With its unique two-faced design and musical pedigree, the Samsung UpStage is a Power Vision phone like no other. Does the schizophrenic form work?
Review summary of the Samsung UpStage:
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 The Samsung UpStage is such a unique flip, it seems almost more a design study than a retail phone. To be blunt, we did not appreciate the flip design. It did not make the music playing experience better, and it did not add to the ease and enjoyment of using the phone. Except for music features, which are controlled completely by the music side, every other feature was hurt either by the inconvenient flipping, the small screen, or the touch sensitive controls. If the design truly appeals to you, the phone has few major flaws besides this point. Music sounds good, and we like that Samsung includes a headphone adapter. Calls sound good, though not great, and other 3G features worked very well, including streaming movies on Sprint TV. Still, though we applaud a leap in design, we just don't think we're up for making the jump ourselves. Release: April 2007. Price: $150.
Pros: Unique design. Good screen on music side. Best music store among all carriers, for price and content. Battery wallet adds hours to talk time.
Cons: Flip design makes use more difficult, less intuitive. Text functions, like messaging and URL input, is difficult on small phone-side screen. Music player looks last-gen with features to match.
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Full Samsung UpStage Review:
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Design
We imagine the brainstorming session behind the UpStage was something like: "Let's make a flip phone, but not one that you flip open . . ." We retain our original reservations from when we first saw the GSM version of the device, Samsung's SGH-F300 Ultra Music phone. We worried at CES that the phone's dialing display was too small, that the flipping action would be more of a gimmick than a useful design tool, and that the touch sensitive controls would give us a hassle like, well, touch sensitive controls. For the most part, these concerns bore themselves out, though Samsung has done an admirable job shoehorning a usable phone into the unique design.
The phone-side display is indeed small, too small to do anything useful. You can dial, you can fit about three lines of a text message, and you can see a small portion of a contact's info. That's it. For the rest of the phone's functions you have to flip it over. On the music side, the screen is tall and bright, with very good color. Here, you can do everything but type. You can browse the web, but when you need to enter an address, you'll have to flip the phone. You can read a message, but if you want to reply, flip the phone. The process can be a bit aggravating.
The interface is modern Samsung, without the hierarchical pop-up windows that we like. Even on the phone side, the menu retains the Samsung icons and black background scheme. The touch controls on the music side are better than most touch controls we've used, even on other Samsung phones, and Samsung has a couple of neat tricks to help with navigation. You can slide your finger horizontally or vertically instead of tapping up and down or sideways. Then, if you hold your finger at the end of a slide, you can scroll through menus. This was a slick effect, but we still aren't touch sensitive button fans, since they can never be as responsive as a good, emphatic depression. We would have preferred a click-wheel-esque compromise, with some touch sensitive menu scrolling, and a traveling click beneath.
Calling - Good
The UpStage is a good phone for calls, but could have been much better if it wasn't held back by the strange design. First of all, you need to remember that the microphone and earpiece are on the keypad side. Okay, no problem. Second, the dialing screen is fine for a phone number, but once you start using the contact list, problems develop. The phone fits three lines on its small screen, so you won't be able to see most of the contact at once. Also, though the contact list has live searching capabilities, simply scrolling through a long list is a pain. Third, the small screen makes advanced calling options, especially 3-way calling, more difficult. The small screen makes adding a contact to a call difficult, and even drilling the menu options during a call requires more scrolling than we're used to. Finally, call quality just wasn't very good. Our callers reported a muddied sound to our voices, whether we were speaking directly into the microphone or the included hands-free mic. Otherwise, the phone features a loud speakerphone, Bluetooth, and speaker-independent voice dialing, all of which performed well in our tests.
