Sprint's newest Windows Mobile 6.5 phone takes on the BlackBerry phones with a touchscreen and Wi-Fi browsing. Check it out in our Samsung Intrepid review.
Review summary of the Samsung Intrepid:
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 The Samsung Intrepid is not a very exciting Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone, especially compared with some of the new models that are hitting the market. It mostly reminds us of AT&T's Samsung Jack, though there are a few solid improvements beyond the addition of the touchscreen and the new WinMo OS. The Samsung Intrepid has a great keyboard, for one thing, and for battery life the Intrepid ranks among the best Windows Mobile phones around. Web browsing has been greatly improved with the new Windows Mobile, but it still lags behind the best of the best, and some apps, like the calendar, Windows Media player and all those system settings menus, have seen little or no improvement at all. If you're looking for a BlackBerry alternative, the Samsung Intrepid makes a compelling choice, though it isn't as adept at handling messaging and social networking as the BlackBerry Tour, for example. Still, with the new Windows Mobile Marketplace app store and some great new services from Microsoft, Windows Phones are getting more interesting all the time. Release: October 2009. Price: $150.
Pros: Great keyboard. Long lasting battery. Improved Web browsing over older versions of Internet Explorer mobile. Windows Mobile Marketplace still blossoming.
Cons: Media player, scheduling apps untouched, need serious work. Buggy system had strange problems. New interface design hardly an improvement. Touchscreen seems unnecessary.
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Full Samsung Intrepid Review:
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Design – Good
The Samsung Intrepid hardly needs its own touchscreen. After all, plenty of phones in this form factor, including the BlackBerry Curve and the Samsung Jack, have done just fine without it, and on the Samsung Intrepid it only seems to get in the way and slow down navigation. We suspect the Intrepid was designed to take advantage of the hullabaloo surrounding the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5, which is really only a worthwhile upgrade on touchscreen-enabled phones. On touchscreen devices like the Samsung Intrepid, you'll see the improved Today screen and the new Windows Mobile Start menu, which is really an icon grid in a staggered formation instead of a standard grid shape. The best improvements come in new features and apps, not in the interface design, and the new WinMo touchscreen interface is only a short step better than the non-touchscreen Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard interface we saw on the Samsung Jack. In other words, there are good reasons to buy the Samsung Intrepid, and the phone's design is solid, but if you're considering this phone because of all the supposed improvements in WinMo 6.5, you're in for a letdown.
That isn't to say that WinMo 6.5 isn't a good mobile OS. It works nicely, but it isn't as innovative or exciting as the new Android or WebOS devices we're seeing. The new Today screen offers a series of tabs, similar to the Microsoft Zune interface, but with less polish. You can see a few lines from new e-mail messages, play music, browse images or check recent calls and texts from the Today screen. You can't customize much of the main screen, which is unfortunate. Instead of a tab devoted to Internet Explorer bookmarks, for instance, we'd prefer a customized tab for commonly used apps. There are some improved buttons and menus, but much remains the same as it looked for the last few generations of Windows Mobile.
The Samsung Intrepid uses a 2.5-inch touchscreen up top, with a QWERTY keyboard below. The keyboard on this phone is fantastic, snappy and comfortable, with keys that are nicely textured and easy to find by feel. Otherwise, the design is unexciting, but classy. The Intrepid gets a mix of glossy and soft touch paint finish surfaces, with a 4-way pad to control navigation if you don't want to tap the screen. There's a volume rocker on one side, placed unfortunately opposite the Power / Lock Screen button, which caused some problems if we weren't careful. We don't usually complain about battery covers, but the Samsung Intrepid's cover was unusually difficult to replace, and the microSD slot is hidden beneath, so it's worth a mention.
Calling – Very Good
Call quality on the Samsung Intrepid was pretty good. We heard some occasional background hissing and noise, but mostly calls were solid. Our callers also had no trouble hearing us. Reception on the phone could have been better, but mediocre reception didn't cause any real trouble. Even when the phone registered only 2-3 bars of Sprint's EV-DO service, we had no trouble completing calls or accessing the data network. Battery life was excellent. The phone uses the same size battery as the Samsung Jack, and like with that phone, the battery life exceeded expectations. Though Sprint offers only 6 hours of talk time, we got closer to 7 hours in a single call during our tests. The Samsung Intrepid easily lasted more than a full day, almost 2 days, or regular use.
