Samsung Brightside (Verizon Wireless)

Upon first glance, the Samsung Brightside looks a lot like a midrange, keyboarded smartphone. At $99.99, it's priced like one too. But the Brightside is actually just an overly ambitious feature?phone. It pairs a nice slide-out keyboard with a responsive touch screen and decent call quality. That's the bright side. Unfortunately, the phone's display looks terrible from any angle other than straight on, the camera is poor, the video camera is worse, and multimedia support is spotty. While it may be a decent choice for some, you'll probably be happier with either a simpler phone or a smartphone.

Design and Call Quality
The Brightside measures 4.4 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.3 ounces. It's made entirely of black plastic, with a coarsely textured back panel. There's a volume rocker on the upper left side of the phone, as well as lock and camera buttons on the right side. Aside from those, there are four function keys located beneath the phone's screen. At first, the 3.1-inch, 320-by-240-pixel capacitive display looks decent. It's a good size, and feels nice and responsive. But turn the phone even slightly and the colors look different, or you can't see anything at all. Unless you're looking straight at it, the screen is practically useless. That's a big disappointment. The screen also doesn't shift orientation unless you open the keyboard. That means you need to slide the phone open pretty much anytime you want to type anything, unless you're willing to deal with typing on the on-screen number pad.

The phone slides open to reveal a spacious four-row QWERTY keyboard. The keys are slightly raised plastic bubbles, and I had no trouble using the Brightside to type out long messages. But nearly every time I flipped open the keyboard, I accidentally pressed the phone's camera button or activated the voicemail. You can probably get around that with practice.

The Samsung Brightside is a dual-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality is pretty good. Voices sound clear and very loud in the phone's earpiece, though they lack depth and richness. On the other end, calls made with the phone sound a little robotic but clear and feature average noise cancellation. The speakerphone sounds fine and is just loud enough for outdoor use. Calls also sounded fine through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and the Nuance-powered voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth. Battery life was average at 5 hours and 25 minutes of talk time.

Interface and Apps
The Brightside has a simple, clean interface, though it could benefit from some customizability. The home screen consists of 12 icons, with a launchpad at the bottom of the screen for your contacts, number dialer, recent calls, and voicemail. While I like this layout, it's limited. To listen to music or watch a video, for instance, you need to tap through to the Media Center, then choose Pictures and Video, then choose Videos. If you watch a lot of videos, it would've been nice to have the option of replacing an icon on the home screen with a shortcut to the videos menu.

Aside from the physical camera button on the right side of the phone, if you want to take a photo you first need to choose My Pictures, and then find the small Camera button buried in the right corner of the screen. The option to place a camera button on the home screen would've been much easier. Or maybe I'm just reviewing too many smartphones lately. That complaint aside, I found the Brightside relatively easy to navigate.

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