Samsung Rogue

Call Quality

Calls and speakerphone: We found calls clear on the Samsung Rogue. We occasionally used the side volume keys to adjust the sound both up and down. Using the speakerphone didn’t degrade call quality, and we had no problem hearing callers. Additionally, you don’t have to be too close to the cell phone when using the speakerphone to be heard clearly by callers.

Audio quality: Playback of songs is loud through the cell phone’s speakers and slightly tinny. The Samsung Rogue has a 3.5mm headset jack (you can use your own stereo headphones with the cell phone, however, you won’t be able to take calls while listening to music over a non-cell phone enabled headset). The cell phone also supports Bluetooth stereo; you can purchase an optional Bluetooth stereo headset if you want to listen to music and take calls without wires.

Ease of Use

Menu/phone book: Unlike many Verizon Wireless cell phones, the Samsung Rogue has a noticeably different interface. Instead, it sports Samsung’s widget interface. In a straight line going down the edge of the left hand side of the screen are a series of icons. You can, of course, swipe your finger up and down the line to scroll through the icons. The icons correspond to an application on the Samsung cell phone such as Twitter, YouTube, Birthday Reminders, and FaceBook. You can tap on an icons to launch the corresponding application. If you hold and drag that icon onto the remaining screen area you’ll get a mini version of the app on the screen, which you can then position anywhere on the display. For example, if you select games, the game icon will appear on the screen and provide one-touch access to the included games (Tetris, Need for Speed and more). The Samsung Rogue has an accelerometer and you can see it in action by using the dice application and shaking the cell phone to see what you roll. We particularly like the button that sits between the talk and end buttons: It’s a Clear button. Whenever you are somewhere in an application you don’t want to be, simply press the Clear button and it will either back you out one screen at a time or ask if you’d like to ‘Exit an Application’. We found it a helpful tool for navigating through the cell phone’s menus.

The Samsung Rogue isn’t just about personalization. You can also use it to view (not edit) Microsoft Office docs and PDF files. We also particularly like how easy it is to use the phone book, which can store 1,000 contacts each with four phone numbers, web site, multiple e-mail addresses, IM handle, a street address, a slot for birthday information, and a picture.

Camera/video: The Samsung Rogue sports a 3-megapixel camera that can take photos and record short videos. The camera phone also has a flash and a tiny mirror for framing self-portraits. We’re happy to report this camera phone has a pretty fast shutter, so you likely won’t miss a lot of shots once you’re in the camera application. When snapping a photo the entire screen turns into a viewfinder (similar to digital cameras), so there’s more room to frame your photo. There are also a ton of features: shooting mode (single, multi shot, panorama, mosaic, or frame where you pick from pre-defined frames that will automatically overlay on top of the picture), a timer, auto focus, ISO settings, white balance, metering, and effects (black and white, antique, aqua, and negative).

Once you take a picture there are quite a few things you can do with it including editing the picture, use a feature called dynamic canvas (you can draw on top of existing pictures and save as a new picture), create a slide show, send the image via Bluetooth As for image quality, as long as the surround lighting was decent we found colors to be vivid and the images sharp on the cell phone’s screen. You can also record videos on the cell phone. Playback of videos on the Samsung Rogue is decent.

Music: The Samsung Rogue sports a MP3 player and comes with a approximately 256MB of usable internal memory, so you can store a few songs and pictures on the cell phone. The Samsung Rogue charger has a removable USB cable for synching music with a computer, which makes getting music on the cell phone pretty easy, especially if you’re using the Verizon Rhapsody service. If you want more storage, we recommend buying an optional MicroSD media card.

You can play MP3, WMA (Windows Media Audio) and unprotected AAC (Apple’s music format) files. As noted, the audio quality is pretty good through the cell phone speaker. However, the Samsung Rogue has only the basics for managing music such as Shuffle, Repeat, and Playlists (you can create these on the fly). It also shows album art when available. Playing music through the cell phone did not drain battery life any faster. Even though you still can’t transfer music via Bluetooth, you can listen to music via Bluetooth stereo options.

Connectivity/Bluetooth: We were able to pair the Samsung cell phone with a Plantronics 925 Bluetooth headset. We found call quality to be just as clear with a headset, and users didn’t know we were using a cell phone, let alone a headset.

Design

Look and feel: There’s no denying the Samsung Rogue has a bright, crisp display and it’s undoubtedly the first thing you’ll notice about this cell phone. Additionally, the screen is an AMOLED touchscreen display that is both viewable in direct sunlight and helps conserve battery life. We should note that the screen is pretty receptive to the touch and we found we did not have to adjust that in the settings. The face of the cell phone isn’t littered with a ton of buttons either; in fact, there are only three: send, end, and clear key that backs you out of applications. However, the sides of the cell phone have their fair share of buttons including a lock key, speakerphone activation key, voice activation key, camera/video key on one side and volume keys and a slot for the microSD card on the other side. Additionally, there’s a 3.5mm headset jack, which we are happy to see instead of the typical Samsung proprietary jack. Unfortunately, it seems a bit awkwardly placed.

That’s not all there is to this cell phone. Slide the display to the right to reveal a full 4 row QWERTY keypad. When the keypad is exposed the cell phone automatically reorients itself to landscape mode. A cell phone with this many design features is bound to be a little large. In fact, it’s only slightly narrower than a BlackBerry Tour. Although it is a bit big, it does feels comfortable when you hold it up to your ear or cradle it between ear and shoulder for longer calls. Since the screen comes so close to your face, it attracts a fair amount of face grease, and we found ourselves wiping it off often.

Keypad: We’re just going to come right out and say it – we really like the cell phone’s touch screen. We like the huge numeric keypad and the additional phone calling features that appear when you press the phone icon surrounding the keypad. In particular, we appreciate the letters on the numeric keys mirror a standard keypad – meaning we never had trouble trying to figure out if we were selecting the right keys when we dialed a number or short code that included letters. We should note that text on this cell phone is fairly large, you won’t have to squint to see what’s on the Samsung Rogue’s display. While we’re on the subject of keypads, we found the QWERTY keyboard extremely usable and spacious. The white-backlit keys are large and well spaced apart. Another plus is the inclusion of dedicated keys for text messaging and adding emoticons.

Battery Life

In the battery life department, the Samsung Rogue is acceptable. We found that the cell phone could last about three days before recharging when using the Samsung Rogue regularly to make calls, occasionally surf the wireless Web, and send/receive text messages. Users who barely use the cell phone to make/receive calls and send/receive messages can probably last about four days before needing to recharge, while heavier cell phone users will likely need to charge the Samsung Rogue every other day. The biggest drain on battery life comes when you leave the location or GPS feature activated. If you plan on using this feature a lot, get a car charger. One bonus is that the cell phone will charge when connected to a computer via the included USB synching cable.