Samsung Highlight is amongst the best and the most affordable offering from T-Mobile. The phone is based on Samsung’s patent TouchWiz platform which has widgets, a full web browser and an exceptionally well crafted design. There are only two colors the phone is available in. even though the other TouchWiz user interface phones focus more on the imaging and design or form factor, they don’t feel as easy on the hand as the Samsung Highlight does. The phone resembles both the Palm Pre and the HTC Touch, but it does not have the slide out keyboard and the pebble design, which became a rage in its time.
The phone boasts of a 3G HSDPA but it also has a non-3G or qual band GSM/EDGE variety, making it very versatile with non 3Gareas as well. With a 3 megapixel camera, fixed focus, and a micro SD card slot, placed under the battery, the Samsung Highlight is a decent offering when it comes to specs. Here are very few buttons, obvious for a touch screen phone. There is a call end and call send and a back button on the face of the phone, there’s camera button on one side and the volume control on another. There’s a dedicated screen lock button as well. However, the screen locks itself automatically, if not used for a prolonged period of time. The phone has been ergonomically designed, with a textured back, which makes it very grip worthy and very cool to look at or hold. The Samsung Highlight has an accelerometer which makes viewing HTML documents in the landscape view a breeze to switch to. The HTML documents are nice and crisp when seen from the picture and loading quality factor.
The usual functions like bookmarking a site, copying a link, copying images, navigating forward/home/back are very nice. Other settings like cache menu, history, cookies and Javascript are available in the web menu of the phone. The Smart-fit view is recommended for better viewing the HTML documents. The Samsung Highlight’s OZ Java-based email applications can handle AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, along with other HTML pages as well. The phone also has one of the best touch screen in the market. The 3”resistive touch screen is amazing and the response is very good. The option for QWERY is available for almost everything, even for HTML. The variety of widgets offered by the Samsung Highlight is versatile and there is always a new one you can add or remove. The widgets are quiet helpful to let you navigate on the device faster and better.
The phone has a decent call or voice quality. Outgoing and incoming calls are not very clear or loud but decent even though they use a 3G HSDPA platform, which is better voice quality wise from the GSM. The phonebook holds up to 2000 phone numbers, with the basic field’s which can be filled like name, address, e-mail, etc. however, the Samsung Highlight’s voice calling software is just stellar. The software recognizes the name and searches and dials it, all done through voice command. Over all, the Samsung Highlight is a decent phone, mush better than the other phones of similar specs in the market.
