T-Mobiles scan, there’s third taste of Samsung’s Touchwiz user interface. They previously had in the form of the Samsung Behold and also the Memoir. Both actually feature some press of camera specs. But now we have the Samsung Highlight which takes out from that we love from the Samsung’s Touchwiz user interface and has it in a slimmer compact form.
Samsung isn’t straight far from the traditional slate form factor they use on the Samsung Highlight. It’s actually some other dimensions with the Behold and Memoir that followed before it. Now, they use this blue plastic which of course feels very plasticky but at the same time a little bit harder and more durable than most of the other set compared to it. The back has these patterns on just to give it a different look. Other than that, it’s relatively pocketable and when you place it in your pockets, it won’t put too much thickness to it. It also feels a little bit heavier just because of the battery that’s inside of it.
And the first thing you’ll notice is the beautiful three-inch LCD screen. It may not be as bright or luminous as something like the inactive matrix but OLED found on the impression on AT&T but lately it does get the job done. It’s pretty bright. You’ll be able to read pretty much anything on text, on screen just because of its great resolution. And it’s pretty responsive so we definitely like the screen.
You have also on the front your Send and End keys and Back or Clear key which has pretty good tactile feel and well—for anyone. On the left, you have the dedicated volume rocker and the other side, dedicated kind of button, Lock, Unlock and also your proprietary charging port. And on the back, you have your three-megapixel camera with the speakerphone, no flash or self-portrait though. And when you remove the battery, the back cover, it reveals the battery, the sim card slot and also the microSD card slot, just kind of a pain how to get access to it because you have to remove the battery physically.
The one thing we were disappointed in it is actually it’s treated with the same exact touch user interface found on the Behold and also Memoir. Of course on the left, we have your widgets which you could place on to the home screen to give it a good personalized look. So, as far as personalization goes, it’s a wonderful interface for that. Unfortunately though, the widgets are the pretty much the same exact ones that we’ve seen previously. None of them are really eye opening or really worthy enough to be something new. The other thing that we notice is just this version on this device just runs a little bit slower than the other models especially when you’ll notice the transition effects, there’s just some more sort of light.
Other than that, navigating is pretty simple with the menu keys and then just break it down to simple larger icons that are touch-friendly. And of course, this is going to be geared towards text messengers out there. So, sending text message is a brisk. There’s many ways you would go about doing that. You could use the traditional touch keypad that’s quite responsive and there’s also a vibration feedback whenever you do use it. You could even use the handwriting recognition which we did find to be not that as accurate as we like and of course, the best form is using the QWERTY keyboard type, that’s probably by far the best and easiest way to go about doing that.
The other thing is the instant messaging application that it uses. It’s powered—and of course you have your Aim, Windows Live and also Yahoo to choose from. As far as the email program goes though, it doesn’t have a full support for you know specific mail clients. It only gives you a listing and of course if yours is not on there, unfortunately you won’t be able to use it directly. You have to actually reload up the browser and go through that way.
The web browsers are actually the same that we were seeing form again the previous devices. It’s tolerable to say the list load of complex websites like I ours. On top of that, scrolling isn’t as bad and of course it’s not as fluid or as smooth as we like but does get the job done. It doesn’t have also a page overview which will come in handy but luckily the zooming out and zooming in functions is pretty relatively quick, at least it resizes the site fast enough for you to actually start scrolling again. So as we said, it’s tolerable, not the best out there but it’s decent.
They have a poor performance with phone call quality on the highlight. That’s just because the voices sound are muffled when we are speaking on there and hearing our callers. And there’s also this static key background noise at all times, even when that that sound is very pronounced. The speakerphone quality wasn’t as strong as we would like to on the weaker side granted that it didn’t crackle when we placed in the highest setting but we just had a hard time hearing our callers.
The great thing about the Highlight is the eight days of battery life we got out of it using it on a normal use. It’s pretty impressive that’s partly because of the large sized battery that they use over it what’s found on the Behold or even Memoir. The three-megapixel camera does take some decent shots, not the most detailed but it’s good enough for a 4x6 printout. And of course, you’re going to be using it for media features, playing videos and also music. There’s a decent experience, videos, there’s no slow down, no hack-ups. On top of that music, it did a good job. No slow down as we said and also placed the mini player on the desk, on the home screen if it has to back out.
The Samsung Highlight just stay stagnant and we’re just hoping to see Samsung come out with a really new device with innovative features and also just an internet updates to the Touchwiz interface but basically we got here is a send device we’ve seen already on T-Mobile’s—except that it has some reduced specs, a little bit slower of the Touchwiz interface, granted that it does have better battery life but other than that we were just unimpressed with the overall design and performance of it.
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