T-Mobile gets heavy with the 3G-enabled update to their popular QWERTY-slider. Is this phone inescapable? Find out in our Samsung Gravity 2 review.
Review summary of the Samsung Gravity 2:
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 With the Samsung Gravity 2, T-Mobile is finally filling in some of the gaps in their lineup, specifically low cost phones that work with their blossoming 3G network and appeal to their text-heavy fan base. It isn't a great phone, but it's up to speed with most modern feature phones, and you get everything from e-mail and IM to a reasonable Web browser, a media player for music, a basic camera and even GPS for turn-by-turn navigation from TeleNav. We weren't fans of the interface, a counterintuitive design we've seen before. We also had trouble getting the e-mail client to keep up with our current conversations, though IM and text messaging worked with no trouble. In the end, we liked the wide, roomy keyboard on the Samsung Gravity 2, and we liked the snazzy colors. Those might be the most important features for the Gravity crowd. Release: August 2009. Price: $50.
Pros: Cool colors. Wide, spacious keyboard. GPS and other 3G services.
Cons: Poor interface design. Sluggish network response in e-mail and Web browser.
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Full Samsung Gravity 2 Review:
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Design – Good
The Samsung Gravity 2 is a modest step beyond the original Samsung Gravity on T-Mobile. On the outside it looks similar to any side-sliding phone, like the LG Rumor 2 or Samsung Rant. We like the bright color choices, our review unit was pink, but otherwise the phone is very basic with few frills. It seems a little chunkier than some of the more compact members of the species, but the extra size gave plenty of room for the keyboard, a 4-row QWERTY that slides out with plenty of thumb room.
The 2.3-inch, QVGA screen seemed bright and shiny at first, but after a few days' use we noticed some issues. The screen seems polarized enough that our eyes saw slightly different images, in terms of lighting and contrast. This gave the display an unpleasant shimmering effect at times. Overall the LCD screen looked okay, but we weren't impressed. The Samsung Comeback has a better screen, on the internal display, at least, though we prefer the overall design of the Samsung Gravity 2 for its roomier keyboard and more stylish look.
The interface on the Samsung Gravity 2 is a real letdown. It's the same sluggish, counterintuitive design we lamented on the Comeback. You'll have a hard time finding some of the key features you need while other features seem to repeat themselves. We like that T-Mobile is breaking away from the icon grid menu design, but T-Mobile and Samsung need to return to the drawing board and come back with an interface based around the messaging and social networking features that buyers are looking for.
Calling - Good
Call quality on the Samsung Gravity 2 was actually pretty good. Calls had a slight tin vibration to them on our callers end, but otherwise sounded very clean and tonally accurate. On our end, callers sounded a bit distant, but nothing serious, and talking on the Gravity 2 was a nice experience. Battery life was also pretty good for such a compact device. We saw almost 6 hours of talk time in a single call, which beats Samsung's modest 5.5 hour estimates. Additionally, reception on the Samsung Gravity 2 was solid, always on par with the other T-Mobile phones we have on hand.
You can synchronize the address book on the Samsung Gravity 2 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 Gravity 2 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 Gravity 2 was nice and loud. Conference calling on the Samsung Gravity 2 was a breeze, and we had no trouble connecting and then splitting up a 3-way call.
Messaging and Keyboard - Mediocre
Across the board, messaging options on the Samsung Gravity 2 were mostly disappointing. At best, features like test messaging and instant messaging worked as they were supposed to, without any of the newer features we've come to enjoy. We like when our text messages are threaded to look like a long conversation. We also like more choices for our IM services. Usually T-Mobile phones offer more IM options than just AOL, MSN and Yahoo, but not on the Samsung Gravity 2.
Worst of all was the e-mail app. The Gravity 2 had no trouble setting up our Gmail account, but when it came to downloading the messages, the phone was very, very slow. In fact, in the few days we were testing the phone, we never saw messages more recent than 4 days in the past. This was similar to the experience we had on the Samsung Comeback. Mail was always behind and the e-mail app takes a long time to download each individual message from the server.
The keyboard on the Samsung Gravity 2 is its best feature. That's not to say it's a great keyboard, but it was better than other recent tic-tac style keyboards we've seen on compact messaging phones. The Gravity 2 had plenty of room for each key, and though the top half of the slide cut into our typing space, it was still a nice fit. We also liked some of the specialized keys, like the "www / .com" key and the smiley key. Our favorite compact keyboard is still on the Nokia Surge on AT&T, but the Gravity 2 has an above average set of keys.
Multimedia, Web browsing and other features – Good
Beyond the messaging and calling features, the Samsung Gravity 2 has a mixed bag of competent, if unexceptional, features. The phone has a basic media player, and it was able to pick up most of the tracks we sideloaded onto our microSD card. The interface seemed more like a file browser than a modern media library, but in a pinch we got the tunes playing. Samsung is still sticking with their silly proprietary connector in place of a proper 3.5mm headphone jack, but there is a basic set of earbuds in the retail box. Still, if you want to use your own cans, better go wireless, since stereo Bluetooth headphones will be easier to find than a proper headphone adapter for the Gravity 2.
The Web browser on the Samsung Gravity 2 was a better than average mobile browser in the Access NetFront family. We found the networking on this phone to be a bit sluggish, and the browser suffered for this. Pages loaded very slowly. Still, our own homepage came through looking neat, and aside from some jagged looking graphics our layout was accurate. 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 Gravity 2 might lack the punch of a higher-megapixel shooter, but for a basic 2-megapixel option, pictures looked just fine. Colors looked bright and we saw plenty of detail for low-res images like these. For Web use on Facebook or MySpace the Gravity 2 will be able to help document your day at the park, but it lacks a flash so it won't help during your night around town. Check out our image samples below:
Sunflowers
Self Portrait
Finally, the Samsung Gravity 2 uses TeleNav for GPS navigation and, as always, TeleNav does a nice job supplying turn-by-turn directions for our driving trips in and out of the city. TeleNav has a nice point-of-interest database that keeps itself fairly fresh, though occasionally the business we were trying to find had closed since TeleNav had updated their records. Still, the TeleNav app did a nice job instructing us on how to find many empty strip malls.
Price and availability
The Samsung Gravity 2 is available on T-Mobile for $30 with a two-year contract.
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