Can T-Mobile's new QWERTY messaging phone compete with our favorite phone of the year, the nearly-identical Samsung Rant? Find out in our in-depth Samsung Gravity review.
Review summary of the Samsung Gravity:
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 The Samsung Gravity is an unfortunate disappointment compared to the strikingly similar Samsung Rant on Sprint, one of our favorite phones of the year. From the outside, the Samsung Gravity looks the same, with its slide-out QWERTY keyboard and click color options, but inside this phone is a much more basic and underpowered device. Messaging options were good, but not outstanding, and the phone lacks key features like fast, 3G networking or GPS for navigation. The phone isn't a bad phone, and we liked the large buttons on the keypad and the QWERTY keyboard. But in every way, from the feature set to the user interface to the phone's performance, the Samsung Rant is a much better option at the same price. T-Mobile fans don't have many QWERTY options at this price, and this phone handily beats the low-end Sidekick ID, but we know that Samsung and T-Mobile could have done better. Release: November 2008. Price: $50.
Pros: Nice, large keys, especially on the number pad. Cool colors. Solid, if not exciting, messaging options.
Cons: No 3G networking. Interface dated and blocky. Lacks advanced messaging, like social networks or modern IM clients.
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Full Samsung Gravity Review:
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Design - Good
The Samsung Gravity is one of the growing crowd of compact QWERTY-sliders, similar to the LG Rumor and the Samsung Rant on Sprint. Closed, it looks like a thick candybar phone, and it hides a full keyboard beneath. The phone has a sort of chintzy, plastic feel to it, though we definitely liked the large, bubbly buttons that made typing on the numeric keys a breeze. We prefer a 4-row keyboard, like we found on the Rant, as that is a more natural layout, with a space bar that doesn't interrupt the bottom row. Still, fewer rows meant larger keys, and we had little trouble typing on the Gravity.
The interface design on the Samsung Gravity ranges from simple and cartoonish to downright dated. This is standard T-Mobile fare, an icon-based grid, and though the phone gets a slight update to the graphics and animation, it really isn't enough to impress us. This is no Sidekick, that's for sure. The screen was nice and clear, though most of the graphics and text were jagged up close. The phone seemed underpowered even for this simple interface. The myFaves icons on the home screen rotated very slowly, with a stuttering action, and the animated icons on the main menu could be similarly sluggish at times.
T-Mobile should follow Sprint's example here. Sprint endowed the Samsung Rant with their new One Touch interface app, which looks great and is powerful to use. While the Samsung Gravity is as simple as can be, thanks to the outdated OS, the Samsung Rant has plenty of powerful messaging features that are bundled with One Touch, including corporate e-mail access and quick links to popular social networking sites.
Calling - Good
Calls made on the Samsung Gravity sounded good, but not great. Voices were clear enough, but we heard a constant buzzing sound during calls, and our callers reported similar tones in our voices. Reception was questionable. The phone usually hovered around 1-2 bars of service whether we were in our Manhattan office or New Jersey home, but this didn't seem to affect the phone's performance in terms of quality or dropped calls. The phone has a relatively small battery, but 2.5G EDGE networking meant that it performed fairly well in our battery tests, and we managed a single call that lasted more than 6 hours.
The phone has a basic address book. There were enough fields for 3 phone numbers and a fax, an e-mail address and a few other details, but some important fields, like an address field or a company name, were missing, with no way to add more. For calling features, the Samsung Gravity is a mixed bag. There is no voice dialing option, which is critical for the way we use our phones. Conference calling, on the other hand, required some menu drilling but was very easy to use. We managed a 4-way call with no trouble. The speakerphone was adequately loud, though not abusively so, as we prefer.
Messaging - Good
For messaging, the Samsung Gravity includes a standard assortment of options like we've found on plenty of T-Mobile phones, but it should be much better. Text messaging with SMS and MMS for multimedia were both easy to accomplish, and nothing special. For Instant Messenger, T-Mobile includes support for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and even ICQ, but we'd still like to see support for Google Talk and some social networking sites as well. The e-mail client comes with a nice list of presets, and plenty of advanced options if you want to set up your own POP or IMAP account. With good instructions from Google, we had no trouble setting up all the proper ports for our Gmail IMAP account.
The keys on the slide-out QWERTY keyboard were plenty large, but the layout gave us some trouble. As we said earlier, we don't like splitting up the bottom row of keys, and we also like seeing plenty of symbol keys or a number row on our keyboard. The keyboard also came perilously close to the cliff edge of the slide, which made typing from the top row more difficult. Even with its smaller keys, we prefer the key placement on the Samsung Rant, which uses a 4-row keyboard instead of 3.
Music - Good
The Samsung Gravity has a simple, but effective, music player. There weren't many playback options, but it managed to chew through all our MP3 files with no trouble. There is no transfer software for the phone, and it doesn't even come with a proprietary Samsung USB adapter, but we had no trouble using a simple microSD card loaded with music. The file browser on the phone found all of our tunes. The phone comes with a stereo headset, which is necessary because Samsung still refuses to use either a standard 3.5mm headphone jack or even a miniUSB port on their phones; they stick with their own port, unfortunately. We also paired the Gravity successfully with our Bluetooth speakers.
Web browsing - Good
We were pleasantly surprised by the Access Netfront Web browser on the Samsung Gravity. The browser loaded our own homepage and it looked clean and accurate. Our masthead graphics looked great, with no jagged edges or alignment issues. The text on the page looked blocky, and clearly this phone would benefit from a higher-resolution screen and some anti-aliasing, but the layout looked good and graphics were crisp and clear. The Web browser is very slow, even worse than we expected on the slower EDGE network. We wonder why Samsung and T-Mobile didn't opt for faster, 3G HSDPA networking on this phone, as the Samsung Rant uses Sprint's fastest network, though a few good reasons come to mind (poor battery life, limited coverage, etc.).
Camera - Mediocre
Pictures taken on the Samsung Gravity's 1.3-megapixel camera had a strange look to them. The camera seemed to be over-sharpening images in the processing stage, leaving our pics looking more like stills from a television picture than camera shots. Except for some bright reds, colors were mostly drab and insipid-looking. The camera also had lots of trouble with complicated lighting, rendering dark shadows and overexposed bright spots.
The camera did manage to impress us with its advanced image editing features. It wasn't much, but the camera did have a nice range of options to sharpen or blur photos, add effects and other elements, and even upload pics to T-Mobile's picture site.
Broadway and 8th
With all the sharpening effects, the image just has an unpleasant look to it. The neon glows hot, but the red bricks look old and brown. Also, everywhere sunlight hits the cars, the image is completely blown out with too much light.
Subway stop
Here, the camera couldn't handle the intense backlighting coming down the alley. The subway stop is dangerously dark as the stairs descend, while the light at the end of 8th st. glows like it's the proverbial end of the tunnel.
Self portrait
We can't blame the Gravity for our messy hair, but we can criticize the dull flesh tones, which make us look sickly or over-medicated.
Price and availability
The Samsung Gravity is available now from T-Mobile for $50 with a contract agreement.
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