Samsung Blast SGH-T729 user reviews (T-Mobile)

4.0 stars

"Sleek...stylish...only minor flaws" on August 16, 2007 by foma14

Pros: Slim. Beautiful Screen and Graphics. Integrated Email. Music Player. Easily accessible microSD slot. Bluetooth. Decent Camera w/ zoom and Video.

Cons: Only one user defined shortcut key. QWERTY hybrid has a learning curve. Slider mechanism can be hard to open. Call quality mediocre.

Summary: This is a feature packed phone; and after a week, I have only minor complaints.

-----The Bad-----
The call quality could be better. With excellent service I still had to frequently ask "Do what?"

The most annoying thing about this phone is lack of basic customization. There is only one user-defined shortcut key. The arrows are preset to: Create Text Message; Phone book; Call Records; and Voice Memo. (How often does one need quick access to voice memo?)

Also in the customization field, the phone comes standard with only ONE menu layout: grid style. I haven't checked t-zones to see if there are other "themes" options available yet.

The slider mechanism is a bit of a pain. Opening this phone with one hand at times can prove difficult. There is a bit too much friction/spring tension upon first opening.

For the uninitiated, the QWERTY hybrid keypad can be annoying at first. There is a learning curve for the uninitiated!

The integrated email works but can be frustrating as it is overly complicated and frequently returns the error message: "Invalid user/password." (Note: couldn't get hotmail set up but Gmail and Yahoo worked. When you receive a new mail notification, you have to tell the phone to retrieve it. This process fails about 60% of the time. After it is "retrieved" when you try to view it, the phone has to "download the message." Again this has a high-failure rate. Upon each three of these steps it plays an annoying preset SMS tone that I haven't figured out how to change yet.

Full mp3s can NOT be used as ringtones. I don't know what length is allowed but I edited several mp3s down to <30 seconds and it worked fine. To be set as ringtones, files have to be on the phone (not on the memory card).

There is no cable included to hook up to your computer but this wasn't a problem for me since I use the SD card and a USB reader to move files.

-----The Good-----
That being said this phone is great. The music player sounds good (standard 3.5mm jack NOT included), up to 2 gig memory with easily accessible microSD card, bluetooth, beautiful display, easy to navigate menus, camera, video, calendar, calculator...it's all here. As these phones are only 16 days old, the jury is still out on their durability.

0.5 stars

"3rd copy of this phone. It's broke again." on July 9, 2009 by Teranceofathens

Pros: Nothing. T-Mobile on the other hand has some really nice people in India who are very nice as they tell you that they can't do anything for you. Incompetence with a smile.

Cons: It breaks, over and over again. The screen goes white, buttons stop working, charging is hit and miss. It's my girlfriend's phone, she works nights. Sometimes I have to lend her my Verizon phone so that she'll have a phone that actually works.

Summary: T-Mobile is refusing to let her have a different model. They want to send her the same P.O.S. again. Looks like I'll be lending her my Verizon so that she won't be without a phone. On the plus side there's only one more year to her contract and then she can switch to Verizon.

4.5 stars

"Would buy another Blast & re-enlist with T-Mobile!" on February 23, 2008 by Jack in Pigsburgh

Pros: ergonomics; voice quality; high res. display; "slider" design; high-contrast keyboard lighting

Cons: speakerphone could be a tad louder

Summary: Once you get past the fact that the name of this phone is marketing hyperbole (the BLAST is not actually a "blast" but it's very, very good) the phone still shines. Voice quality is exceptional and when I am using the speakerphone function, those on the other end are amazed that such good voice quality is possible using a speakerphone. The slider design is much easier to operate than the so-called flip phones and I can see much more information on the display without opening the phone. I also have to tell you that T-Mobile is a much better experience than evil Verizon. T-Mobile customer service is vastly superior and you get to speak with a human being with far fewer "clicks" and far less waiting than the big "V".

