Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 – Perfect… Spot On

Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Responsive interface, suave looks, decent battery life, simple and brilliant interface, beautiful AMOLED screen.

Thumbs down: Battery heats up a bit while charging, video streaming quality is not great.

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Sammy has tried its hand out with a range of Phones with keyboards. Though the Glyde was a bit faulty, the Impression pretty much lived upto its name. And this latest one from Sammy is hardly any disappointment.

Razzle-dazzle: What attracted me towards the phone was its unusual kind of a name. I mean Rogue… now that definitely is a headturning name in itself. Anyways moving ahead this one measures a decent 4.29 inches long by 2.17 inches wide by 0.65 inch thick and can slip easily into the pocket. Also it is pretty much lightweight at 4.94 ounces. It’s quite a Ki-ller one when it comes to the looks department with its elegant black and silver case. Also the battery cover has a textured finish which gives it a nice grip when held in the hand.

Coming to the display, this one by far is the winner with an AMOLED display which supports 262000 colours and with a resolution of 480×800 pixel. As a result of which the images are highly animated, the text is clear and the display is vibrant and a look at it and surely it would bring some smile too your face even on a drowsy and dull day. This one uses the patent TouchWiz interface and the touchscreen is also highly responsive and highly instinctive.

Apart from the virtual keypad and the numberpad this one has a Send, End/power and clear keys below the display. The left spine houses the volume rocker and the charger jack. On the right spine there’s the camera key, voice command key, speakerphone key and the screen lock key.

Sliding the phone reveals a QWERTY keyboard with spaciously placed keys. The keys are a bit risen above the surface which makes them more easy to use. Also its got an accelerometer which changes its orientation from the landscape mode to the portrait mode. What is worth noticing here is that even with the keyboard out you can change the orientation of the screen.

Inside Dope: This one has a 1000 phonebook entry, world clock, calculator, stop watch, vibrate mode, sketchpad, timer, notepad, alarm clock and a calculator. This one could very aptly be called a messaging phone and it offers a nice variety of messaging features like e-mail options – mobile e-mail, corporate email, and mobile Web e-mail along with visual voice mail, mobile IM with AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo messenger support.

Also this one comes loaded with the EV-DO Rev. A it supports the V Cast broadband services, like V Cast Video, and the V Cast Audio. One can easily download songs and listen to them when on the move. I was pretty much impressed with music player with an easy to use interface and nice categorizations of the tracks according to the artists, albms, genres etc. However I would recommend using headphones than blasting the music on the speakers because the speakers are not that great. Downloading web pages using the EV-DO Rev was also an easy task and it hardly ttook me 30 secs to download an 1.6 MB song.

This one is equipped with a 3.0 megapixel camera  with really good photo quality. The photos were pretty much vibrant, sharp and clear. Also this one is flash enabled and allows picture taking in about 8 resolutions.  The video recorder is a bit disappointing though and does not do much  to add to the brilliant performance of the other features of the Rogue. The videos run pretty much alright, but then again the videos are kind of choppy and grainy.

Coming to the call quality, this one offers excellent voice quality with hardly any static or interference and no background noise. On the callers end they were hardly able to recognize that I was talking through a cell phone. Using the speakerphone the voice quality diminished a bit but was perfectly clear and audible. However I still recommend a headset for the best audio quality.

Coming to the battery life, this one has a battery life of about 4.7 hours talk time and 12.5 days on standby which is pretty much decent.

Nitty-Gritty: This one by far is one of the best phones available at the moment in the markets. Definitely a masterpiece. An unique combination of classy looks and great functionality. I would surely recommend this one to anyone who’s looking out for a svelte touch screen phone.

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