Screen

The Propel Pro's reflective screen is uniquely square -- with easy-to-read, medium-sized fonts.

While some handsets waste the advantages of having a large screen by featuring drab and uncomplicated menus, the Pro has a colorful background for its photo menu and a black and gray backdrop and vibrant icons for its main menu.

The black background is especially helpful in sunny days by keeping the phone's reflective face from becoming shiny and hard to read.

The screen has a few disadvantages -- it smudges easily, turns off quickly when not in use to conserve battery power and has some dull and simplistic menus.

The display also has just 65K-colors and a resolution of 320 x 320 px -- not very strong, especially compared to most other smartphones.

The LCD can double as a mirror, but it's also a fingerprint magnet. Pictures and videos show up with decent clarity, but that's more due to the quality of the images than the color and pixel capacity of the screen.

Although the easy-to-navigate home menu is attractive, many other menus are boring, and while the font is readable for most, it could stand to be larger. As with any phone, reading the text of a complicated Web page shrunk to fit the screen can be difficult.

Audio

Static, crackling and straining to hear conversations or songs are rare with the handset. Volume at its highest level is usually loud enough to be heard over a crowd when taking a call. The phone's speakers also pump out songs at a decent volume with crisp sound quality.

Although the Pro won't double as a boom box, it's certainly loud enough for a user to listen to songs while in the same room as the handset. Users can also use a Bluetooth headset to listen to music, but it does not come equipped with an outlet for ear buds.

The Pro comes with 30 built-in ringtones. For a phone that's designed for professionals, it's surprising how many of the tones are more appropriate for the for the dance club than the boardroom.

Users can download more ringtones from the AT&T Mall application and get songs through AT&T Music or by syncing a computer song library with the Pro via a USB cable on Active Sync. Audio also comes in handy when using voice and video recording features, which pick up every detail of sound excellently.

The Propel Pro has a great volume range and sounds great. But don't count on it to become the next personal music player -- only headset owners can listen to songs privately without booming music over its speakers.

Messaging

The smartphone's email and instant message services are more prevalent on the its text messaging. While personal and work email accounts and instant messengers (choose from AOL, Windows Live or Yahoo!) are readily available in the home menu, users have to press the messaging key on the keypad or navigate to a second menu.

Multimedia messages can be sent after a photo or video is taken. The handset supports Video Share, which allows users to stream a video as they're filming it, but it can only be sent to other phones with Video Share service as part of their phone plan.

Pictures and videos show up well, although streaming video looks and performs much better when streamed from CV, AT&T's online video service, or sent in WMV format.

Traditional text messaging works fine but it's also not prominent. It's so hidden and blase that it's almost as if Samsung wanted to steer users away from texting and toward Internet-based messaging services. Multimedia messaging works well too -- streaming video comes in with the best quality.

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