In-Depth Samsung Rogue Review - A Stylish Feature-Rich Smartphone with New AMOLED Screen
Introduction
Samsung has been launching many smartphones with touchscreens, and full keyboards and one of the newest in the line is the Samsung Rogue SCH – U960. This model offers the dazzling new AMOLED touchscreen display and possesses a number of luxury features, at a cost of $130.
Design (5 out of 5)
The Samsung Rogue U960 is a 4-inch tall and 2-inch wide high-end mobile phone that has a tablet style front and a slide out full QWERTY keyboard underneath. Shortcut keys are placed at the right side and include keys for voice commands, speaker phone, camera, and screen lock. The 3.5 mm audio jack and a memory card slot are also located at the right side, while the left side houses a volume rocker and a charger jack. The back of the phone has a textured cover that provides extra grip.
The phone has a 3.1-inch display with a resolution of 800 by 400 pixels, which makes the phone’s display look sharp. The display supports color depth of 18 bits, with 256 thousand colors, and the colors appear bright, vibrant, and sharp. The font style, size, clock and backlights can be adjusted on the main screen and the transition effects between menus can also be adjusted.
The most prominent feature of this mobile is its AMOLED screen which provides a range of colors to the display. Although it’s a large phone the size-to-weight ratio is perfect and the overall feel of the phone is incredibly solid.
User Interface (5 out of 5)
The QWERTY keyboard opens when the phone is slid to the right. There are four ro
ws of keys that are spacious. Keys are user friendly and the numpad is separate. There is also an accelerometer that rotates the screen from portrait to landscape, when the phone is opened. The Samsung Rogue uses the Touch Wiz interface that offers a widgets toolbar, with lots of widgets. The widgets like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and My Space are the most useful ones.
Features (5 out of 5)
The storage capacity of the phonebook is 1,000 contacts, each of which can have five numbers, two email addresses, residential address, instant messaging name, notes, and birth date. Contact groups can be created and ringtones and photos can also be assigned to each contact. The organizer includes basic applications like world clock, alarm clock, calendar, stop watch, calculator, notepad, timer, voice recorder, with an additional cool feature called Sketch Pad that allows you to sketch doodles and share with your contacts.
Continue to the next page for more on the Samsung Rogue review.
Samsung Rogue Features (5 out of 5)
The phone supports plenty of messaging and multimedia features. SMS and MMS appear in a threaded style in the inbox, while the emails can have three types (web email, corporate email and mobile email). There is also instant messaging support, so you can use Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger or AIM. Videos and songs can be downloaded and viewed by using the VCast services. Songs can be filtered according to albums, composer, genre, etc. in the music player provided, and play lists can also be formed. The video player of the Samsung Rogue can play videos in MP4, 3GP, WMV and 3G2 formats. The supported image and audio file formats include JPEG, PNG, BMP, PMD , GIF, SWF , SVG-T, and MP3, QCELP, AAC/AAC+/eAAC+, M4A, CMX 4.5, WMA, EVRC,and I-Melody
The Samsung Rogue has an HTML browser, and the content can easily be zoomed for a better view. There is a three megapixel camera with flash and auto focus. The images can be captured at a maximum resolution of 2048×1536 pixels. The picture quality is sharp with vibrant details. The camera can also record videos at 320×240 or 640×480 pixels in save mode, and 176×1400 pixels for MMS. The phone has an internal memory of 512 MB and the memory card slot can hold an expandable microSD card up to 16GB. GSM and Bluetooth support are also present in the Samsung Rogue.
Performance (5 out of 5)
The phone performs well and only in concrete offices and school buildings do signals get lost. You can set your own homepages with the Verizon browser and it roughly takes a few seconds to open the inbox. Tons of details can be captured by the 3 megapixel camera and the Samsung rated standard time for the battery life is 282 minutes to 456 minutes, depending on phone usage.
The Verdict (5 out of 5)
Overall, the Samsung Rogue is an attractive, compelling type of a phone. It has the attractions of a perfect keyboard and an awesome music player with great play list options. The only problem lies with the battery life which needs to be extended, but all in all it is a very nice entry level phone to use for $130.
You may also be interested in the best Samsung Rogue apps.
