Samsung Trender SPH-M380 (Sprint)

It's getting tougher to justify buying feature phones these days, but the $29.99 Samsung Trender SPH-M380 is a solid effort. It's a good budget cell phone for anyone who texts frequently, but also wants something that's not too large and doesn't cost a bundle per month. Go with one of Sprint's unlimited feature phone plans, and you can do quite well with the Trender for the next two years.

Design, Call Quality, and Apps
The attractive Samsung Trender measures 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs four ounces. It feels like a quality device, even though it's made entirely of plastic. The lightweight design and electric blue sides and back panel looked sharp on my review unit; you can also get one in purple. The smooth, flush, 2.8-inch, 240-by-320-pixel touch screen features vibrant color. Touch response is just okay for a plastic resistive LCD, and nowhere near as accurate as today's capacitive screens. It took two or three tries before many of my finger swipes and button presses registered. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard, on the other hand, is a gem. It features four rows of well-spaced, if flat, keys. I found the phone's small size and horizontal slider form factor made for a keyboard that's just the right width for fast two-finger typing.

The Samsung Trender is a dual-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality was solid in both directions, with a clear tone in the earpiece, and a natural sound through the microphone to callers on the other end. Reception was iffy; the phone dropped two calls during a battery test, but my actual conversations were fine, even though I live in a somewhat marginal Sprint coverage area. Calls sounded fine through an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars), and voice dialing worked well over Bluetooth without training. The speakerphone was surprisingly loud and powerful. Battery life was disappointing at just 3 hours and 53 minutes of talk time.

Samsung combines the home screen and main menu into four tabs—Favs, Main, Fun, and Web—each with up to nine icons arranged in a grid pattern. Pressing the End button brings you to a fifth customizable screen with a dialer and address book, while pressing the Home button returns you to the first four tabs. (It seems backwards, but I got used to it.) You'll never miss a text with this phone, thanks to the full screen alert and default double ringtone. Ringtones are suitably loud, and text messages are threaded. The Access NetFront 3.5.1 browser delivers decent WAP pages, but that's about it. You get dedicated Facebook and Twitter icons, though they just point to the mobile WAP pages. There's no GPS.

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The Samsung B3410EUBLK GSM Quad-Band Unlocked Cell Phone with 2MP camera, Touch Screen, QWERTY Keyboard, MP3 Player, and Bluetooth–International Version with No Warranty (Black) is yet one more first-rate product now offered for an astonishingly low price, making this device remarkable value for money & a great deal not to be passed over!

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