Samsung SGH-T809

RAZR, meet the blade: Samsung's T809. T-Mobile's slickest and most feature-packed phone to date looks like something you'd expect Darth Vader to use (especially if he had ears).

Long and flat, the T809 distinctly resembles Motorola's Black RAZR. In fact, its size when closed (3.8 by 2.0 by 0.6 inches) is almost exactly the same as the RAZR's. The T809 is slightly lighter (3 ounces versus 3.4) and plastic rather than metal, which carries through to the flat plastic keypad. (The RAZR's is inscribed metal.)

When closed, the T809's sliding front cover is dominated by a huge, bright, and gorgeous 262,000-color 320- by 240-pixel screen. Below it, a tight cursor pad surrounds a very small action button—so small that we actually had to press the button with a fingernail while gaming. Slide the phone's screen up and you reveal the flat, black keypad. The tightly spaced, non-domed keys will also cause some trouble for larger fingers.

A power/headphone jack and TransFlash memory-card doors adorned the sides of our prototype unit and also tended to swing free, creating an unfortunate hanging-chad effect. Asked why this happens, the folks at Samsung said everything was loose because the review phone had passed through the hands of many engineers and test users.

None of these build issues are necessarily deal-killers: Units for sale may hot have the chad problem, and as for the buttons, think Italian sports car—you may have to sacrifice a little ease of use or comfort to gain fashion and power.

And the T809 boasts lots of power—for starters, a quad-band, GSM phone with Class 10 EDGE data capability that should provide from 100 to 160 Kbps downloads. We got 7 hours 35 minutes of continuous talk time on one battery charge, which is good but not exceptional. Reception was good and sound was very sharp through the earpiece and a Bluetooth headset, though the volume doesn't go very high. The speakerphone is also sharp, but not loud.

Ringtones and MP3s, on the other hand, are very loud through the stereo speakers. The built-in MP3 player is impressive—it supports playlists, comes with an equalizer, and plays high bit-rate, variable bit-rate, and AAC-formatted music off a TransFlash card (a 32MB card is included). Alas, as is the case with most phones, you'll have to use the included wired stereo headset to listen through headphones, because the T809 has an oddball headset jack and doesn't stream music over Bluetooth.

The Bluetooth 2.0 implementation worked well, though the available profiles are just basic stuff, like setups for file transfer, wireless mono headsets, and dial-up networking. Sadly, there's no voice dialing, making headsets less useful than they could be. If your PC lacks Bluetooth for file transfer, you'll appreciate the USB mass-storage drivers on the T809. When used with the included USB cable, they allow the phone's memory card to be seen by the PC as another drive.

The T809's megapixel camera is pretty good for one in a phone. It did have some color noise, but not enough to really worry us. The camcorder mode is excellent, recording 352- by 288-pixel video with sharp sound at a clean 13 frames per second. It's some of the best we've seen. And you can store plenty of images in the 65MB of available internal memory.

Our model also came with three games and an instant-messaging client. Java performance for gaming was decent, but not excellent. MMS and SMS worked well, though there's no e-mail client.

At $299, the Samsung T809 is a formidable competitor to the Motorola RAZR. It looks almost as good and packs in more features.

To view a side-by-side feature table of the best T-Mobile cell phones, including the T809, click here.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 7 hours 35 minutes
Jbenchmark 1.1.1: 1606
Jbenchmark 2.1.1: 122