Sprint offers their greenest phone yet with a QWERTY slider made of corn and other recyclable materials. But does green make this a good phone? Find out in our Samsung Reclaim review.
Review summary of the Samsung Reclaim:
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 The Samsung Reclaim may not be as green as the Motorola W233 Renew on T-Mobile, but while the former phone made compromises on features and design, the Reclaim feels much more like a regular old feature phone that also happens to be fairly green. How green is it? Well, some of it is made out of corn, most of it is recyclable, and the documentation is printed on soy ink. Is that green enough? Then enjoy Sprint's One Click interface, our favorite for simple feature phones, which gives you a customizable carousel of tabs to quickly access key features like Sprint Navigation and the Sprint Music Store, as well as your favorite social networks like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. The Samsung Reclaim doesn't feel as green as the Moto device, but it doesn't feel like such a compromise, either. Release: August 2009. Price: $50.
Pros: More recyclable, and made from more renewable materials. Full featured 3G feature phone. Great One Click interface design from Sprint.
Cons: Call quality wasn't great.
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Full Samsung Reclaim Review:
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Design – Very Good
If you didn't know the Samsung Reclaim was made up of some "green" parts, you probably wouldn't have guessed it. Some of the plastic, especially the back cover, is made from a processed corn material, and Samsung says that 80% of the phone is recyclable. Even the Reclaim's packaging is green. It's a thinner box made from recycled materials and printed with soy ink. But the best part is that Samsung didn't compromise with this phone. While the Motorola W233 Renew may be 100% carbon neutral, that phone lacked many key features and felt flimsy and cheap. The Samsung Reclaim, which costs the same in Sprint's lineup as the Samsung Rant and the LG Rumor 2, feels like a more solid device, and we were delighted to find it uses the same Sprint One Click interface that we liked so much on those other phones.
The Sprint One Click interface leaves the basic icon grid setup hidden, and the main screen is devoted to a fully customizable "carousel" of "tiles." Each tile is sort of a cross between a widget and a bookmark. You can perform simple tasks from each, like updating your Facebook status and Twitter feed or initiating a Google search, and the tile will jump to the appropriate Web page. There are literally dozens of tiles to choose from, but we wish they did more without having to open the Web browser. We wish the Accuweather tile would show the current forecast, or the Movies tile would display current showtimes. Instead, these provided convenient links, but no real information. Still, the Sprint One Click system is very useful and it's leaps and bounds better than the simple menus used on feature phones on the other major carriers.
The Samsung Reclaim is a well designed phone. The screen isn't the best we've seen, but it looked mostly clear and colorful, though a screen door effect did pop up from time to time. The buttons on the face of the Reclaim are large and easy to press without looking, great for the voice dialing app or the navigation button. The microSD slot isn't hidden beneath the battery, it's on the side of the phone, and though we're not a fan of port covers, we like the range of convenient connectivity options that were easy to access.
Calling - Good
Calls on the Samsung Reclaim sounded pretty good. Compared to the competition, Motorola's Renew, the Reclaim doesn't quite match up, but truth be told, decent call quality was about the only thing the Moto Renew did well, while the Samsung Reclaim is a real, full-featured phone. Calls on the Reclaim sounded fine, though we heard a bit of crackling on both end of our calls on occasion. For such a feature-rich phone, battery life was solid. We managed a call that lasted almost 6.5 hours, which is just over Samsung's own estimates. Samsung also notes that the charger included with the Reclaim will flash when the phone is full, so you don't waste power charging the device.
The address book on the Samsung Reclaim is perfectly average. There's no easy way to synchronize with an online or corporate address book, but digging up your corporate contacts is possible with the Corporate E-mail app. You can copy Exchange contacts over to the phone's memory one at a time, but you can't perform a full sync. We'd like to see a nice sync option with a popular online address book, such as Yahoo, Google or even Facebook.
