Googles Androids: Samsung Behold II Phone Reviews
The Behold II tries to set itself apart from the crowd with a AMOLED display, Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, and enhanced multimedia capabilities. The touch screen is certainly a stunner, multimedia 
performance is tops, and general performance is solid. However, the TouchWiz interface doesn’t really add much to the user experience and in fact, at times, hinders it. the smartphone runs Android 1.5
Design
The Samsung Behold II isn’t much of a sight to behold and it barely resembles the original Samsung Behold. It’s not that it’s ugly, rather just a bit plain. Like a number of the other Android devices out there, including the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G and HTC Droid Eris, the Behold II features a candy bar design with smooth, rounded edges.
the smartphone is compact at 4.57 inches tall by 2.2 inches wide by 0.46 inch thick and 4.2 ounces.
The Behold II’s one-handed navigation is also easy with the aforementioned navigation controls, which include Talk and End keys, a Home shortcut, a Menu key, a back button, a quick-launch button for the multimedia cube menu, and a directional keypad with a center select button. There’s also a volume rocker on the left side, and a lock key and a dedicated camera activation/capture button are located on the right.
The Behold II is no different, as it comes equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack and Micro-USB port on top of the device. Turning the phone over, you’ll find that a world map adorns the back cover along with the camera and flash, while the microSD slot hides behind the battery door.
Display
Though the design isn’t all that exciting, the Behold II does have one standout feature, which is the 3.2-inch AMOLED capacitive touch screen. The advantages of an AMOLED screen over standard LCDs are many:
* They’re sharper, brighter, and consume less power. In addition, they allow for wider viewing angles. Compared to the Droid Eris,
* The Behold II’s screen is brighter and has a higher contrast.
* Videos and photos, in particular, look amazing on the screen.
The Behold II offers a virtual keyboard–which works in both a portrait and landscape–but Samsung has reskinned it to match its interface.
The display also has a built-in accelerometer and a proximity sensor, which turns off the display when you’re on a phone call to prevent any accidental mispresses.
User interface
Like HTC has done with its HTC Sense user experience, Samsung is adding the TouchWiz software to a number of its cell phones and smartphones as a form of branding as well as a way to provide a uniform experience across its devices.
Like the Samsung Omnia, the Behold II features an expandable tray on the left side that includes access to all of your apps. From this tray, you can drag any of your favorites to the home screen to create a shortcut on one of three home panes. To remove them, simply hold down an icon and drag it back to the tray.
Samsung also added a revamped notification window and a 3D cube navigation menu to the user interface. The former is probably the most useful as it not only provides you alerts to new messages, appointments, missed calls, and so forth, but it also provides one-touch access to your wireless connections, so you don’t have to dig through various menus.
When you press the dedicated cube key below the screen, a 3D cube will appear; you can spin it around and then tap it to launch various multimedia apps, including the Amazon MP3 Store, the dedicated YouTube app, photos, videos, music, and the Web browser. You can even shake the phone to move the cube. While cool at first and certainly an attention grabber, the feature is more gimmicky than useful.
Accessories
T-Mobile packages the Samsung Behold II with a healthy number of accessories, including an AC adapter, a USB cable, a 2GB microSD card, a carrying case, a wired stereo headset, and reference material.
Features
Below the TouchWiz skin and the 3D cube interface, the Samsung Behold II is running Android 1.5, so you’re not getting the newer features of Android 2.0, or even Android 1.6. As is, you still get the core functions of Android, including access to various Google services, the Amazon MP3 Store, Exchange ActiveSync support, and more. Preloaded apps include a world clock, a calculator, a smart converter, a memo pad, a task list, and the Android Market provides plenty more options.
Phone and contacts
The Behold II’s voice features include quad-band world roaming, a speakerphone, three-way calling, speed dial, voice dialing, and visual voice mail.
The Behold II also offers integrated Bluetooth with stereo, a hands-free kit, object push, and basic printing profiles.
Messaging
The Behold II offers plenty of messaging options. As a Google Android phone, Gmail is obviously the preferred e-mail client and has its own dedicated in-box. However, you also get Exchange ActiveSync support for your Outlook mail, calendar, and contacts. You also can access POP3 and IMAP accounts.
In addition to e-mail, the Behold II comes preloaded with IM clients for Google Talk, AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo Messenger. There’s also text and multimedia messaging with threaded chat view.
Web browsing
Like the other Android smartphones, the Behold II features a full HTML Web browser. By default, it opens up to T-Mobile’s Web2go portal, but you can always change the home page. The browser supports multiple windows, bookmarking.
The Behold II offers both 3G and integrated Wi-Fi. T-Mobile’s 3G network now reaches 240 cities nationwide and the carrier hopes to expand its reach from 170 million customers to 200 million customers by the end of the year.
GPS
GPS/A-GPS is available to help you navigate through unfamiliar territory. The smartphone comes preloaded with Google Maps, which offers maps with satellite view, real-time positioning and text-based directions, business searches, traffic data, and Google Latitude support. Google Maps Navigation Beta is a feature of Android 2.0
Multimedia
Samsung includes its own media player, which has a Cover Flow-like feature for advancing and rewinding tracks. It also has a built-in equalizer and there are options for repeat, shuffle, creating playlists on the fly, finding similar tracks through the Amazon MP3 Store, conducting album searches, and more.
The richness of the audio quality was really impressive, even through the phone’s speakers. Of course, with the AMOLED display, videos looked amazing.
The Behold II is equipped with a 5-megapixel camera with a flash, 8x zoom, autofocus, and video-recording capabilities. There a number of editing options, including white balance, effects, ISO, and various scene modes. Samsung also throws in a handy Imaging Tool widget that provides access to photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Kodak Gallery. The Behold II offers 200MB of internal memory and up to 16GB expandable memory.
Performance
The Behold II is equipped with a 528MHz Qualcomm ARM 11 processor, and despite the addition of the TouchWiz software, it didn’t have too much of an effect on general performance. There was some slight sluggishness to the smartphone–a pause here and there when opening applications–but no worse than some of the other Android devices on the market.
The Samsung Behold II has a 1,000mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 6 hours and up to 16 days of standby time. According to FCC radiation tests, the Behold II has a digital SAR rating of 0.67 watt per kilogram.
The Samsung Behold II will be available starting November 18.
source: cnet.com
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Our team at googlesandroids.com rated this product as:
The Good :Samsung has switched things up a bit with the Behold II, instead of a respectable feature phone, you not only get Android 1.5, but a 3.5mm headphone jack and WiFi also.
The Bad : Some major hiccups when playing MP3s (album art and ID3 tags often weren’t understood by the device) and unlike other smart phones, DivX is not supported.
Googles Androids rating is :
when it comes to android phone, i like the Motorola brand. i like its features and everything. but generally speaking, android phones are excellent!
The Behold II is so great especially its virtual keypad.Its so cool.
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