T-Mobile gets a touchscreen phone for the younger crowd as Samsung brings its TouchWiz flair to this small, colorful device. Check out our Samsung Highlight review.
Review summary of the Samsung Highlight:
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 The Samsung Highlight is an interesting alternative to the Samsung Behold, and we think it will have more appeal for a younger audience looking for a cool phone without the advanced camera features and chunky design of the former phone. We like the slim, Icy blue shell, and we even had a good time with the responsive, vibrant touchscreen, even though the TouchWiz interface got messy when we started dragging out too many widgets. The phone isn't great at any one feature, but it is pretty good at almost all of them, with a friendly, capable music player and a Web browser that was better than most basic feature phones. The key for this phone will be if T-Mobile can offer it for a bargain basement price, which isn't the case at launch, so we're hoping the price will drop rapidly into the $50 range. It needs to be affordable for teens and even tweens, who will definitely be the target audience for this cool looking, though underpowered, little tablet phone. Release: July 2009. Price: $80.
Pros: Small, cute and colorful touchscreen phone. Screen and interface were touch friendly and very responsive.
Cons: TouchWiz interface seems cluttered. Phone is a jack of all trades, master of none. Web browser and multimedia features are adequate, but not impressive.
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Full Samsung Highlight Review:
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Design – Good
The Samsung Highlight is a departure from the boxy and more adult-looking Samsung Behold and Samsung Memoir, also on T-Mobile. It's a cute little tablet phone with a colorful body (our review unit was Ice, but a Fire model is also available). The Highlight is nicely rounded and appropriately narrow, a much more pocketable phone than the uptight Samsung Behold. Once you turn it on, though, you'll quickly see the family resemblance, as the Samsung Highlight packs the same pixels and uses nearly the same TouchWiz interface as the Behold. The screen on the Highlight looks great and we were mostly happy with its responsiveness. It reacted accurately to our touch, and even scrolling through our long song library, the Samsung Highlight seemed to do a better job than Behold, though it was a bit sluggish moving through a long list.
We're still not fans of the Samsung TouchWiz interface, and seeing TouchWiz on such a small phone only reinforces that feeling. TouchWiz is a widget-based UI. You drag widgets from the side bar on the home screen onto the main desktop area, where they expand and display useful information, like recent news headlines or local weather forecasts. There's a widget for controlling the media player and other apps, and there are widgets that act as shortcuts, like the voice dial widget. The problem is, if you place more than a couple widgets on the main screen, the display gets cluttered very quickly, rendering the widgets useless. We appreciate the touch-friendly design, but this interface would be much more useful on a very large tablet with plenty of space. Beyond the main screen, though, the TouchWiz interface was very friendly and responsive to touch.
Calling - Good
Call quality on the Samsung Highlight was a mixed bag. Our callers reported clean tones, but our voices sounded distant, like we were talking from the end of a short, metallic tunnel. On our end, voices sounded a bit muffled, but mostly okay. We tested the phone on T-Mobile's 3G network in the Dallas metro area, and reception was always quite strong. The Samsung Highlight also comes with a generous battery, even larger than the battery on the larger Samsung Behold, and battery life was impressive for such a small device. We managed a single call that lasted more than 6 hours before we had to wrap up our first tests, and Samsung claims you'll get up to 6.5 hours of talking time.
The address book on the Samsung Highlight looked good, and it held enough information for a simple feature phone, but we wish there was an easier way to synchronize our contacts. You can backup your address book to T-Mobile's own Web site, which is convenient, but you still have to do a lot of typing on one side or the other. We'd like an online sync with a popular address book, like our Gmail or Yahoo account. During calls, the Samsung Highlight gets the same great call handling screens as the Samsung Behold, which made conference calling and call swapping easy and fun.
For calling features, the Samsung Highlight has a great voice dialing app that requires no training and was on target in 9 out of 10 requests. The speakerphone was a bit soft for our taste. We like our speakers blaring and loud. The Highlight had no trouble connecting to all our Bluetooth headsets.
Messaging - Good
The Samsung Highlight gets a few basic messaging apps, and while these will probably be enough to satisfy younger buyers, a more mature audience might feel left out. The phone uses a basic text messaging app. Messages aren't presented in threaded style, which we prefer because it helps us keep track of a text conversation. For instant messaging fans, the phone has a basic client that support AOL, MSN and Yahoo. That's a light selection of clients, especially on T-Mobile, and we miss support for Gtalk or perhaps one of the social networks, like MySpace or Facebook instant messaging. E-mail is also very basic, with support for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Gmail, as well as an assortment of large Internet providers like Verizon and even .Mac. Still, the e-mail app was slow to load, and it wouldn't report new messages unless the app was open when they arrived.
