Samsung T509 May 9th, 2006 | by Vince Veneziani

Setup and Use

The T509 gets great battery life. On a full charge, you can talk normally and play with the phone a great deal for about three days straight. The battery bar seems as though it never goes down, which is great on a phone this small. Call reception is pretty decent in most areas and the quality of a call is superb. Every word is heard loud and clear and the noise cancellation works great. Those who want a fashionable phone with great reception and call quality should consider this phone.

Text messaging is an issue, though, with the T509. The keypad is a normal size, but the buttons above it are too big. You'll find yourself accidentally hitting these buttons quite a few times if you text message a lot. The predictive text is very slow, too. It can't keep up with fast-paced messages, so you'll find yourself going back quite a lot to fix words. This is a huge annoyance and I hope it is fixed by the time the phone is released in May. Picture messaging isn't a problem at all, though, and works like a charm.

Because Samsung decided to cheap out on the camera on this phone, it's pretty much worthless unless you picture message someone a lot. The VGA-quality pictures look like utter disasters when transferred onto a computer where you can view them in full resolution. Graininess, bad color, and fuzziness plague every picture taken, no matter what the conditions are. Plus, there's no flash included on the T509, so forget about taking pictures of anything in the dark. The T509 also does videos, but at a horrible frame-rate, and each clip is limited to 10 seconds; I don't know about you, but I certainly can't record anything of value in less than 10 seconds. For a cell phone camera to be decent, it needs to be 1.3 megapixels. Try putting the camera used in the A950 or T809 in here, Samsung, and you'd have a much better phone.

The IM client included on the phone is great. Samsung has one of the best UIs in the cell phone industry. It's easy to navigate, easy to use, and makes great use of keypad shortcuts. Using AIM on the phone was fun and easy to use. It's also pleasant to look at and makes the experience more enjoyable. Predictive text seems to work better here than it does while text messaging.

For transferring files, I used my iMac and a Bluetooth connection. It connected pretty seamlessly, but once inside the phone, no files were available. I had to individually send each picture I wanted to my iMac, using the phone. This was a hassle I shouldn't have had to deal with; the Samsung T809 never had a problem like this. Pairing was pretty easy and the file transfers went quickly, so Bluetooth seems to work pretty nicely on the T509.