Samsung SGH T729 Blast (T-Mobile)

I liked the SGH-T719 which was a very sedate two tone grey flip phone from Samsung. You could whip it out in any business meeting and no one would even notice. Then T-Mobile changed direction and what a good direction they took!

From the grey flannel button down look they went uptown to the "mullet of mobile phones". We all know a mullet is "business in the front and party in the back." The black front of the Blast is the business end. The deep crimson red on the back of the phone was meant for partying.

The Business End

1- Semi-QWERTY SureType keypad. I call it a double tap. You can get to any letter with two taps. Need an "s"? Two taps is all you need, not four like on conventional keypads. Some letters require only a single tap. This will speed your thoughts and feelings on their way once you get used to it. XT9 predictive text will help as well.

2- E-mail is the heart and soul of this phone. The T719 had Blackberry Connect. This does away with the Blackberry Connect and has a less money hungry e-mail client allowing Protocols: IMAP4, POP3, SMTP and if you have accounts with AOL, Yahoo!, or Gmail set-up is a snap. IM is also provided.

3- Quadband coverage is a must in a business device. Not everyone travels on business but if you do: is porting all of your contacts to a different mobile something you want to mess with right before you go out of the country? This is a true world phone. It also has flight mode which turns off all of the radios in the phone for that airplane trip.

4- EDGE, Class 10 allows the browser to keep you updated pretty quickly. It's not 3G but it is adequate.

5- 11 megabytes of internal memory augmented by up to 2 gigabytes of microSD storage means you won't be seeing the "out of memory" message right away either.

6- 1000 entry phone book, with up to 5 entries per name means you'll be able to reach out to your contacts when you need to even when your fingers are busy with SIND - Speaker Independent Name Dialing. Additional PIM functions also are on the phone. It supports MyFaves.

The Party End

1- Music player supports MP3 and ACC formats.

2- Bluetooth has a full plate of profiles. (A2DP, AVRC, BPP, DUN, FTP, HFP, HSP, OPP) A2DP is the one that will get your party animal's attention. This allows the music player to send the output to stereo headphones. Think - Silent Rave.

3- The 1.3 megapixel camera is up to Samsung's usual high quality for cameras. It has SXGA (1280x1024) resolution, a 4x digital zoom, brightness control and a multi-shot setting that will take between 6 to 15 frames in rapid order depending on how you set the function to operate. It is also a video player-recorder supporting .3gp and .mp4 files. Like most on-phone video recorders it does not record video at anything close to the sensor's maximum resolution. This uses QCIF 176 × 144 resolution at what appears to be about 15 frames per second.

4- Java games can be the life of the party as well. t-zones will be more than willing to sell or lease to you any number of games for this phone. There are also third party games that will work quite well. That's the beauty of Java.

The Wrap

Get used to the keyboard - this is a decent phone. It is solid. Samsung makes pretty solid sliders, the U600 excepted. The black and red looks really good. It does everything you want a cell phone to do, it doesn't weight a ton, it will fit in your jacket pocket or your purse. T-Mobile fully supports it. Loosen up a bit!