Samsung Forever Smartphone Review

Jay takes a look at the Samsung Forever, a smartphone alternative for those on a budget.

Samsung Forever Smartphone Review Hi I am Jay Goldman you are watching MR. Mobile on butterscotch.com. Thanks for tuning in today for a look at this a Samsung Forever, Samsung’s new quote, unquote Smartphone also known as the SGHA886 which is a little less catchy than Forever. It is a pretty good low-end Smartphone but there are some pretty common design flaws that we have seen in a bunch of other phones. And you served hope that by this point the handset manufacturers had figured out that this weren’t great design decisions. And we will take a look at them and you can draw your own conclusions, this is a quad band GSM phone. So to work in pretty much any GSM network out there, it is also a dual band 3G so you got 3.6 megabits per second of high quality HSDPA. Which means lots of fast data coming down here, the phone can't make quite as much using it as you would hope from a smart phone. In fact it is certainly no iPhone or Blackberry but lots of high-speed data coming down all the same. Three inch touch screen on the front here, 240x400 pixels so not super high resolution but not bad. It is not multi touch screen, so single touch only like you are seeing with a lot of the lower end smart phone. Still entirely useful as a touch screen, there is another cool pinch and zoom that you have seen on the iPhone and things like that. Back end side here has a two mega pixel camera on it, it does video but there is no flash. So you are shooting in sort of nice light conditions, 72 megabytes of on board memory. Stores a lot of photographs and music and if you wan to store more there is a microSD card slot on the back. That will hold up to a 32 Meg card, now that brings us of course to our first design flaw. In order to install a memory card, you have to take the back off which is not all that un common but unfortunately. You have to take the battery off as well, the card slot is located underneath the Sim Card here and you would slide in by taking off the battery and popping it in. And that is a design flaw that we have seen on a bunch of phones and it is something that people continuously complain about. Because of course if you got different memory cards with different stuff on them you have to shut the phone down and take the battery off everytime. So not perhaps the best design decision, phone manufacturers take note - we don’t like it. It does have accelerometer which allows us to do screen rotation like we’ve seen on the iPhone and the bunch of other platforms as well. So you can turn it this way and in fact turning it this way, gives you a full size query keyboard so you can type out your text messages and that kind of thing. Without having to do the T9 predictive input that you have to do otherwise when the phone is this mode. So if you are looking for an entry level smart phone that has a normal query keyboard on it, this is a pretty good choice. It is a soft keyboard though not hard keyboard. It has AGPS or assisted GPS which is not actually scan in GPS this is carrier assisted GPS. It will locate you it is not quite as accurate and it won’t work without a cell connection but it does have sort of rudimentary GPS functionality. It runs touch wiz which is Samsung’s operating system for smart phones. And it is heavily build around widgets instead of apps. So there is a lot of sort of widgets on here that allow you to do things like a World Clock or Messaging in that kind of thing. You can have a bunch of them running at the same time, there is a little bit on the side here that will let you switch between the things that are running. But they are sort of widgets so you are not getting full scale applications and there is nothing like an App store that we have seen on the Android, Blackberry or iPhone platforms. So you are pretty much limited to what comes on the phone, it got a browser on here that does web browsing. They say it is full image browsing, it is not really what you have come to expect from smart phone platforms that decent web browsers. It is sort of renders HTML it doesn’t handle Java Script and things like that. So you can do basic web browsing and certainly web sites that are built for mobile phones will work quite well on. The other design flaw that I wanted to mention was actually the accessory port which is located on the side over here underneath the little flap. And if you are looking at it there and thinking it doesn’t look like USB. That is because it is not USB. It is n fact a proprietary type of plug that Samsung’s got here. That is what the plug actually looks like when you are plugging that end in, so what does that mean for you? It means you can't headphones unless they have this little plug on the end. You also can't use a standard USB cable when you are plugging it in to the phone. Because it has to have the little proprietary end on so that means you are always going to have to carry the cables that came with the phone. And any accessories that you plug in are going to have to come from Samsung. This is a really bad design decision, we have seen it with a bunch of platforms for a long time the HDC phones did that. They have just come around to putting on standard USB and headphone jacks. And that would probably be my biggest draw back with this platform. You really limited in the accessories that you can buy the plug in. Now it does it have bluetooth, you can use bluetooth headsets so if you are sort of worried about the headphone. Stereo bluetooth headsets might be a way to go. Conclusion, not a bad entry level phone, it is actually pretty cheap, you can get it for about $80.00 on contract about $250 without. Depending who you carrier is, don’t expect a smart phone though it is an entry level phone. If you are looking for something that you primarily use a phone, like to be able to take some photos, maybe a little bit of video with it. And you really just want query keyboard so that when you are typing out text messages but not Email. You can do that without having to use the T9, this is probably a pretty good one to take to look at. Again the Samsung Forever and find from most major carrier. I am Jay Goldman this has been Mr. Mobile on butterscotch.com, thanks for watching we will catch you next time.