Usually successor phones bear a fairly close resemblance to their earlier namesakes. But the Samsung Behold II, $230, available Wednesday from T-Mobile, looks and behaves little like the first Behold.
While that predecessor is an advanced phone with touch screen and a 4.9-megapixel camera with advanced controls, the Behold II is a smart phone, with a larger screen (3.2 in. vs. 3 in.) and more buttons at its base for accessing the phone's more advanced features. Measuring 4.57 in. x 2.2. in. x .48 in., the Behold II is about average in size for a smart phone. It includes built-in Wi-Fi, a full Web browser, virtual QWERTY keyboard and a 2GB MicroSD storage card, which you can upgrade to 16GB. The phone runs on the Android operating system, but the older 1.5 version. That aging OS lacks the native support for Microsoft Exchange Server, Facebook, and some of the advanced e-mail capabilities built into the 2.0 version of Android found the Motorola Droid, Samsung Moment, and other phones.
Our telecom engineers are currently testing the press sample we received from Samsung, but I've already had a chance to use the phone for a few hours. Overall, I found the phone decent enough, though not up to the standard of the Droid and some of the other smart phones that have hit the market recently, which offer better performance for less money. Here are my first impressions:
Display. Its 3.2-in. active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) display is pretty sharp: about 185 pixels per inch. Images seemed crisp and the colors were vibrant. Videos, including those I shot with the phone's camera, appeared smooth and sharp.
Phone controls. Where some smart phones lack hard phone buttons, and bury virtual phone controls on the desktop, the Behold has a well-located phone button on the bottom left corner of the phone. The virtual dial buttons were also easy to see and use, too, and buttons for voice mail, speed dial, contacts, and call log were conveniently displayed on the bottom.
Navigation. In addition to its touch screen and hard buttons for phone and off-hook/power down, the Behold II has a navigation/OK button for scrolling down the page and selecting hotlinks. It's flanked by rocker controls for Home, Menu, Back, and Cube. The latter summons a rotating cube, with six sides that serve as quick links to your music, photo, and video collection, as well as the Web, YouTube, and the Amazon MP3 storefront. While that cube access works fine, an Android Search button would have been a more useful way to launch internal and Web-based searches. You can zoom in and out of photos with a double tap of your finger, except on Web pages, which is a shortcoming of Android 1.5.
Interface. The Behold II unfortunately lacks the interfaces that enhance messaging or social networking applications like we’ve seen on other Android phones like the Motorola Cliq and Droid. Setting up my corporate e-mail account via Exchange Server was easy, though I had difficulty getting the phone to sync with my corporate calendar app out of the box because that feature is off by default. However, I was able to switch on calendar sync by going into the advanced e-mail settings.
Keyboard. The virtual keyboard is supposed to expand or contract when you reorient the phone from a vertical to horizontal position, and vice-versa. But it sometimes got stuck on our press sample. The virtual keys themselves seemed well-spaced in landscape mode, but they shrank to a cramped size in portrait orientation. I found it virtually impossible to type more than a few words without making a mistake.
Camera. The camera, which you can launch by pushing a button on the phone's side, worked very well, and controls for adjusting picture quality and setting the timer are conveniently displayed to each side of the viewfinder. Next-shot-delay seemed faster than most phones I've tried, but the final verdict resides with our imaging experts, who are now putting the phone's camera though its paces.
We'll have more details on this phone as your tech team completes its test. In the meantime, check out our smart phone Ratings for details on other phones. —Mike Gikas
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