Did Verizon Wireless' new AMOLED-packing touchscreen slider steal our hearts? Get the inside scoop in our Samsung Rogue review.
Review summary of the Samsung Rogue:
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 If you just read the hardware specs on the Samsung Rogue and don't actually pick it up to use it, it's quite an impressive phone. That 3.1-inch AMOLED screen is really top notch, with a high resolution and gorgeous color. The phone also packs some nice features, like music and video playback, corporate and civilian e-mail access, a comfortable slide-out QWERTY keyboard and more. It does everything a feature phone can do, but it performed so poorly in our hands-on tests that we'd have trouble recommending the Samsung Rogue, a phone that is unresponsive and frustrating. Navigating the phone's interface is a sluggish, slapdash affair, as any errant press could land you in an unwanted feature. Some apps, like the music player and the e-mail client, were just poorly designed while others, like the Web browser and the phone's TouchWIZ interface, suffered from a touchscreen that had trouble distinguishing our flicks from our taps. This isn't surprising, considering the Samsung Glyde, which the Rogue replaces, had similar issues. The Samsung Impression, a near-identical phone on AT&T, performed a little better, but we're still waiting for Samsung to impress us with a touchscreen, full QWERTY phone. Release: September 2009. Price: $100.
Pros: AMOLED screen is crisp and colorful, packed with pixels. Great features, including 3-megapixel auto focus camera, corporate e-mail support.
Cons: Unresponsive screen hurts performance in most key apps. Unimpressive software design hurts the rest.
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Full Samsung Rogue Review:
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Design – Good
Samsung's Rogue for Verizon Wireless doesn't try to deviate much from the pack in terms of hardware design, but it manages a clean look with some nice flourishes. It's a phone with a tablet-style front and a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard underneath. The right side of the phone is plastered in shortcut keys, including keys for voice commands, speakerphone, camera and screen lock. Around back, the Rogue has a nice, textured cover that adds some variety without aiming for the cheesy, faux-leather finish of other phones, like the BlackBerry Bold.
The standout feature on the Samsung Rogue is the AMOLED screen. While we weren't thrilled with the phone's performance, we were very happy with the quality of the screen, and we're excited for the day when technology this good is standard on all cell phones. AMOLED provides deep, dark blacks and rich color, with plenty of contrast. The 3.1-inch display is WVGA resolution, a full 800 by 480 pixels, and while the phone did little to push the envelope with so many pixels, at least the high-res screen made icons and text look sharp and crisp all around.
The interface on the Samsung Rogue is Samsung's standard TouchWIZ design. It's among our least favorite interface designs, and on the Rogue it was just as cluttered and inept as it usually is. The interface relies on a widgets bar on the side of the screen and a shortcut bar at the bottom, and these overlap to annoying effect. You drag a widget out of the widget bar and onto the desktop, where it grows a little and does almost nothing until you press on it. Widgets pile up quickly, and most are simply bookmarks or shortcuts to other features, very few provide any real functions on the homescreen. Widgets for Facebook and Twitter were just Web links to the standard mobile site, and there isn't even a clock on the main screen until you drag out the clock widget, thus taking up space. The interface is a mess, and we hope Samsung comes up with something better soon.
Calling - Good
Calls on the Samsung Rogue sounded mediocre in our tests, especially when network signal started to drop off. Reception on the Rogue was pretty lousy, usually only a bar or two of EV-DO service, and maybe an extra bar for 1xRTT calls. At that level, calls sounded digitized and we heard static on both ends of the conversation. When signal improved, call quality wasn't so bad. For battery life, we got more than 5 hours out of a single call, and we had no trouble using the Samsung Rogue all day, with some Web browsing and GPS navigation thrown in, without having to recharge the phone.
You can't synchronize the contact list on the Samsung Rogue, but for a feature phone, the address book had plenty of fields to store information. Calling screens were snazzy looking and colorful, taking great advantage of the AMOLED display, but in-call screens offered no better functionality than your average calling phone.
The Samsung Rogue comes with plenty of great calling features. Voice dialing is speaker-independent, just press the button on the side and the Rogue will dial a name from your contact list or a number at your command. The speakerphone also gets its own button, and it was nice and loud, though we prefer a more abusively volume level for speakerphones. The Rogue also gets Verizon Wireless' great visual voicemail, so you can listen to your messages out of order by tapping on a message list, without calling into a centralized service.
Messaging - Good
With its slide-out keyboard, the Samsung Rogue seems made for messaging, and it does come with a nice array of e-mail and messaging apps. But for a phone with such high-end ambitions, the Samsung Rogue barely skims the surface of what we expect from a capable messaging device. The phone uses standard text messaging, and can't display SMS messages in a threaded style, so it's harder to follow a text message conversation on this device. Also, for instant messaging fans, the phone works well if you use AOL, MSN and Yahoo, but there's no support for other IM services like Gmail's Gtalk, and definitely nothing for MySpace IM or Facebook integration.
