Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: clear and sharp graphics, brilliant battery life, light and comfortable.

Thumbs down: old-fashioned slider look, camera could be improved, ringtone volumes are very low.

Inside the trunk:

• technology GSM
• Band GSM 850/1900 (Dual Band)
• Phone Design Slider
• Antenna Internal
• Vibrating Alert Yes
• Polyphonic Ringer Yes

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: I think Sammy just came up with this phone as a tribute to its slim slider range of phones which it had launched like two years back. The plethora of slider phones that it had launched one after the other slowly died and I assume Sammy is trying hard to reincarnate it with this one. This one isn’t loaded with like awesome features because it is supposed to be a prepaid one, but it definitely offers whatever best it can in the $59 price range.

Razzle- dazzle: A look at the T239 and an air of nostalgia builds up around you. Its got a very retro kind  of a look. The midrange display, the keypad, the slider almost everything about the phone reminded me of its older siblings. Its quite sleek and lightweight At 3.78 inches by 1.87 inches by 0.68 inch and 3.34 ounces, though it  kind of has a solid grip on the hand. Moving over the  boring blacks, this one is available in two colours red and grey.

The display is 2.8 inches in size and supports around 262,000 colours. I was quite fascinated by the sharp graphics and the vibrant colours which was quite unexpected. Though the  display is a bit turdy when it is being viewed under direct light it gives awesome results in a room or when not under direct lights. And anyways most of the phones do have this drawback and we are kind of used to it too. The menu can be viewed in two styles: grid and list.

There is a large central OK button on the  navigation array along with two other soft keys and the talk and end keys. The navigation array has a pretty comfortable layout. The other buttons on the keypad have a pleasant rubbery feel to it and gives a decent, non daunting experience to the fingers. Plus I hardly committed any mistakes while texting or messaging. the backlighting is bright enough too. One of my woes is that whenever I had to use the clear key I had to open the keypad.

The camera lens is behind the phone and the volume rocker has been placed on the right spine. The left spine has the camera shutter and the headphone/charger port. Other essentials include a vibrate mode, text and multimedia messaging, an alarm clock, a calendar, a task list, a calculator, a world clock, a tip calculator, a unit and currency converter, a timer, and a stopwatch.

Inside dope:
The phone book capacity of the T239 is relatively small  with just 300 contacts entry. Contacts can be paired up with a photo and a ringer id.

It comes equipped with a VGA camera and which can take pictures in almost four resolutions. Considering that it’s a VGA camera the image quality is quite average. Anyways I didn’t expect any kind of sharp images. The images display some amount of noise which is pretty much expected. It offers you with about 10 MB of storage for photos which is more or less not that great.

Coming to the call quality, it was pretty much decent with minimal static and interference. It was sort of clear and sounded pretty much natural. The volume of the calls was quite low though because of which I could hardly hear anything in crowded and noisy places. The caller to had more or less the same to say. Speakerphone calls were kind of average and the the  performance with the Bluetooth headphones was just about satisfactory.

The T239 has a battery life of  7 hours talktime and 12.5 days on standby.

Nitty-gritty: For anyone who is looking out for a basic phone which is worth the money being paid for it. Definitely worth a shot.

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