Screen
The Propel Pro's reflective screen is uniquely square -- with easy-to-read,
medium-sized fonts.
|
|
Your Price:
Free!
with service
 |
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.
< Prev Next
>
This article is Copyright 2002-2009 Mobiledia Corp. and the review in
part or in whole may NOT be reproduced in any electronic or printed
medium without prior permission from Mobiledia. For information on
reproducing any part of this review (or any images) please
contact us. |
1.