For e-mail, the Samsung Rogue presents a list of preset e-mail options, but the phone had no trouble finding settings for our Gmail account on its own, even though Gmail wasn't on the list. The e-mail client was a bit sluggish and ugly, sometimes frustrating and difficult to navigate. The phone comes with a corporate e-mail client, and even though we've entered settings for our Exchange server a thousand times before, the Rogue just couldn't connect properly to our server and gave us strange, unintelligible error messages instead.
The keyboard on the Samsung Rogue felt very nice, with well rounded keys and great spacing. It's probably the best full QWERTY keyboard to come out of Samsung. Unfortunately, the stange layout threw us off. With the space bar interrupting the bottom row and the arrow keys crammed in on the right side, the whole keyboard felt off-balance. You'll feel like you're being pushed off the phone to the left side while typing. Still, if you can get used to it, it's a very cozy set of keys.
Multimedia - Mediocre
Multimedia playback was the biggest disappointment on the Samsung Rogue. We expected so much more from this phone. With it's high-resolution screen, we expected great looking videos, and as one of the few Samsung or Verizon Wireless phones to sport a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, we were hoping for a great music player, as well. In both areas, the Samsung Rogue just failed to deliver.
We tried a number of videos on the Samsung Rogue, and the video player chewed through all of our MP4 files encoded with H.264 compression. The phone even played videos scaled to the screen's large, 800 by 480 pixel resolution. The problem was that even these high-res videos looked like mobile content in the phone's player. Videos looked pixilated and boxy, with serious posterization problems creating a gradient effect between colors.
The music player had its own issues. The player first had trouble finding our music tracks. Even with an option to scan for them, they still have to be placed in a very specific folder on your memory card. Playback sounded great on the phone, but when we tried to dig for some playback options, the music stopped. The Samsung Rogue is incapable of multitasking with it's music player. If you open a menu, or even go back to browser your library for the next tune, the music will stop. Unlike most other Samsung TouchWIZ phones we've seen, the Samsung Rogue doesn't get a music widget, so you can't play tunes from the home screen, either.
Web browsing - Good
As you might expect, the unresponsive screen and lagging performance of the Samsung Rogue also took its toll on the Web browser. For rendering pages, the Polaris browser did an okay job. Layout wasn't perfect, but text looked sharp on the Rogue's screen and images were also drawn nicely. The phone did an acceptable job with our own homepage, and most pages that don't rely on advanced Web technologies will come through fine, though a bit muddied. Once you dig in and start navigating those pages, though, you'll start to run into problems. The kinetic scrolling on the Rogue, the feature that lets the Web page glide past as you flick your finger, was very jerky, and sometimes it didn't seem to work at all. Accidentally, we'd start our glide on a tiny Web link, and we'd end up jumping to a new page. The browser also seemed sluggish, considering the EV-DO Rev. A network.
Camera - Good
The camera on the Samsung Rogue took shots that were good enough for online sharing and basic desktop use, but they weren't up to snuff for printing and real photography work. The phone has plenty of camera features, but we ran into trouble once we dug past the simple point and shoot aspects. The Rogue uses a 3-megapixel camera with auto focus, but Samsung doesn't include a 2-stage camera button. This would let us press halfway to focus our shot, then the rest of the way to snap the pic, but the Rogue handles the whole routine for you, which sometimes resulted in jerky shots if we moved while the camera was working. Most images looked okay, and the auto focus did seem to help a bit. We also tried the panorama mode, but all the shots we took were blurry and unusable. Check out our image samples below.
Chinese Starfish
Self Portrait
Tassle, Macro shot with Flash
Red Hot Burner?
GPS Navigation - Good
Turn-by-turn navigation on the Samsung Rogue comes via VZ Navigator, a competent navigation app that performs well, even if it lacks some of the visual flair and touch friendliness of the competition on other carriers. The Samsung Rogue did well finding us for a first fix, and tracked us smoothly on our trip in and out of the Dallas metro area. The app even includes speech recognition, so you can speak everything from street number and name to city and ZIP code, and the phone will recognize your spoken input. This worked pretty well in our tests, though not perfectly, so we had to make occasional corrections. Once VZ Navigator is running, it's very hard to control. You can't zoom in and out of maps with your finger, you need to dig in the menus for zoom. You also can't pan around the map to see what's coming up next. Maps screens were overall difficult to navigate and understand, with or without touch input. Overall, the system worked very well in a pinch, but it won't replace a dedicated portable navigation device.
Price and availability
The Samsung Rogue is available now from Verizon Wireless for $100 with a contract agreement.
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