Messaging - Good
The Samsung Reclaim has a solid list of messaging and social networking features, though in practice none of these are truly satisfying. There's simple text messaging for SMS fans, as well as instant messaging if you use AOL, MSN and Yahoo as your client of choice. If you prefer Google's Gtalk or some other service, you're out of luck. The e-mail app is surprisingly robust in its options. It handled all of our accounts, including our Gmail and corporate Exchange account. Don't expect a full business e-mail app, though. Exchange support only lets you check your inbox and perform menial tasks. You won't be digging through e-mail subfolders or performing many advanced tricks here. In a pinch, though, it's a nice option for users who want to ditch the smartphone on the weekend but still can't keep themselves away from their Inbox.
For social networking, the Sprint One Click interface offers some nice direct links, but like we said, we wish the individual tiles offered more information instead of just links to small apps and mobile Web pages. We liked being able to update out Twitter feed quickly, but wish we could see updates from people we follow without having to open another application. Still, this is a far more convenient setup than you'll find on feature phones on other carriers, who usually just rely on simple Web links.
We weren't fans of the keyboard on the Samsung Reclaim. While the phone strongly resembles the Samsung Propel Pro, a decidedly more upscale business phone, we weren't as happy with the keys on the Reclaim. The entire keyboard felt very flat, and it was hard to find the ridges between keys. Plus, the keys themselves seemed to run into each other from column to column. Definitely a try-before-you-buy deal, and we have other favorites out there, especially the Nokia Surge on AT&T.
Multimedia - Good
For playing our music and video files, again the Samsung Reclaim did a fine job, but some more effective use of the One Click tiles would have dramatically improved the experience. For music fans, the Samsung Reclaim can play your own music files, or you can buy more tracks from the Sprint Music Store and download them directly to your phone. We transferred our own tunes to the microSD card, and the songs came through sounding good, though most of our album artwork went AWOL.
Video playback was abysmal. It was very difficult to even find our preloaded videos, and once we did, the Samsung Reclaim did a poor job of playing our files. Even simple videos scaled to the Reclaim's low-resolution QVGA screen played choppy with stops and starts, and the audio and video tracks didn't synchronize properly. Best to just stick with music on this phone. Streaming video from Sprint TV was a little better, but not much. Videos took a while to start playing, and were still choppy once the buffer was full. At full screen, videos had obvious pixelation and compression artifacts.
The good news is that Samsung has made it easy to listen to music on the Samsung Reclaim. Sprint has whipped Samsung into shape, and Sprint is the only major carrier to release Samsung phones without the ridiculous proprietary connector for headphones, data and power. Instead, the Samsung Reclaim gets a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and the phone uses microUSB for charging and data transfer. This is the right move, and we'd like to see every Samsung phone (if not every phone, period) with these options built in.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Samsung Reclaim uses the Access Netfront browser, and this version of Access' mobile browser is among the worst still available on the market. It hardly qualifies as a full-HTML browser. Pages came through with layout that was all over the place, with poorly sized text columns and jagged looking images. Pages were readable, but barely resembled their desktop counterparts. If your browsing will mostly consist of accessing pages formatted for mobile devices, this won't be so much of a problem, but if you need a desktop-grade browser, best to look elsewhere.
Camera - Mediocre
The 2-megapixel camera on the Samsung Reclaim was also a disappointment. We can't expect much from such a low-resolution shooter, but the camera on the Reclaim took images that weren't even good enough for Facebook or basic social network use. Pictures looked fuzzy and blown out at the bright spots, with a notable lack of detail and an oversharpened effect that made our pics look like stills from a videotape. Check out our sample images below.
Self Portrait
Baby Toy
Flowers
GPS – Very Good
For turn-by-turn navigation, the Samsung Reclaim uses the always-solid Sprint Navigator, which comes from TeleNav. The Reclaim had no trouble finding us and pinpointing our GPS location on the maps, and it usually found our initial position very quickly. Tracking us through our trip was no trouble, and the Samsung Reclaim did a fine job loading new maps quickly, or coming up with an alternate route when we found ourselves off course.
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