Review Of Samsung Freeform – teal – Alltel- Cell Phone

Cell Phones — By Ricky on November 15, 2009 at 3:20 am

Samsung is here with a business class phone that is a strict no-no for music and camera enthusiasts.

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Full size QWERTY keyboard, 3.5 mm jack, the camera has mirror for self portrait, e-mail support.

Thumbs Down:

A 1.3 MP camera, small display resolution, bad speaker quality for music.

Inside the trunk:

Technology: CDMA
Band: CDMA2000 1X 1900/800 / AWS 1700/2100
Phone design: Candy bar
Caller ID: Yes
Additional features: Music Player, Bluetooth, Camera, GPS

Razzle Dazzle:

Samsung Freeform is not actually attractive and won’t make you drool. Nothing about it is appealing and stay away from it if you use phone as a style statement.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Samsung Freeform sports a full size QWERTY keyboard on its surface and on the back it has 1.3 MP camera. It can capture resolutions up to 1,280×960. It has e-mail, music player, GPS, etc. Languages available on the phone are Spanish and English. The phone is 4.4 inches long, 2.4 inches wide and 0.5 inch thick. It weighs 3.63 ounces, not heavy at all.

Inside Dope:

Samsung have been in the phone making industry for a while and they are now a well known name here. They have come up with Samsung Freeform feels like a Blackberry device. We have no idea why this phone is named “Freeform”

It has this full size QWERTY keyboard where the buttons are raised enough above the surface for smooth key presses. But frequent use of this keyboard will be a pain. Nothing has replaced the comfort of a spacious keyboard computer till now. But it is not that bad from the other phones keyboard that we have tested in the market. The keyboard makes the phone big and it asks for bigger space in your pocket when you carry it.

Samsung freeform phone

Along with this, around the phone, there is camera key and the charger jack and a jack for headphone is on the top of the phone.

The navigation system is a little different in here. It doesn’t have a four way navigational button or trackball, but has rectangular toggle with the “Accept” button in the centre. Around these buttons is the call accept and call close buttons and above them are two buttons which are used according to what is displayed on the screen.

The display of this phone is a 2.2 inch screen with a 262k colors. The display is good and we could read the text on it quite clearly. But a screen of this size in these times is a little unacceptable. When there are bigger screens available this screen looks too tiny. You can the change the banner on the phone, the clock format, welcome message (when you switch on the phone) and the size of the dialing font.

The camera is awful. The less said about it, the better. We don’t know why Samsung has gone back ten years and used a 1.3 MP camera on this phone. Ok, we don’t ask a eight or five MP camera on such devices, but how about at least a 3.2 or 2 MP camera?

And what can you expect from a 1.3 MP camera? Yes, bad pictures. The pictures were hardly impressive and appeared blurred.

The camera can take picture in five resolutions 1280×960, 640×480, 320×240, and 176×144. It is equipped with other settings like white balance presets, five color effects, a night shot mode and three quality settings and four shot modes (Single Shot, Series Shot, Mosaic Shot, and Fun Frames) but all this is like serving uncooked meat. When the camera is of such inferior quality, what are good are these settings? The camera has a mirror along so you click images of yourself.

Internal memory of the phone is 55 MB big and can be expandable up to 16 GB to store your photos, music and videos. MicroSD cards are supported. The card is not hot swappable though so you go all the way and remove the battery of the phone to change the cards. The speakers on the phone sound awful but there is 3.5mm jack on the device which lets you plug in your favorite brand of headphones.

There is a music player on the phone and it is simple to use. iPod features like creating play lists while on the go and shuffle and repeat functions are all included. Equalizer is present. Stay away from this phone if you are a music enthusiast. Always go to iPhone or Nokia N series or Sony Walkman series phones for music.

There is a little eye candy available for music. You can use the visualization feature (like in Windows Media Player) or lyrics (if available) or album art.

There is browser and e-mail support on this phone. You can configure mail from IMAP accounts on this phone to set the device to get mails from Gmail, Yahoo or any other mail account. POP3 is also supported.

If you are bored and are waiting around for train or bus, you can try your hand in the included games like games like Wallpaper Universe, Collapse Chaos, My-Cast Weather, nuTsie, and Tetris. More games are available at Alltell store.

We tested the phone for call quality and we were not disappointed with the results. The calls were clear and voice could be clearly heard. We could hear the voice of the party at the other end and we were said that our voice could be heard clearly also. The quality of the voice drops a little when you are on the speaker phone but we guess this is uniform throughout. This is probably because the speakerphone attracts the sounds in the background more.

The 1000 memory phone book makes sure you never run out of space to store contacts. Along with it there are features like associating a picture with a person so it flashes when he/she calls. You can give different ring tones to individuals.

Nitty Gritty:

This phone is meant to cater to the needs of business men or men in their 30s and later who use the phone just for calls, SMS and email. Nothing about this device will appeal to the younger generation. Camera, Music player are all included but Samsung thinks the one who uses this phone will needs such applications very rarely and hence they have been kept to their minimum.