The thin-and-light slider arrives with Bluetooth, a VGA camera, impressive calling features, and killer looks. Philip Berne puts the SCH-U420 through its paces.
Review summary of the Samsung SCH-U420:
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 With a few tweaks to the keyboard, and perhaps a better-quality microphone, the SCH-U420 could be quite a contender. This thin, compact slider has crowd-pleasing looks and a light shell; however, although it begs to be opened and touched, the U420 is a pain to use because of the cramped keys and difficult-to-access "OK" button on the five-way selector. And while the phone's screen is bright and crisp, browsing through the menus and content is a pain because of the tiny five-way navigation control and buried "OK" button. The SCH-U420 may have style and substance (including Bluetooth and speaker-independent voice dialing), but ease-of-use is not its strong point. Release: September 2006. Price: $50.
Pros: Slick design. Light weight. Crisp screen with clean text and good options for how text is displayed. Speaker-independent voice dialing is a nice touch on an inexpensive phone.
Cons: Keypad is almost unusable, resulting in misdials and typos in every application. No conference calling.
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Full review of the Samsung SCH-U420:
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Design
The SCH-U420 is beautiful to look at, but the slick, lightweight design clearly comes at a cost of usability. Keys are a shiny, black plastic with little gap between them, making it far too easy to press above or below your intended stroke. The number keys butt up against the bottom of the upper half of the slider, making the top row difficult to access. The phone is small and very light, but feels solid. Its slide opens and closes with a spring-loaded, reassuring click. The screen is bright and colorful, and text is easy to read in every application.
Calling - Mediocre
Call quality on the SCH-U420 is mediocre, at best. Calls have a slightly buzzing sound to them, making words slur together on the receiving end of calls. Though the microphone is positioned away from the mouth, breathing sounds, and occasionally air currents from air conditioning vents were audible. Dialing on the phone was just as bad. The keys are small, very slick, and close together. The top row of digits are so close to the bottom of the slide that dialing "1" or "3" resulted in frequent errors -- indeed, we found ourselves pecking with our fingernails to dial correctly, an uncomfortable predicament. Similarly, pressing "OK" in the center of the five-way button was nearly impossible. The phone sports speaker-independent voice dialing, a feature that may save you the headache of dialing with the keys. Polyphonic ringtones are supported and sold through Alltel's Axcess network, but the phone cannot play MP3s. Bluetooth headsets are supported, but unfortunately there's no conference calling. The contact list is basic, but competent, allowing you to store five numbers and an e-mail address for each contact. Live searching cuts the necessity for scrolling. Also, a set of fun fonts are available on the dialing display, making your numbers look like sticky notes or handwriting.
Messaging - Good
The U420 did a competent job of handling incoming SMS and MMS messages. The phone cannot display a full, 160-character text messages at once, but messages can be stored in subfolders, and the phone will send you a text acknowledgment when a message has been delivered. Outgoing SMSs can be viewed in various colors and font styles, as well. Unfortunately, the U420's tiny keypad renders moot the phone's above-average messaging features. We made frequent mistakes, even with predictive typing enabled, and scrolling through and selecting messages was problematic due to the diminutive five-way button.
Odds and ends
The U420 packs in a VGA camera (not the greatest resolution, but more or less standard for a phone in its class), and pictures can be sent via MMS, but cannot be transferred via Bluetooth. Content on Alltell's 2.5G 1XRTT network is pretty good, especially the 20 channels of XM content. Though our New York office is outside of Alltell's network (and thus the phone roamed at a slower speed), we were able to stream audio without a problem.
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Score: 63% When: December 2005 Worth: $150 - $300 Carrier: T-Mobile
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Price and availability
Available now from Alltel, the Samsung SCH-U420 retails for $220, or $50 with a two-year service agreement.
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