The Samsung Behold looks and works a lot like Sprint's Samsung Instinct or Verizon's LG Dare. All three are feature phones with extra bells and whistles; they look and feel a little like smartphones, but aren't as expandable or complex. The 3.9-ounce Behold is a 4.1 by 2.1 by 0.5 inch (HWD) black slab with an attractive plastic back that looks like brushed metal. On the front of the handset, there's a big, 3.1-inch, 240 by 400-pixel touch screen above the Pick Up, Hang Up, and Back buttons. Camera, Lock and Volume buttons reside on the sides of the phone, and a whopping 5-megapixel, autofocus camera lives on the back. One sour design note: the MicroSD card slot is tucked under the battery, which makes getting at it a challenge.
Samsung's TouchWiz interface makes using the Behold fun. Like on the LG Dare, the home screen is highly customizable. You can drag various icons for apps including the music player, the photo viewer, the IM client, and the Web browser from a sidebar and plop them anywhere you'd like on the home screen. I found the touch screen and accelerometer to be responsive.
As a voice phone, the Behold isn't bad, as long as you don't venture into areas with a lot of background noise. Since this is a 3G phone (T-Mobile 3G only, but global EDGE), I experienced the richer tones of a 3G call, without the hiss I hear on a lot of 2G T-Mobile calls. Indoors or in a quiet area, the earpiece volume was fine, and a lot of in-ear feedback made talking pleasant. But outdoors, the earpiece had trouble triumphing over very noisy areas, and a lot of background noise came through the microphone. The speakerphone was loud, if tinny, and also transmitted a lot of background noise. The phone comes with a wired headset for its oddball, proprietary Samsung jack. It also worked fine with our Plantronics Voyager 520 mono and Motorola S9 stereo headsets, including activating the excellent Nuance voice dialing system. Battery life was very good for a 3G phone, at 5 hours and 10 minutes of talk time.
As the carrier typically does, T-Mobile has locked down this phone, prohibiting you from installing your own apps; in all fairness, though, the Behold isn't a smartphone. But this means you're stuck with a mediocre browser, and underwhelming e-mail and IM programs. The IM app handles AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! and Windows Live messenger; the e-mail program supports AOL, Gmail, Yahoo!, and a few other ISPs, but not generic POP/IMAP e-mail. The browser is the popular NetFront 3.4, but with a twist: T-Mobile passes all pages through a WAP-translation portal which makes it easy to read the basic text content from Web pages, but it also mangles their layout. It's safest to stick with mobile-formatted pages on this phone.
The 5-megapixel camera doesn't quite measure up to the one in the Motorola ZN5, still it's a lot better than the 2-megapixel shooters you get on many feature phones. The Behold's camera captured about 25 percent fewer lines than the ZN5's, resulting in fuzzier images. Also, the LED flash is very weak compared to the ZN5's Xenon flash, and shutter lag was disappointing at 1.93 seconds (compared to a snappy 0.45 seconds on the ZN5.) On the positive side, using the Imatest testing suite, the Behold showed low amounts of noise at all light levels, and pictures had cooler tones than the ZN5's. And the Behold has a better movie mode than the ZN5 does, capturing relatively smooth 320 by 240 videos at 15 frames per second. You can store your pictures in the phone's roomy 200MB of onboard memory or on a MicroSD card up to 16GB.
Using the included USB cable or Bluetooth, the Behold syncs with Samsung's free PC Studio 3.1.2 software for Windows Vista. You can also transfer files to and from Macs or PCs with Bluetooth; file transfers were unusually fast for a phone, at around 1 megabit per second, but PC Studio is much rougher than either Nokia's or Sony Ericsson's PC suites. You can copy single contacts, calendar entries, tasks, and notes from Outlook or just type them in on your PC, but you can't select a range of entries or folders to copy. The program imploded when I tried to copy all of my calendar entries back to 2004. PC Studio also lets you copy music and video files over to your phone, but it doesn't transcode them into the right formats for on-the-go viewing. MP3, AAC, and WMA music files are supported, and you can use your own songs as ringtones. The music player is very attractive, displays album art, and supports the typical sorting options. In my video tests, the Behold played a 320 by 240, 30-frame-per-second MPEG4 movie file smoothly in landscape mode, but an H.264 video stuttered badly. You also get TeleNav GPS driving directions software. But since the phone is satellite-only and not AGPS, it had trouble locking on and finding a location when we tried it in two different boroughs of New York City.
The Samsung Behold isn't the best at any one thing, but it offers up a lot on a single device. On T-Mobile, the Motorola ZN5 is a better camera phone, the T-Mobile G1 delivers far superior Web experience, and the BlackBerry Pearl 8120 offers free Wi-Fi calling and syncs with iTunes. But the Behold balances a little of this, and a little of that in a fun device that just might make it worth your $200.
SPEC DATA :
Price as Tested: $199.99 - $399.99
Service Provider: T-Mobile
Operating System: Other
Screen Size: 3.1 inches
Screen Details: 240x400, 262k-color touch screen
Camera: Yes
Megapixels: 5 MP
802.11x: No
Bluetooth: Yes
Web Browser: Yes
Network: GSM, UMTS
Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 1700
High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
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