The Samsung Intrepid packs all the powerful address book handling we've come to appreciate in Windows Phones, and the new WinMo 6.5 update adds some interesting services from Microsoft. We've usually used Microsoft Exchange to synchronize our corporate contacts list, but the new WinMo 6.5 also offers Microsoft's MyPhone service. If you're not using an Exchange account, you can synchronize your contacts online with MyPhone, which acts as a backup and online repository for your phone's information. You can access and change this info online at the MyPhone site, or on your phone. In addition to contacts, MyPhone also backed up our photos, music, calendar items and more. Otherwise, the contacts list on the Samsung Intrepid has gotten only a modest visual polish, but it still works very well, allowing us to search through our contacts from the Today screen while we type their names or numbers.
In addition to the new Microsoft MyPhone service, the Samsung Intrepid also comes packed with TellMe, which even gets its own button on the keyboard. TellMe can act as a speaker-independent voice dialing app, letting you dial contacts or numbers by talking to your phone, but it also goes much further. TellMe also includes voice search, and the service is GPS-aware, so if you ask TellMe to find "Pizza," it will return results for local pizzerias. Finally, TellMe also has some basic speech-to-text functions to help transcribe text messages when you dictate to your phone. In our tests, TellMe worked pretty well, but it wasn't close to perfect. For simpler dialing tasks, TellMe was very reliable, though it took some time to figure out the right set of spoken commands. For more advanced tasks, TellMe was about 75% accurate in recognizing what we were trying to say.
Messaging – Very Good
With all of the improvements for the new Windows Mobile 6.5 OS, there were still a few features that were left behind, and these are starting to feel woefully aged. Messaging is one of those features. Though Windows Mobile always did a fine job handling e-mail, especially corporate e-mail, and basic messaging, the system hasn't caught up to the popular trends in messaging phones today. There's now a Facebook app built for Windows Mobile, but it lags behind competing apps on the iPhone or BlackBerry platforms. Besides, what we really want is deep integration with our messaging and social networking services. We like to have easy access to both incoming messages and status updates from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. We also like our address book to reflect our social networks. The Samsung Intrepid and Windows Mobile 6.5 handle neither of these tasks well. The phone does a nice job with text messages and standard e-mail, but you'll have to find 3rd party apps to handle your favorite networks.
The keyboard on the Samsung Intrepid is first-class, one of the best we've seen on a phone of this design. The keys have a nicely textured finish, and all are raised and curved so that our fingers found them easily. There are dedicated keys on the QWERTY keyboard for the Wireless Manager, Messaging, and the TellMe service, which is a good start, but a Task Manager button in Windows Mobile is still a necessity. In any case, typing messages and editing documents on the Samsung Intrepid was a breeze, thanks to the great QWERTY design.
Business – Very Good
The standard calendar and scheduling features on Windows Phones were always good, but they haven't seen much improvement with the new Windows Mobile 6.5 update. The calendar is still ugly, but packs all the features we want to schedule new appointments and invite our colleagues. We synchronized the calendar with our Exchange account, but you can also sync with the MyPhone service, or with Outlook on your desktop. We wish there were sync options for Google's calendar and other social services as well, like Facebook or LinkedIn.
Business users who aren't using an Exchange Server will appreciate the new options that Microsoft MyPhone affords. As a direct, free competitor to Apple's MobileMe service on their Apple iPhone, Microsoft's MyPhone lets you find a lost phone using GPS tracking, or wipe a phone remotely if it falls into the wrong hands. Both of these are easy to accomplish on the MyPhone Web site, no administrator needed. MyPhone also backs up text messages and documents from your phone, which makes it a nice complement to a full Microsoft Exchange account.
Office Mobile comes standard with Windows Mobile, so you can work on Microsoft Office documents on the road. Beyond the standard calendar apps and MyPhone, there are a number of productivity apps installed on the Samsung Intrepid, but the overwhelming amount of bloat, coupled with the lack of control on the Start menu, make navigating these options tedious. There's no way to separate the wheat from the chaff. For instance, business users may enjoy the MSN Money app for tracking stock quotes or the Smart Reader for scanning business cards and simple documents. But you have to find them amidst the NFL Mobile and Anniversary apps that may only be of occasional interest. There's a calculator, a tip calculator and a smart converter, and all of these take up space on the Start menu. It's a bit of a disorganized mess, and we'd like to see better control, and better selection.