Updated on Jan 16, 2009

I've had the Blast for a year now. Dropped it once on hard pavement from my pocket and that cracked the screen. Call lists, etc., not intuitive. Call quality okay; speakerphone not quite loud enough. Would not buy this phone again.

But-T-MOBILE rocks!!! Great customer service. Great connectivity. I'm staying with them.

2.0 stars

"SD card didn't work. Had to return. So disappionted." on January 3, 2008 by poohgirl424

Pros: Lightweight, stylish, great battery life, easy to use keypad, mp3 ringtones,

Cons: Buggy SD card slot. Slippery surface makes it hard to slide. Prone to fingerprints and smudges.

Summary: For 2 days I was totally in love with this phone. It's part of the reason we decided to jump ship from AT&T to T-Mobile. The five faves was the other . Both myself and my husband picked one up. It's gorgeous with lovely black and red colors and is very slim and lightweight. I charged it the first day and for the five days that I played with the phone I never had to recharge. This included many calls, text messages, bluetoothing,and never turning off the phone.

My previous phone was a Samsung which gave me 2 years of trouble free usage. It's one of the main reasons I chose another Samsung phone. I also loved their menus which have numeric shortcuts.

Bluetooth worked fine on the phone. I was able to sync up to my headset and my previous phone and transfered all my numbers over without a hitch.

It has an interesting "half Qwerty" keypad once you slide it open. There are two letters per key rather than the 3-4 on a normal phone keypad. The keypad itself was pretty flat, but I had no trouble pressing the keys. Can switch between plain input and T9. Since there were only 2 letters per key, I didn't really need to use T9.

The sider felt solid but the face is pretty flat with no thumb grip to help with opening the phone. This made it a little hard to slide unless I pushed down on the buttons or put a huge thumbprint on the screen. Fingerprints were always visible and I was constantly wiping the screen clean. Loved the huge screen though.

Nothing special about the camera. 1.3 megapixels and there's a handy camera button on the side of the phone. Works well enough for making hilarious five fave icons.


On day 3 I got a 2GB Kingston Micro SD card. One of the things I wanted my new phone to be able to do was play MP3s. I uploaded songs to the card, put the card in the phone and soon found myself out of love.

The nice thing about this phone is that the SD card slot is located on the side of the phone, rather than behind the battery panel like so many other phones have them located.

However, the phone had trouble reading the data on the SD card. Sometimes it recognizes the card just fine, however most of the time the phone saw absolutely nothing on the card, constantly telling me that the card was completely empty, even though there are folders and several MP3 and image files on the card. Sometimes removing and re-inserting the SD card resolved this issue. Sometimes it took several re-inserts or a total restart of the phone to get the phone to correctly read the card. Even when the phone was able to read the card, I only had to access the card to look at the files once and a few minutes later when I tried to do the same thing, the card is once again "Empty".

The music player was totally unable to play MP3 files on the SD card. The times I was able to get the phone to recognize there were music files on the card, I'd add the files to the music player's playlist, hit play and get the message "Not Supported Content". When I managed to copy one of the MP3 songs into the phone, the file plays just fine.

I tried EVERYTHING thinking it couldn't possibly be the fault of my fabulous new phone. I tried 2 different programs to rip MP3s on both XP and Vista machines. I tried a different SD card. The results were the same on my Blast and my husband's Blast. The phone rarely recognized there was content on the cards and couldn't play any of the MP3 files located on the card. These files played just fine when the card is inserted into my PDA, Computer and NUVI. If the MP3 files are copied to the phone, they can be played, but with 11MB of internal memory the phone can hold all of 2 songs. Totally useless.

On day 5 I finally gave up. Although I loved the phone and loved every other aspect of it, I couldn't look over the fact that it didn't do one of the basic requirements I wanted in my new phone. I returned the Blast for a Nokia 5300, which had no problems whatsoever playing the MP3 files on the SD card.