Samsung Gravity T user reviews (steel, T-Mobile)

4.0 stars

"Excellent Feature Phone" on July 22, 2010 by thesameer14

Pros: Responsive touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, decent speakers

Cons: No 3.5 mm jack, occasional lag

Summary: Hardware-
The phone is equipped with a full QWERY keyboard and the slider has a very good feel and click to it. The design is clean, and while it is a bit uninspired, it looks fine and I would not be reluctant to use it in public. It is not particularly heavy or thick, but a happy medium of both. The touchscreen was very colorful at 262,000 colors and is fairly usable in sunlight. It?s only resistive and lacks the accuracy of say, an iPod Touch. But it is very good and among the better resistive screens I?ve used. There is no 3.5mm headphone jack which is a little annoying seeing how most new phones today have them, but this isn?t meant to a multimedia device so it?s not too major. The phone is equipped with an accelerometer, but it is used in very few applications, such as the video and image viewer. Finally, the phone is equipped with a 184 mhz processor which doesn?t sound too great on paper compared with all the new 1GHZ Snapdragons out there, but the phone chugged along fine. At some times, the phone did stop to think and I did experience horrendous lag while using the music player but shutting down the phone and restarting it fixed the problem and I experienced next to no problems after that. If it?s a big deal for you, try it out at the store, but it?s not an extremely big problem.

Keyboard-
The virtual keyboard is nothing special, but I did like the haptic vibration and the very big keys. It has a fairly accurate T9 and I did not mind typing out short messages on it. There is no virtual QWERTY keyboard, but seeing as there is a full physical keyboard, I can see why Samsung did not include one. The physical keyboard is nicely spaced and I made few mistakes on it. I wish the buttons were raised a big higher, but it was fine. The keyboard is backlighted and has directional buttons.

Software-
The phone is using the newest TouchWiz software which allows you to customize three homescreens with various widgets. Unlike other phones, such as the Samsung Behold, the screen was not too cramped as widgets can be placed on more screens, creating a far less cluttered look. It ran nicely and the menus are very finger friendly with big icons. The processor did hamper things from time to time, but only if I crammed the screen with 5+ widgets just for fun. There's a nifty Smart Unlock feature which lets you draw shapes to access certain features, such as the music player.There is one application named Social Buzz for social networking and while I have not used it yet, I have seen demos and it seems to be an adequate replacement for mobile social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The music player is good enough for basic playback. Like I mentioned before, without a 3.5mm jack, this is not meant to me a multimedia powerhouse. However, the speakers were decently loud and had acceptable sound quality. The video player handled videos at a 320 by 240 resolution at 15 fps and they looked surprisingly good on the screen with no lag present. To round up the entertainment, the phone has a few games but they are all demos. You have to buy the full games from T-Mo.

Phone-
My old phone suffered from reception problems and I could barely find a decent signal in the house. However, this phone is almost always able to have 3+ bars and with 3G and I seem to have very good reception wherever I go. While T-Mo?s 3G isn?t as broad as Verizon or even AT&T, it?s available in most major cities. The call quality was very good and I did not hear any distortion from my callers. The speakerphone put out decent volume and is easily heard.
The messaging app is sufficient for light to medium texters. There is support for IM, E-Mail, Social buzz messages, and of course, text messages. Texts are not threaded, a big inconvenience to people who text a lot and prefer to follow conversations, but it is still fine.

Camera-
I was disappointed when I saw the phone only had a 2 mp camera, but it was actually better than expected. While the pictures weren?t stunning, they were clear and had good amounts of detail. There?s also a night mode for low light situations and video, which was able to record smooth but slightly grainy videos. All in all, it?s decent for a phone and ok for Facebook.
Battery-
The battery life on this phone was excellent. I pushed it through 4 days of average to heavy use while on 3G for 95% of the time. People who use their phones more might burn out in 2-3 days but it met all my expectations.
Web- Unfortunately, I was unable to test out data on this phone, so you?re going to have to try it at a T-Mobile store. But you only have to pay $10 a month for data so that?s a real bargain, considering normal smartphones now require $30 a month. From what I?ve seen in demos, the web browser wasn?t as good as the Safari or Android mobile browser, but it?s not meant to be either. It has a neat one finger zoom that seems better than poking a magnifying glass and the browser itself is fairly speedy.