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TouchWiz user interface Samsung's TouchWiz UI is currently found on the Samsung Behold, Eternity and Omnia. It's a great home screen UI with a collapsible launcher dock on the left that holds "widgets". You can drag these to the phone's desktop and drag them back to the dock as you like. You can select which widgets appear on the dock via settings, but you can't download new widgets as of this writing. We like the Behold's set of widgets better than the Eternity's-- they're more useful. There are widgets for IM, messaging, voice dialing, TeleNav GPS navigation, myFaves, the music player, Bluetooth, various clocks and more. Unfortunately, the Behold lacks the Eternity's quick launch button that brings up an on-screen launcher for commonly used applications. The phone is very fast and responsive; even window animations and opening folders and applications happen instantly. There are on-screen notifications for alarms, calendar events and missed calls. The built-in accelerometer handles automatic screen rotation when the phone is turned. The screen turns quickly, and the accelerometer tuning is good-- it's neither too twitchy nor too slow to turn.
The screen's haptic feedback makes using the touch screen easier and more pleasant-- especially the on-screen QWERTY keyboard and dialer. The device vibrates gently when you touch it, and you can turn on (generally pleasant) sound effects for touch as well. Though like most every other phone, the touch experience isn't as good as the iPhone's, the Behold's is very good. It takes a light touch to tap an icon to launch a program, and a moderate press and hold to drag items on screen or scroll through lists. List scrolling and web page scrolling are very controlled, and don't go flying wildly as on some phones. The phone's on-screen QWERTY keyboard is available everywhere with a flip to landscape mode (except 3rd party Java apps not offered by T-Mobile such as Opera and Google Maps). It's simply a joy to type on-- the keys are large, haptics helps with feel and the layout is customized at times (in the web browser, there are .com and www. buttons and the / is easy to get to). The on-screen dial pad is likewise easy to use and supports T9. For those so inclined, there's also handwriting recognition that works best if you use your finger and write one letter at a time. Phone The Behold is a quad band GSM world phone with EDGE that supports the world's GSM bands (850/900/1800/1900MHz). It has 3G HSDPA only on T-Mobile's US bands which are different from AT&T's. Call quality on 3G is very good and volume is average. The speakerphone sounds a little tinny and is likewise not the loudest and clearest when used for music playback or GPS navigation. But earpiece voice quality is excellent, as is outgoing voice, and the phone worked well with a variety of Bluetooth headsets. Nuance's excellent voice dialing software is included, and you can launch it by tapping the talking head widget on the home screen. The Eternity on AT&T lacks built-in voice dialing, and since there's no speed dial, we really like having voice dialing-- good going, T-Mobile!
In addition to the WAP and HTML NetFront 3.4 web browser, there's a Java-based email client that handles several popular account types such as AOL, Yahoo mail, Earthlink, Gmail, .Mac, Comcast, Verizon and SBC Yahoo but you can't define your own POP3 or IMAP accounts. The IM client supports AIM, ICQ, Windows Live and Yahoo, and can run in the background. Multimedia The music player supports a healthy selection of formats: MP3, AAC (unprotected iTunes format), WMA and Real Player. The phone doesn't support MTP for copying DRM files to the phone but it does support mass storage mode so you can mount the phone's microSD card on the desktop. T-Mobile includes a stereo earbud headset which is handy since it uses the Samsung blade connector. Unfortunately, the included headset didn't impress the heck out of us, so we recommend finding a blade to 3.5mm stereo jack adapter so you can use better headphones or use Bluetooth A2DP stereo headphones. The Behold can handle mobile YouTube content via its media player. Unfortunately, mobile YouTube is low quality optimized for smaller screened phones with less multimedia power, and the videos look pretty poor on the Behold's large screen. When listening to music videos sound quality is particularly poor, though this isn't the phone's fault, it's due to the low quality audio stream on mobile phone-optimized content. It can also play locally stored content (copy movies to a microSD card and you've got a decent iPod substitute thanks to the large and bright display). We tested it with some MPEG4 files formatted for the iPod and iPhone, and they played fine as long as the bitrate was below 600kbps.
Speaking of that microSD card slot, it's under the battery door and you must remove the battery to access the card-- argh. But we're pleased that T-Mobile includes a 1 gig starter card and that the phone supports SDHC high capacity cards. GPS We had a terrible time with the Behold's GPS, which surprised us given the Eternity's good performance. Perhaps T-Mobile, whose selection of GPS-enabled phones is very slim, doesn't have as robust an aGPS service as the other carriers. That might explain the seeming eternity it took to get a cold fix (lock onto satellites and get a location after the phone has been turned on). It seemed like it was riding on a weak and unassisted GPS chip. We had to take the phone outdoors with a clear view of the sky to get a fix, and that fix took about 2 minutes, which is quite long compared to other current phones. Warm fixes were much quicker at 20 seconds or less, but the GPS often lost its satellite fix and thus stopped tracking us accurately. This made for some comical directions from TeleNav, a generally excellent turn-by-turn spoken navigation and mapping application that costs $9.99/month and also requires a data plan since maps are downloaded over the air in real time. The GPS would lose location or get it wrong and the directions would thus change several times in a few minutes as TeleNav tried desperately to recalculate the route based on the phone's incorrect GPS information.
Conclusion Certainly one of the coolest phones on T-Mobile, the Samsung Behold is a pleasure to use and look at. We love the responsive and large touch screen, and the phone is easy to understand and use. The Behold looks like an expensive phone; the metal back and well thought-out trim make the phone look classier than its AT&T counterpart as well. Though not the best we've seen in its class, the 5MP camera takes good shots and has a fairly quick autofocus; again a bargain at this price. We only wish for a more robust web experience given the full HTML browser marketing bytes and expensive data plan. Pro: Very good touch screen-- easy to use and control. The phone is fun and easy to use. Attractive, stylish design. Has 3G for fast data, simultaneous voice and data and higher quality voice calls. Very good voice quality for phone calls. High resolution camera with autofocus is cutting edge for the US market. Can use MP3s as ringtones (files must be under 300k) and any image as a home screen background. Con: If you wish to have Internet access, the data plan is expensive and T-Mobile's coverage is still sparse since they just started rolling out 3G this year (mid-2008). Internet settings are locked down and the gateway/proxy can get in the way of accessing full HTML sites, even though this phone is marketed as having a full HTML web browser. GPS is weak and couldn't keep up with us when driving.
Web sites: www.samsung.com, www.tmobile.com Price: $149 with 2 year contract after T-Mobile $50 rebate. No contract price: $399.
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