Multimedia - Good
No feature on the Samsung Intrepid gave us more trouble than the multimedia features. The Windows Media Player on Windows Mobile has not been improved in the updated system, and this app was in sore need of improvement. Everything about the multimedia experience is abysmal. Songs did not load properly, as Windows Mobile did a poor job of finding our music on our memory card and organizing it properly in the library. Windows Media Player often crashed or forgot our library entirely, all 2GB of music we had to load every time. The interface is ugly and dated looking, with difficult playback controls and few additional features to improve the sound of your tunes. Videos were equally unimpressive. Our pre-loaded videos were hard to find in the Windows Media Player library, and once we used the File Explorer to load them, they were hardly worth the effort. Though larger, VGA videos scaled properly to fit the Intrepid's Quarter-VGA, 320 by 240 pixel screen, videos looked blocky and fuzzy, and colors were posterized with a gradient effect.
Web browsing - Good
Though we saw phones running Internet Explorer Mobile 6 before the recent software update, Microsoft has improved IE Mobile just enough for the new WinMo 6.5 launch that it's finally become a contender among mobile browsers. It's still not on par with the sharp and dynamic WebOS or Android browsers, but it's at least as good as the browser you'll find on a Nokia phone like the Nokia E71x on AT&T. It even includes a similar mini-map to help guide your navigation through long pages. Web sites loaded on the IE browser looked good, though text rendering was still blocky and wiry on the low-res display. The browser on the Samsung Intrepid even gets some Flash support with Flash Lite, and we tried loading some YouTube videos inline on the YouTube homepage. These looked pretty good, at least for streaming content on a mobile phone, and we were able to resize the videos to full screen without stopping playback.
In addition to the improved Web browser, the Samsung Intrepid also gets access to the Microsoft Windows Mobile Marketplace, Microsoft's new app store for Windows Phones. The app store is still blooming, so the selection can be scattershot, but there are some interesting picks available. For one thing, Microsoft has no problem letting you buy apps that duplicate the phone's features, so you can download new Web browsers from the Marketplace, including the Skyfire browser. There are also plenty of games and productivity apps worth checking out. The interface is fairly basic, but gets the job done. In all, it's a nice start for Microsoft's mobile app sales, but we're still waiting for some manufacturer to do a revolutionary job organizing and presenting apps in a way that's easy to manage and understand.
Camera - Good
The 3.2-megapixel camera on the Samsung Intrepid is fine for very basic Web use, but images will be disappointing if you need to view them full screen. A long rain patch kept us indoors during our photo testing, and images inside fell apart with numerous problems. There were terrible noise issues that made the photos look like they had been printed on top of patterned fabric. The camera's auto focus had trouble catching us for a self portrait. The blurry shot below is the best we got in 5 attempts at a shot of our own mug. Macro offered nothing of the sort, and close-up images fell into blurriness and a lack of detail until we pulled the camera much farther away. Panorama mode worked well, at least, automatically snapping pictures as we panned the camera slowly and stitching up to 6 shots into a cohesive whole.
The camera interface on the Samsung Intrepid was very good, thanks to its simplicity. Almost all the important shooting functions, including focus mode for macro shots, shooting modes for panorama or the fallible Smile Shot mode, and scene modes for portraits or night shots were all available as touchable buttons on the viewfinder screen. Very little menu digging was required. We'd like to see a similar interface on a phone with a higher-quality camera and flash setup, and we'd definitely be more pleased with this feature. Check out our image samples below.
Noisy Snail
Espresso in a Guinness Glass
Tassle Macro
Self Portrait
Kitchen Panorama
Odds and Ends
Though Windows Mobile 6.5 has been redesigned around being touch friendly, the Samsung Intrepid still comes with a stylus. With its resistive touch technology, the screen on the Intrepid actually responds better to a sharp fingernail or stylus than a broad finger pad. On most menus and windows, this didn't matter, as our fingers worked just fine, but on many of the buttons and soft keys that pop up in Windows Mobile, we still had to reach for the stylus to find the precision that was necessary to use the phone.
Our Samsung Intrepid review unit also had some serious bugs. Occasionally, while typing on the QWERTY keyboard, the phone would quit whatever we were doing and leap back out to the Today screen. This happened a few times in our tests, but we couldn't figure out the cause. Windows Media Player crashed almost every time we tried to load our library from the memory card. Some scroll bars also didn't seem to work, though we were able to navigate those screens by flicking them up or down, instead of relying on the scroll bars themselves. The HTC Imagio, the first WinMo 6.5 phone we had the chance to review, was also a bit buggy, but we encountered different bugs on that phone, so we're not sure if this is a Windows problem or Samsung's own issues.
Price and availability
The Samsung Intrepid is available now from Sprint for $150 with a contract agreement and $100 mail-in rebate.
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