There are not a lot of rugged phones out there. Sanyo models from Sprint and Motorola handsets from Nextel had captured this market until Samsung launched its Rugby with AT&T. Now, the company has launched another rugged model – Samsung SGH-A657 for AT&T. The SGH-A657 is built and shaped like a brick. The phone does not have fashionable smooth look, but its rubber sliding and hard shell are making the phone tough. The SGH-A657 does not have a camera but offers features including 3G support, GPS, Bluetooth and push-to-talk. Samsung SGH-A657 is available at AT&T business channel for $129. It means that you must have a business account with AT&T service to purchase this phone. 2-inch LCD display has 220×176 pixels resolution and 262,000 colors. The display is bright, sharp and easy on the eyes. It exhibits sharp graphics and vibrant colors. The menu interface is available in two styles – icon and list. You can adjust the backlight  [...]

Though the world has moved on to high end smart phones which sport lots of multimedia and messaging capabilities, there are still people who are not so enthusiastic about mobile phones. All they want is a device which can make call and send messages. A167 is a phone for such people. You can talk to people, text messages and take some photos with the low end camera on the handset. Being a clamshell phone, it has two displays, one on the lid and other one inside. The monochrome display on the lid gives a resolution of 96x96 pixels and it also gives you caller ID, signal strength, time battery life and date. The low end display doesn’t give a photo caller ID and neither does it work as a camera viewfinder. On the exterior of the phone, there is a volume rocker and a proprietary jack for putting headset and adapter. A single jack means that you get to use only one peripheral at a time. Asking for a 3.5 mm jack on an entry level phone like  [...]

Samsung SGH-T349 is a messaging phone, which sports the latest in-style 20 key QWERTY keyboard layout. Having a full QWERTY keyboard makes the phone quite big so it has been shrunk but still has great ergonomics while typing. We have seen this keyboard on BlackBerry Pearl's SureType and we loved it. This is a message centric phone, although great on messaging is low on other features. It has been made for business men who need messaging applications while on the move. There is no GPS or 3G however; there is a music player, Bluetooth and 1.3 MP camera. The handset is extremely cheap at just $15 with a two year contract. It is also available for $99.99 with T-Mobile’s Prepaid service. The display of the screen is 2.2 inch big and has support for 262,000 colors with resolution of 176X220 pixels. Although a bit small, it serves its purpose. The display is vibrant and bright with colorful animated icons on the interface of the menu. In the display, you  [...]