Digital Trends

Samsung Highnote (SPH-M630) October 29th, 2008 | by Stewart Wolpin

Features and Design

The Highnote offers two primary ergonomic enhancements: A dual slide that reveals a dialpad at one end and stereo speakers at the other, and an iPod-like twirl-a-circle one click navigation array. In addition to these physical navigation aids, Highnote has a completely customizable user interface that lets you add menu items to a "carousel" menu.

The Highnote is also a multimedia phone with a music player and access to Sprint's streaming TV service. You further get visual turn-by-turn navigation and other A-GPS location based services, a 2 MP camera, a microSD slot and a host of POP3 and IMAP email and messaging options. Finally, you can even get a Highnote to match your political leanings as well – which is to say that there's a blue version and a red version. 

Form Factor

Samsung has squeezed a great deal of functionality into a small package. The Highnote's front face is of course dominated by its 2-inch 176 x 220 pixel LCD screen, positioned atop a circular navigation and function array.

The outer circle of the navigation array is made up of five keys that form around 270 degrees of the circle: Back, Talk, End and two soft keys that correspond with menu choices on the bottom of the screen. Oddly, the top 90 percent of the circle does absolutely nothing. 

You're going to have to get used to where these buttons are located, since their placement runs contrary to where they are on every other non-touchscreen cellphone. Making matters less helpful, the words "Talk," "Back" and "End" are etched into the arched controls, not backlit and prove difficult to read. Third strike: The Talk key isn't backlit green and the End key isn't blacklit red either. And with the Back button housed at the bottom of the circle, you'll be accidentally hitting the wrong key by mistake for several weeks.

Inside the circle is a disk that works two ways. Pressing it directionally (left, right, up, down) as you would any navigation array moves the on-screen cursor accordingly. But you can also spin the disk to move the cursor as well, sort of a physical version of iPod's click wheel. In the middle of the disk is a "Menu/OK" select button.

Consider this either/or directional control the cellphone version of wearing both belt and suspenders. The spin wheel is nice, but we’re not sure it's completely necessary. In fact, it may get in the way; as you go to click a direction to move the cursor, an errant brush against the disk may move the cursor first. We accidentally selected the wrong action multiple times because of this design quirk.

On the right spine of the phone is the micro USB jack, a "sound" button (tap it and the ringer volume setting is displayed; hold it down to activate the music player) and the camera activation button/shutter release. 

On the left spine is the 3.5mm headphone jack, the volume up/down toggle, a "Hold" lock key that deactivates the front navigation array, and the microSDHC card slot.

On the rear is the Highnote's 2 MP camera lens.

Sliding the top down uncovers the Highnote's stereo speaker array. Sliding the top up reveals its alphanumeric dial keypad – small black tablet-shaped keys with bright white backlighting inset against a grey background. While these keys are highly readable, they are uncomfortably small.

Above the usual 12 alphanumeric keys are three function controls: Mute, Text (which toggles between multi-tap and predictive text input while in email mode) and a Car switch that activates the voice function to read out messages, etc.
This top row of extra keys lower the odds of correctly dialing by instinctual feel or multi-tapping or T9 typing without looking; instead of pushing a 1, 2 or 3, which usually comprise the top row of keys, you're bound to hit the Mute, Text or Car keys by accident instead. 

Ports & Connectors

As noted, the Highnote has two jacks – a 3.5mm headphone jack on the left spine and a microbus power/PC connector jack on the right, both covered with easily-removed flaps. Also as noted, there is a microSD slot on the left spine.

When connecting the phone to a PC to sync music et al, you have to go through the Tools menu to switch the phone to PC mode. We found this rather annoying; the PC seemed to know the phone was connected. Why isn't there a pop-up message on the phone asking you if you wanted to switch to sync mode, instead of making you scroll through multiple menus?

Granted, the Highnote is one of the first phones we've seen whose SD card slot can handle up to a 16GB card. When an SD card is slid into the slot, a completely unnecessary security screen pops-up asking for a four-digital PIN. This PIN is the last four digits of the phone's phone number, which is easily found in the Settings menu. You can change the PIN, but we’re not sure why this level of security is even necessary.