Samsung and T-Mobile take on Verizon Wireless' enV3 with their new dual-screen, clamshell messaging phone. Read our full Samsung Comeback review.
Review summary of the Samsung Comeback:
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 The Samsung Comeback should be called the Samsung Comeback In 10 Minutes. The phone was sluggish in almost every way, from simply opening messages to browsing the Web, belying its 3G Internet connection. It was also confusing to use, thanks to the maze-like interface with its redundant choices and counterintuitive feature placements. Where's the GPS navigator? Oh right, under "Organizer," with the voice dialing app. Some aspects frustrated us, and some were downright lousy, like the nearly useless external display and the strange, tic-tac keys on the full-QWERTY keyboard. The Samsung Comeback would have been a decent messaging phone a year ago, but can't match the competitors' current offerings in the budget segment. If T-Mobile is your preferred carrier and price doesn't matter, the Sidekick LX 2009 offers a more compelling messaging experience. Release: July 2009. Price: $130.
Pros: Cool colors. Nice camera. HTML Web browser. Good GPS navigation.
Cons: Sluggish at almost every task, even e-mail. Keyboard tough to use. External screen is very low quality.
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Full Samsung Comeback Review:
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Design and Interface – Mediocre
The nicest thing we can say about the design of T-Mobile's new consumer QWERTY phone, the Samsung Comeback, is that we like the color, especially the white plastic with purple trim of our review unit. We also like the internal screen, though that feeling was more relief after suffering through the smaller, difficult to read external display. That external display was blocky and very cheap looking, and it lacked any real capabilities, so the phone was constantly asking us to open up the flip. Even that gave us trouble. We could never remember which way to open the Samsung Comeback, with its huge, inelegant gaps on both sides. We didn't mind the large ridges on either side of the keyboard. They gave us a place to grip the phone and were reminiscent of T-Mobile's Sidekick lineup. But the phone is such a thick chunk of plastic that it won't appeal to anyone without deep, large pockets.
The interface design on the Samsung Comeback is a slight departure from the normal icon grid interface, and we never thought we'd wish for the older style until now. The Comeback interface was counterintuitive and somewhat confusing, with plenty of redundant options and features hidden in spots that just didn't make sense. Depending on how you access a feature, like a song file, for instance, you might get different options or settings available. Also, the phone's two soft keys don't line up with their onscreen choices, a strange and frustrating design flaw.
Calling - Good
Call quality from the Samsung Comeback was okay. Calls sounded distant on our callers' end, with a slight digital echo, but for the most part voices were clear enough to be understood. The Samsung Comeback always reported solid reception, but on a few occasions a call or data request would fail as the phone reported a network problem. For battery life, the Samsung Comeback was on par with Samsung's estimates, and we got about 5.5 hours of talking time out of the phone in a single test call.
You can synchronize the address book on the Samsung Comeback with an online account through the myT-Mobile Web site, but we wish there were more options for contact sync. We'd like the phone to synchronize with our desktop in some way, or perhaps with a more popular online service, like Yahoo or Gmail. Still, the contact list on the phone looked good and had plenty of fields to store information.
The Samsung Comeback is loaded with calling features, and all of them worked well in our tests. The phone uses speaker independent voice dialing from Nuance, and it was about 90% accurate when we tried it. Our big complaint is that the voice dialing feature is buried under the Organizer menu option. We'd prefer a dedicated key for voice dialing. The speakerphone on the Comeback was nice and loud, though since it was on the back of the phone it was muffled when the flip was up and the phone was lying open on our desk. Conference calling on the Samsung Comeback was a breeze, and we had no trouble connecting and then splitting up a 3-way call.
Messaging - Mediocre
We had a difficult time with messaging on the Samsung Comeback, and even when the messaging features worked properly, they weren't very impressive. The phone features text messaging, but for a phone centered on sending texts, it wasn't any better than the simplest SMS apps we've seen. The Comeback didn't offer live searching while we typed recipients into the To: field, though we could jump to our address book and search. Messages weren't delivered in a conversational, or threaded style, but rather were displayed one at a time. The phone's interface uses a main Inbox, but this was only for text messages, and not for e-mails.
Speaking of e-mail, we were let down by the client on the Samsung Comeback. The phone had no trouble setting up our Gmail account, and it includes presets for AOL, Yahoo and a few other smaller services, with the option to let the phone search for settings automatically if your service isn't listed. Once we set up our Gmail account, though, our mail took a very long time to populate the e-mail inbox, and it never completely caught up to our most recent messages. In fact, at time of writing, the phone is a full five days behind on our mail. Even worse, every time you click on a message, the phone has to download the text, and even the Comeback uses T-Mobile's fast 3G network, messages took 30 – 40 seconds to download. We've never seen such sluggish performance on a messaging phone. Instant messaging gave us similar problems. The phone supports IM for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, and after we signed into our Yahoo account, the Samsung Comeback took about 3 minutes to recognize our online buddies and receive a message.
We weren't fans of the keyboard on the Samsung Comeback. The phone features a nice selection of keys, with dedicated buttons for ".com," "@," smileys and more. But the keys are very tall, and not nearly wide enough. They resemble tic-tacs, and we had a hard time getting used to the keyboard. Even small fingers will be wide enough to cover 3-4 keys, which could make typing slow and difficult.
Multimedia, Web browsing and other features – Good
The Samsung Comeback has an adequate music player. File management was more difficult than it needed to be, and some of our album artwork didn't make it through from the microSD card we loaded into the slot underneath the battery. Still, our song files sounded pretty good. Samsung includes a pair of headphones, which is necessary because the phone uses Samsung's silly proprietary port, instead of a standard 3.5mm port. The Comeback's speaker was nice and loud, and the phone even includes a small set of preset Equalizer effects to tweak the sound a bit. The phone can play back some video files, but not very well. Even though the internal screen on the Comeback has a resolution of 400 by 240 pixels, videos at this size were unable to play, and we had to shrink them to a smaller QVGA format.
The Web browser on the Samsung Comeback was better than your average mobile WAP browser, but like other features, it suffered from the poor networking on the phone. Often, even with full reception and a 3G network indicator lit, the Web browser would tell us the network was unavailable. Pages also loaded very slowly. Still, our own homepage came through in tact, with a layout that looked accurate, and most pages looked pretty good. CNN and the New York Times would only load their mobile pages, but images and text were clean. Navigating long pages involved a lot of clicking, since the browser won't smoothly scroll. Still, if you have some time to spare, the Web browser did a good job.
The camera on the Samsung Comeback wasn't bad either. The 2-megapixel shooter around back took images that were bright and colorful, with hues that looked accurate. Detail wasn't superb, but this is only a 2-megapixel camera, so we weren't expecting much. There's no flash for dark, indoor shots, but under the best conditions, pictures looked nice. Certainly they would be useful for MySpace and MMS messaging. Our only real complaint is that the camera had a tendency to shift the image slightly just after we clicked the shutter. Our picture of the gate house below was centered in the phone's screen, but ended up off-center in the real shot. Check out our image samples below.
Crossing sign
Self Portrait
Gate house
Stone path
Stone wall
Finally, the Samsung Comeback uses TeleNav for GPS navigation, and as always, TeleNav did a nice job supplying turn-by-turn directions for our driving trips in and out of the city. The phone had some trouble picking up a GPS signal when the sky was mostly blocked, but in our car or near a window we got a quick fix from the satellites above.
Price and availability
The Samsung Comeback is available now from T-Mobile for $130 with a contract agreement.
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