Smartphone Review

The Samsung Propel Pro from AT&T is a Windows Mobile 6.1 slider phone with a full QWERTY keyboard and a stylish exterior. It’s a quad band world phone with Wi-Fi and some extras.

BUILD AND DESIGN
The first word that comes to mind when I look at the Samsung Propel Pro is “sexy”. The device has an ultra-sleek exterior that looks like polished hematite. It’s really quite striking, and looks much cooler than a lot of the other cookie-cutter phones on the market.

Even though the exterior of the phone is plastic it looks like metal, and the device feels very solid in the hand. At 2.4 inches wide, especially in my relatively small hand, it is so wide that its sharp corners tend to dig into my palm if I’m trying to use it one-handed. The phone is a little on the heavy side, but not too heavy, and the weight is pretty well balanced between the top slider and the main portion of the phone.

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BY: AWright, Brighthand.com Contributor
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic has quickly become a very popular Symbian S60-based mobile device for the Finnish company. In its first few months on the market, there have been over 2 million of these devices sold.

And while one can point to the similarity of the 5800XM to other famous touchscreen models such as the iPhone, Instinct, and Prada; none of these devices have demonstrated the sheer capability, or market friendliness that Nokia’s offering has. Maybe that is why, despite some glaring weaknesses, that its found a solid place in this reviewer’s pocket.
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BY: Jen Edwards, Brighthand.com Contributor
The Samsung Impression, one of the latest from AT&T, has a large touch-screen display and a spacious keyboard, along with an excellent camera. It’s a quad-band GSM world phone with Bluetooth and GPS functionality, plus fun polyphonic ringtones and highly customizable vibrating alerts.

It’s an exceptional device that might make you decide you need a new phone — even if you like your current one.
Design & Build
My first impression of this device was a good one; it’s a substantial phone that nevertheless doesn’t feel heavy. It’s nicely designed in almost every respect — rounded in all the right places, with a slide-out keyboard that functions well.

At 4.48 inches it’s just a bit taller than other phones, but it’s also a little narrower at just a hair under 2.25 inches, and it feels great in my relatively small hand. It’s a bit large in the pocket, but it works.

Most of the buttons are located on the sides of the device, and they’re large enough to manipulate easily while still being small and unobtrusive as far as aesthetics are concerned. The call, back, and disconnect buttons underneath the screen are flush with the front of the device, but well designed and still easy to use — my fingers don’t have any trouble finding them.

I have only one small complaint about the overall physical design of the Impression, and that’s the location and use of the Lock key. It’s located on the right side of the device, on the lower portion (the keyboard slider, not the display). You have to press and hold it for a couple of seconds to unlock the device, and both my test subjects and I had the same problem with it.

When you try to press the button with your thumb, you tend to also press on the left side of the device as well, which can start opening the slider and causing the display to slide over to the right, making it harder to keep pressure on that lock button. I could be making way too much of this point, but I still find it annoying after using the device for a week now, and it’s the only real problem with the physical design of the Impression. I’m learning to adjust for it and hold the phone slightly differently, but I felt this should still be mentioned. Read More »

BY: Jen Edwards, Brighthand.com Contributor

The Pantech Matrix Pro, recently released by AT&T, is a unique dual slider phone with both a QWERTY keyboard and a full number keypad.

It has a 2.0 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.0, a microSD card slot, and 128 MB of RAM. It comes with a nice protective pouch that also doubles as a polishing cloth, a very small AC adapter, and a headphone adapter dongle.

In some ways it’s the best of both worlds, but there are a quite a few tradeoffs which make it hard for me to recommend this device wholeheartedly.
Design and Build
The Pantech Matrix Pro is a dual slider phone, so it’s somewhat “fat” but still pocketable and comfortable to hold in the hand. It is very solidly built, and when I manipulate the sliders I find that they work smoothly and strongly “snap” into the appropriate position whether they are being opened or closed.

The phone has a two-tone color scheme, with the display and the QWERTY slider done in a metallic pewter-gray plastic with a very shiny mirror finish. I think it’s very sharp looking and attractive, so I was slightly disappointed when I turned the phone over and found that the back was a muted blue that clashes just a bit with the front of the phone. It isn’t ugly by any means, but I would like to have seen better coordination as far as color and finish are concerned.

The buttons on the front are rather small and fairly hard for me to hit consistently. The five-way navigator is large enough to work well, but that comes at the cost of making the other six buttons too small. My biggest problem is with the two soft menu keys, as I tend to hit either the Home (left) or back/recent programs (right) button instead since they stick up a bit. I don’t seem to have as much of a problem with the call and disconnect keys, but this is still an annoying issue for me. I’ve had the phone for almost three weeks now, and I still have to look down at it to make sure I’m pressing the correct key.

My other issue is the missing headphone jack; you have to plug the included dongle adapter into the sync/charge port. Not only do I hate dongles (they’re so easy to lose!), but that also means that there’s no way to plug the phone in and listen to music while it’s charging. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but it is disappointing when you consider that this phone is definitely on the larger side of the current form factor spectrum. There should be room for a headset jack. Read More »