The keyboard on the Samsung Highlight gave us a real headache. The phone uses a landscape keyboard for a full QWERTY layout. Tilt the phone to the side and the keyboard pops up, no problem. Unfortunately, right next to the letter "A" is a button that switches the orientation back to a regular old 12-key number layout, and we hit this button all the time while we furiously typed out our messages. Then, the phone took a long time to realize we wanted to switch back, unless we pecked the same button again, which is wisely hidden in a corner in portrait mode. The tiny keys were also tough for accuracy. The phone uses T9 auto correction, and this usually helped when we made simple mistakes, but it wasn't quite smart enough to keep us happy.
Multimedia - Good
With basic music and video playback, the Samsung Highlight does a fine job, but don't expect too much from the phone. The music player was nice looking and very touch friendly, even for scrubbing through music tracks to find our favorite moments. For video playback, the Samsung Highlight had trouble playing our movie files. Videos that were sized to a QVGA resolution would play properly, with black bars on the side, but the Highlight would refuse to scale down a video at any larger screen size. While the screen showed deep, rich colors in our movies, the low resolution cause them to look boxy and pixelated.
We sideloaded music onto our own 8GB microSD card, and the Highlight can handle cards up to 16GB, though it doesn't come with any memory cards in the box. The phone was also very slow reading our card. The music player and the file browser took minutes to acknowledge our microSD card, leaving us wondering if the card was inserted properly. That microSD card slides in behind the battery, so you'll have to shut down the phone every time you swap out the card. Samsung has included a pair of mediocre earbuds, which is necessary since the phone uses a single proprietary port for headphones, USB and charging. We hope Samsung gives up this proprietary nonsense soon, because a standard 3.5mm headphone jack would be a great addition to this cute, compact little phone.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Web browser on the Samsung Highlight was a healthy step above a simple WAP browser, but it still didn't quite live up to the desktop grade experience that Samsung claims. In fact, many Web pages, like CNN and the New York Times, will supply their mobile edition to this phone, and the browser has no built in options to make adjustments or tweak the browsing experience. To the Highlight's credit, our own homepage looked pretty good on the phone's browser. Images were sharp and colorful, and layout was perfectly accurate. Text looked a bit chunky, especially as we zoomed away to get a better look. The volume rocker on the Samsung Highlight doubles as a zoom key in the Web browser, which would have been a nice touch, but somehow the phone didn't let us zoom out nearly enough. Even zoomed all the way out of a page, we still couldn't see the entire width of the site, whether we were browsing in portrait or landscape view.
Camera - Mediocre
Compared to the more camera-focused devices on T-Mobile's lineup (to check out T-Mobile's best camera phones, click here), the Samsung Highlight just doesn't compare. The 3.2-megapixel shooter on the phone has some nice camera features, but the lens just can't keep up, and the phone lacks an auto focus to keep images sharp. There are a few scene modes available for portraits or night landscape shots, as well as shooting modes for panoramas, but none of these helped produce quality images. Shots will be fine for MMS messaging, but full size images won't even be good enough for MySpace or Facebook, unless you're trying to blur your look a bit (we're not judging).
The phone has some nice photo viewer options, but these didn't seem to work well in our tests. The phone can supposedly upload pics directly to Flickr and other online services, but our test shots never actually appeared in our Flickr photostream. Also, the gallery viewer supposedly has a sort of tilt action to let you browse photos by rocking the phone, but again this didn't actually work in our hands-on tests. Considering the disappointing image quality, we didn't spend too much time lamenting these features. Check out our image samples below.
Chandelier
Self Portrait
Panorama
Yellow Light Cycle
GPS - Good
For GPS navigation, the Samsung Highlight comes preloaded with TeleNav's turn-by-turn navigation app, and TeleNav did a good job finding us and tracking us through our drive time. The phone found our location easily, even when our view of the sky was mostly obscured. Then, the TeleNav app did a nice job mapping our route and offering suggestions when we drove off course. This was a nice improvement over the Samsung Behold, which seemed less responsive in comparison. TeleNav's maps looked great on the Samsung Highlight, and the high-speed networking helped our maps and point-of-interest search results load quickly.
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