Gadgetory

hi I'm Kim Sherman senior managing editor at CENTCOM I'm here to pick today you take a first look at the Samsung array this is a new phone for Sprint it's also out for boost for Sprint that that prices will require to your contracts well boost his contract free now you're probably look at this phone you're saying gosh this thing looks really old it looks like I just dug it out of a drawer for maybe 2005 and yeah it does look a little old it's a very tried-and-true design it's very familiar but it's a slider phone it's a feature device made for texting so really there's not much you can do to really mix that up that design up so I think it's perfectly straightforward easy to use maybe a little boring but certainly it's very user friendly from the front it's a candy bar design the display takes almost about 2/3 of the front space it is a pretty low resolution is colorful it's bright but you can see distinct lines between the different color shades so don't expect a lot of fancy graphics but you really wouldn't anyway because this phone doesn't have a lot of apps or any games you should not use it for those things down below is the navigation controls these are well designed there's a square toggle with a central ok button they are silver they're little reflective so they stand out from the black keypad below they're also 2 soft keys there's a dedicated speakerphone key a back key and the talking and power buttons and down below is the alpha numeric keypad that's caught in black of course I found this to be a little squash together also doesn't like that they were the keypad buttons were perfectly flat with the surface of the phone the other controls are raised which is nice so if you can use them by feel and there's some definition here on the top there's a 3.5 millimeter headset jack and on the bottom there's the microUSB port which is also used for the charger on the left there's a volume rocker it's easy to find when you're on a call over here you have the micro SD card slot that fits cards up to 32 gig and the camera shutter now if you want to open the phone just slide it up like this and you can see that the screen rotates 90 degrees automatically there's no need to change it or do anything like that phone doesn't have an accelerometer so if you tip it the screen isn't gonna change but it's only when you open and close the phone down below are two soft keys those are you only used when the phone is open and they correspond to the commands right above I do like the keyboard is pretty roomy it's pretty spacious the keys are slightly slightly raised above the surface of the phone which is nice there are four rows of keys so that means a letter share space with numbers and punctuation and symbols it's not a big deal personally I'd like five rows of keys but if you're gonna go for a compact phone you sort of need to live with four there Christy can switch back and forth between the different functions of the key using either the shift or the function key nice spacebar in the middle it's pretty wide it's quite where it should be and there's a dedicated comm key which is nice there are arrow buttons over here and there's a dedicated atcase you don't have to go in and use the shift when you're typing out emails now this phone really is built for communication the menu system is pretty simple it's just it's the icons in the front then is you get internal menus that's all list based does have a two megapixel camera you can see here on the back photo quality isn't very good video quality isn't good at all so it's really not worth taking photos unless you just need something on the fly and then again don't count on anything spectacular there is a bare-bones music player there's Bluetooth is a web browser so if you're used to using a smartphone you're not going to get those full HTML pages or even the mobile pages these are going to be web pages which means that they are even some more stripped down so just lines of text maybe the occasional photo no graphics it's a little clunky to use because you're moving the cursor around with this with this navigation keys there's no touchscreen so I really don't think web browsing is worth it on the phone it's also a 3G video so but even on those simple pages they do take a few seconds to download good thing though is texting is very easy using that keyboard call quality is good it is a phone that excels at communication just what a phone should do just don't count on it for really anything else if you want to keep in touch the Samsung array is not a bad guy I'm Ken Sherman and this is the Samsung array it's available for Sprint and this mobile