This is Phone Arena’s video review of the new Samsung Upstage phone offered by Sprint.
The Upstage is a candy bar phone measuring at only 4 inches in height, 1.73 inches in width and in 0.37 inches in depth.
There are also 2 sides to the device, one side for music and the other side for basic phone functions. The phone side features a small 1.76 X 65 pixel TFT display. This display is fairly small and it’s only large enough to see dialed numbers and sorting menu items such as the call history, contacts, text message and adding new contacts. There is also a 1.3 mega pixel camera, navigational pad and numeric keypad.
Pressing the flip button allows you to change between the 2 different sides of the phone. On the music side, there is a much larger, 176 X 220 pixel TFT display and a touched sensitive keypad. The only button that is not touched sensitive is the center play, pause button that also acts as the OK button.
Pressing the top button on the keypad will activate the main menu. There are 12 categories to choose from, you can use any of the touch sensitive keypads to move the direction in which you want to go. You can also slide, from side to side.
For display settings, choosing menu styles, there are only 3 different choices to choose from, Black, White icon and the List. We’re now changing to the White menu, and now changing to the List, and then back to Black. Those are the only 3 customizations that the menu option allows.
One of the main features of the Upstage is the MP3 music playback capability. There is a micro SD card slot on the side that allows you to install up to 2 gigabyte micro SD card. Pressing the center play, pause button will bring up the Sprint music store. From there you can either go to the store or pay to download music or simply access the music on your micro SD card.
Categorized by songs, artist and genres, select the song that you wish and then begin play back. You can raise and lower the volume. Display shows the current song information as well as the cover art.
Overall play back on the Upstage is good, considering it plays through the single speaker on the other side of the phone. Because of this, we recommend keeping the phone flip during music play back.
While the music is being played, can also just send it to the background and this will allow you to use other functions such as sending a text message or accessing web.
We’re overall quite pleased with the quality delivered by the Samsung Upstage phone. The phone itself is very good quality, much better than the LG Fusic which we reviewed last year. The reception, maintain signal bars except in certain French areas and the actual call quality through the ear piece was quite good.
It’s fairly durable plastic and should hold up over time. The music play back is also good, considering there’s only one speaker. However we consider using a Bluetooth stereo device, this will allow better music play back.
The only shortcoming of the Upstage is the 1.3 mega pixel camera, which offers less than adequate images. However since this is designed as a phone/music device, it is no wonder that the camera is not up to par with other phones.
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