Samsung Glyde

Call Quality

Calls and speakerphone: We found calls on the Samsung Glyde to be loud. In fact, we often had to use the side keys to lower the volume often. Unfortunately, calls were not always clear with a caller’s voice breaking up in mid-sentence. Additionally, when using the speakerphone there’s no interrupting the conversation. You will need to wait for the other person to finish talking before speaking or you will spend a decent amount of time saying “What did you say? I missed that.”

Audio quality: Playback of songs is loud and not too tinny through the cell phone’s speakers. We don’t even need to lay the cell phone face down to improve audio quality. The Samsung Glyde has a standard cell phone headset jack (so you can’t you use your own stereo headphones with the cell phone). Since the Samsung Glyde supports Bluetooth stereo, you can purchase an optional Bluetooth stereo headset if you want to listen to music without wires.

Ease of Use

Menu/phone book: Like many Verizon Wireless cell phones, the Samsung Glyde has a standard menu system; if you're already accustomed to it, using this Samsung cell phone should be a breeze. That said, this is one of the more straightforward menu interfaces you’ll find on a cell phone. The 2.8-inch touch-screen a row of icons for apps across the bottom; you can press anywhere on that row to view applications in as a list. Of course, there are also three highlighted apps at the top of the screen for Menu, Contacts, and Dial Pad. You can also press the blinking square in the middle of the screen to access even more applications. Additionally, when you launch certain apps the screen will re-orient itself to landscape or portrait mode when needed. For example, launching the music application automatically realigns the screen into landscape mode.

We particularly like how easy it is to use the phone book, which can store 1,000 contacts, each with five phone numbers, two e-mail addresses, and a picture – sorry, there's no slot for addresses. If you want to find your phone number, you won’t find it in the contacts unless you manually enter it as a contact

Camera/video: The Samsung Glyde sports a 2-megapixel camera with a flash that can take photos and record short videos. Fortunately, the shutter on this camera is actually kind of fast and it has an auto focus feature so you get decent pictures. You can also snap self-portraits by using the mirror next to the lens to help you frame the shot. When using the camera the entire screen turns into a viewfinder (similar to digital cameras), so you have more room to frame your photo. There are also a plethora of camera features: color effects, white balance, brightness, ISO setting, metering, auto focus, self timer, and there’s also multishot. Once you’ve got some pictures stored on the Glyde, you can always turn them into a slideshow. As for image quality, we found colors bright, but whites were a bit gray. However, details were sharp. Video quality is acceptable, but not stellar. You can record up to 30 seconds of video at a time.

Music: The Samsung Glyde sports an MP3 player and comes with 45MB of internal memory, so you can store a few songs (at least an album worth of tunes) and pictures on the cell phone. If you want more storage, we recommend buying an optional MicroSD media card . However, finding the MicroSD card slot is no easy task. You need to remove the back cover to insert a MicroSD card. You can play MP3, WMA (Windows Media Audio), and AAC (Apple’s music format) files on the MP3 player. As noted, the audio quality is quite good through the cell phone speaker.

There’s not a ton you can do with the music on the Samsung Glyde: you can skip forward and back between songs, create playlists, and repeat and shuffle songs. Additionally, playing music through the cell phone did not drain battery life any faster. You can listen to music via Bluetooth stereo options.

Connectivity/Bluetooth: We were able to pair the Samsung Glyde cell phone with a Plantronics 925 Bluetooth headset. We found call quality to be acceptable, but not stellar.

Design

Look and feel: The Samsung Glyde looks like a miniature version of the LG Voyager. The Glyde is the same width, but not as long as the Voyager. This Samsung cell phone does take up some pocket real estate but it’s completely manageable. Additionally, despite its black casing the Samsung Glyde is still fairly easy to find floating around a purse. The cell phone does feel comfortable when you hold it up to your ear or cradle it between ear and shoulder for longer calls. We should note that the base of the cell phone sits far from the mouth when talking on the phone. Since it is a touch-screen cell phone you can expect to attract a lot of fingerprints and face grease.

About that touch-screen, it is not as bright as those found on other models. That said it’s viewable in direct sunlight. The biggest issue we had with the screen was that it was difficult to use. We found that we continually had to touch the screen multiple times to achieve any action. Plus, the amount of misdials we suffered when making calls using the dial pad were more than we typically encounter. One plus, the cell phone’s spine isn’t littered with extra buttons. The only buttons you’ll find are camera (placed perfectly for snapping shots when in picture mode), the volume keys, a 2.5mm headset jack, the lock key and the charger port.

Keypad: Slide open the screen to reveal a full, albeit slimmed down QWERTY keypad. The white backlit numbers are easy to discern. Instead of the typical 4-way navi-key found on most cell phones this one only sports directional arrows highlighted on other keys. You won’t always need to press the FN key to use them, so that’s a plus. About those keys, while they look well spaced, they are far from spacious. Read: This keypad is great for younger folks, if you have larger fingers, look elsewhere. Additionally, the top row of keys is far too close to the screen and therefore extremely difficult to use effectively. We did like that the symbols are laid out on the keys, so no scrolling through a menu to find a question mark – a nice plus.

Battery Life

In the battery life department, the Samsung Glyde didn’t disappoint. We found that the cell phone could last about four to five days before recharging when using the Samsung Glyde regularly to make calls, occasionally surf the wireless Web, and send/receive text messages. Users who barely use the cell phone to make/receive calls and send/receive messages can probably last about a week before needing to recharge, while heavier cell phone users will likely need to charge the Samsung every three days. We should also note the cell phone will charge when connected to a computer via the included USB cable.