Samsung Memoir T929 - black (T-Mobile)

Reviewed by

Nicole Lee

on 02/25/2009

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Features
The Samsung Memoir's camera is the primary reason to get this handset, despite the fact the Memoir comes with a whole host of other advanced features. We'll get to that shortly, but first we wanted to let you know a few essentials before we delve into the main course. The Memoir has a large 2,000-entry phone book with room in each entry for four phone numbers, four instant-messaging usernames, a Web site address, birthday and anniversary dates, a street address, and notes. You can save callers to groups, pair them with a photo for caller ID, plus one of 23 polyphonic ringtones.

Other essentials include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a calendar, a calculator, a notepad, a task list, an alarm clock, a world clock, a timer, a stopwatch, and a currency and unit converter. It also has voice command, PC syncing, Web-based e-mail for a variety of providers (AOL, Yahoo, GMail, Comcast, etc.), instant messaging, GPS support, and stereo Bluetooth. The Memoir is also one of the few phones to support T-Mobile's 3G network. News junkies will also like the built-in RSS reader. Though there's 3G, there is no Wi-Fi, which is quite a disappointment seeing as there's a full HTML browser and photo upload capabilities.

The Samsung Memoir's camera is similar to the Innov8 in terms of features. The 8-megapixel camera can take pictures in up to seven resolutions, from a large 3,264x2,448 to the smallest 320x240. Some of the more typical camera settings include color effects, white balance presets, 8x digital zoom, a self-timer, three quality settings, a mosaic-shot mode, three shutter sounds with silent option, and nine fun frames. You will even find more advanced camera settings like an adjustable ISO and exposure metering.

You also get 12 preset scene settings for certain conditions like portrait, landscape, sports, indoor, beach, sunset, backlight, and more. If you've ever had problems with jerky photos, you'll like the Memoir's antishake mode. Smile-shot helps you to snap a photo only when the people are smiling, and blink detection lets you know when someone has blinked. We've tried both smile and blink detections, and it worked flawlessly. For business travelers, you'll like the ability to use the camera for capturing business cards, so you might never have to carry a bunch of business cards home with you again. There's even a panorama mode that lets you auto-stitch photos after shooting seven photos in quick succession from left to right (or vice versa).

The camcorder is impressive as well. The Memoir can record clips in two resolutions (640x480 and 320x240) in one of three modes: normal mode, picture message mode, and slow-motion video mode. Videos in normal mode are kept for however much storage is on the phone. Picture messages are capped to 30 seconds, and slow-motion video capture is shot at 120 frames per second. The settings are similar to the still camera.

The Samsung Memoir takes really great photos.

Photo quality is simply amazing. We're very impressed by the sharp images, accurate colors, and little to no image noise. After you're done shooting photos, you can store them in the phone or up to a 8GB microSD card. You can also e-mail them, send them to a friend, plus you can upload your photo directly to one of four online sharing sites--Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Photobucket, and Snapfish. You just log into your preferred site, and upload directly from the phone--no need for a special e-mail address or a third-party application like Shozu. We really like this feature, since you do not need to resize your photo down to a more Web-friendly resolution and can instead upload the full original photo if you like. The Memoir also supports geotagging if you want your photos to be tagged with the location where you took the photo.

The Memoir has a pretty simple music player. It supports album art, you can create and edit playlists, there are shuffle and repeat modes, plus six equalizer settings. You load music onto it with a USB cable by dragging and dropping into it. You can set the player to play in the background while multitasking.

Thankfully, the Memoir also offers a full HTML browser. It is similar to other Samsung browsers--you can scroll through pages by dragging your finger across the page. You can use the camera's physical zoom controls to zoom in and out of Web pages, which is very nice. And as we said above, the virtual QWERTY keyboard on the browser has a dedicated .com button, which helps in entering URLs. You can save bookmarks easily, and you can get rid of the surrounding controls for full screen mode if you want. It's not quite as good as the iPhone's browser of course, but it compares favorably with other proprietary Web browsers.

You can customize the Memoir with wallpaper, alert tones, and more. If you want more options, you can download them from T-Mobile's t-zones store. There are no included games.

Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) Samsung Memoir in San Francisco using T-Mobile. We were impressed with the call quality. Callers sounded loud and clear, with natural voices, and nary a sign of static. On their end, callers said we sounded fine as well, though they did complain of the occasional background noise. Speakerphone calls performed admirably as well. Callers could still hear an echo, but it wasn't that bad. We could certainly hear them loud and clear, though with a slightly tinnier voice quality.

Music quality was pretty good. The external speakers give out a rather hollow sound with not a lot of bass, but the overall sound is fine. We would recommend using a headset for better audio quality of course.

The Memoir supports T-Mobile's 3G network (UMTS 1700/2100). It is very fast. We connected to Web pages in seconds and were able to upload a 2.2MB photo in just under a couple minutes.

The Samsung Memoir has a battery life of 5.5 hours talk time and 12.5 days standby time. It has a tested talk time of 5 hours and 5 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the Memoir has a digital SAR rating of 0.618 watt per kilogram.