Samsung Behold

“The Behold fills the hole in T-Mobile's lineup for a not-quite-smart feature phone: It does a lot of the stuff a smartphone will do, like web browsing and email, just you know, not quite as capably as a real smartphone, or even as well as its cousin, the Instinct (even before it got better with its most recent round of updates). The web browser is bleh for anything but mobile sites since T-Mobile does you the favor of translating pages, which tends to butcher more complicated ones, and the email client won't do standard IMAP or POP. The IM client is slow, though not terrible, but either way, you can't really install your own apps to rectify the situation.”

“We had reasonably low expectations for the T919 Behold, but were pleasantly surprised by the device. It still can't compete with high-end smartphones like the Apple iPhone, or even T-Mobile's own G1, but it is an easy to use and fun device to have around. The widget based home screen of the device can be a tad annoying, but the rest of the phone's TouchWiz user interface is very nicely implemented. We give the Behold a solid Recommended rating.”

“The Behold is an interesting device. It fills a gap in T-Mobile's line-up of phones in that it provides what should be a winning combination of a touch-screen with a 5 megapixel camera and the TouchWiz user interface. TouchWiz is a decent user interface, and that fact that it is so easily customized makes it more user friendly than a lot of other phone OSes out there. The 5 megapixel camera is decent, but not great. Where the quality of the images falls a little short, however, the camera software gives you plenty of ways to manipulate the picture-taking process. The touch screen itself works well, and the fact that you can turn the haptics off completely, makes it much more usable in my mind. If you're in the market for a touch device that has a better-than-average feature set, the Behold is worth considering.”