Messaging - Mediocre
The Samsung UpStage is simply not meant for messaging. Though the keypad was plenty comfortable, with nicely rounded rows of keys, the small screen is simply too small for a messaging enthusiast. Though you can type on the larger screen, the process is slow and difficult, requiring lots of scrolling, so the phone actively discourages you from using the music side for text input, and in fact you have to trick the phone to allow you to see its ugly side. The phone includes all the standard amenities we like on a simple messaging phone, such as pre-loaded settings for AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. Also, the phone handles MMS messages and Voice SMS. Still, if you rely on messaging, find a phone that makes use of a bigger screen.
Music - Good
The Samsung UpStage does a good job handling music, but to be a real competitor in the music phone realm, some serious improvements are needed. The phone needs dedicated music buttons that activate the music with a single touch. Though music is a top-level option from the standby screen, we would prefer to be able to press play and hear music right away, a feature we liked on the Nokia 5300. Though playback controls on the touch pad worked well, the touch sensitive buttons, like almost all touch sensitive buttons we've tried, were not perfect, leading to annoying double-taps, and occasionally mispressed buttons. The scrolling feature of the touch pad was not quick enough to scroll even our meager list of songs, and tapping down on the pad 100 times was out of the question. Strangely, if you want to take a call or reply to a message while the music is playing, the UpStage will flip to the phone side and let you perform your task. However, if you are playing music and press the flip button, the phone claims it cannot continue to sing.
Though music from the phone sounds good, as good as any basic music--playing phone, the music player app is a real disappointment. Simple text on a white background, the player does little more than play, fast forward, and rewind. It featured no EQ settings, no visualizer, and no advanced playback options, like A-B repeat. You can create playlists on the phone, but the process is slow. The phone allows you to sort songs by artist, title, or genre, but not by other criteria, like album title or song length. Basically, the player is completely unchanged from first generation Sprint Music Store phones. We would rather see a more appealing interface, with better organization and file handling, like Sony Ericsson's Walkman player.
The music transfer software makes an attempt at a modern look, but is actually quite thin on features. The software is very slow. It took quite some time to find all of our songs (though they're all in the same folder), and about 30 minutes to fill a 512MB microSD card, which is way too long. The software is not difficult to use, so long as you simply press the right button, but if you deviate from the path and try to re-sort lists, or perform any of the intuitive organization that iTunes allows, you're stuck. Like the player on the phone, Samsung and Sprint would have done well to introduce a more advanced and unique solution for this unique phone design.
Odds and ends
The Samsung UpStage has all the amenities of Sprint's Power Vision network, including Web surfing, Sprint TV, and OnDemand. Sprint TV and OnDemand, which don't require much textual input, worked well, and were comparable in performance to the Samsung SPH-M610. While surfing the Web, pages loaded as quickly as we expected, but again the phone's design hampered easy use. When you want to type a Web address, you must flip the phone. Then flip back to load the page. Forget a letter (we did, often)? Flip the phone again. Then flip back. After a couple of typos, the novelty of the flip design and the large screen on the music side quickly wore out their welcome, and we were happy to return to our full-keypad smartphones, with their measly single screens.
Though the phone's internal battery is not replaceable, it ships with a handy leather battery wallet. We liked this idea, as it didn't add too much bulk to the phone, and helped protect the screens and touch pad. Without the battery pack, we got about five minutes shy of three hours of talk time with the phone, but with the pack we talked for almost seven hours straight. For music, we only tested the battery with a fully charged pack, and got about 14 and a half hours of playback, with occasional track-skipping and some light Web browsing thrown in for good measure.
Finally, though we appreciate the included accessories, we wish Sprint had bundled a larger memory card. The phone comes with headphones, a 3.5mm headphone adapter, the battery wallet, and a 64MB card. No respectable music player, phone or otherwise, should be shipping with less than a Gigabyte on board, since this marks the low end of digital audio players, outside of the phone market. In the phone world, this memory is also used for pictures and various files, which makes the low capacity even more problematic.
Price and availability
The Samsung UpStage is available for $150 with a contract. A mail-in rebate of $50 is available, when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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