Features
The Samsung Gloss has a 500-entry address book with room in each entry for five numbers and an e-mail address. You can then organize them into groups, pair them with a photo for caller ID, or with one of 22 ringtones and sound alerts. Other basics include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock, a memo pad, world clock, a stopwatch, a unit converter, and a tip calculator. More advanced users will appreciate voice dialing, stereo Bluetooth, USB mass storage mode, and A-GPS.
The Samsung Gloss also has access to the EasyEdge service, which comes with a wireless Web browser, the EasyEdge online store, plus mobile e-mail. The mobile e-mail is compatible with Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail, AIM Mail, and any other provider that has IMAP or POP access. You also have access to Your Navigator, with voice turn by turn directions, and City ID, which is an enhanced caller ID that displays the city and state of incoming calls.
The Gloss comes with a pretty rudimentary music player. You have to add songs via a microSD card to access the music player. You can set the songs on repeat or shuffle and create and edit playlists. The Gloss supports up to 16GB of external storage.
The 1.3-megapixel camera on the Gloss is quite basic as well. it can take pictures in four resolutions (1,280x960, 640x480; 320x240; and 176x144), three quality settings, five white balance presets, five color effects, and four shot modes (single shot, series shot, divided shot, or frame shot). Other camera settings include a self-timer, and the choice of three shutter sounds plus a silent option. Photo quality was quite awful. Images looked blurry, and colors seemed washed out.
You can personalize the phone with graphics and sounds by downloading more via U.S. Cellular's EasyEdge store.
Performance
We tested the Samsung Gloss (CDMA 800/1900; 1xRTT) with U.S. Cellular, which has a roaming agreement with Verizon Wireless in San Francisco. Call quality was good overall--we heard our callers just fine and vice versa. However, they said our volume wasn't as loud as they would like, and they still heard quite a bit of environmental or background noise. On our end, we didn't get a lot of static, but we did think their voices sounded less than natural, with a slight robotic quality.
Speakerphone calls did not fare much better. Since the external speaker is on the back of the phone, calls sounded a tad muted until we flipped it around. Even then, the speakers sounded tinny and hollow, without a lot of bass. Callers said that they heard more echo in speakerphone mode, though they said we still came through loud and clear. Because the Gloss doesn't have much of a speaker, we would recommend using a headset when listening to music.
The Samsung Gloss has a rated battery life of 3 hours talk time and 10.4 days standby time. We received a talk time of 5 hours and 39 minutes in our tests. According to the FCC radiation tests, the digital SAR is 1.21 watts per kilogram.
What You'll Pay
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