Like the L6, the SGH-T509 has a low-resolution VGA camera. You can take pictures in four resolutions (640x480, 320x240, 176x132, and 128x96) and you get a good assortment of editing options. There's a 4X zoom, a brightness control, seven color effects, spot focus, an ISO setting, 30 fun frames, a self-timer (3, 5, or 10 seconds), a multishot option, and a night mode. You can also flip a photo upside down or produce a mirror image. Sound effects are plentiful, with three shutter sounds and options for when you activate the brightness and zoom controls, or you can have no sound. Unfortunately, there's no silent shutter option. Finally, you can program the navigation controls and keypad buttons to act as shortcuts to various photo-editing options--a nice touch.
The video camera takes clips in two resolutions (176x144 and 128x96) with sound. Clip length is short at just 15 seconds, but you get an assortment of editing options similar to the still camera's. Though the camera has a lot of features, image quality is about what you'd expect from a VGA camera. Colors aren't very sharp and images appeared grainy. Video quality also is choppy but serviceable for short clips. When finished with your work, you can save it to the phone's impressive 70MB shared memory, include it in a multimedia message, or save it your online T-Mobile album.
You can personalize the SGH-T509 with a variety of wallpaper, color patterns, and sounds. If you want more options and more ring tones, you can download them from T-Mobile via the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. Gamers get full versions of three Java (J2ME) game titles: Forgotten Warrior, Freekick, and Arch Angel. There's also a demo version of Midnight Pool. We tested the triband, dual-mode (GSM 850/1800/1900; EDGE) Samsung SGH-T509 in San Francisco using T-Mobile's service. Call quality was generally good and a signal was readily available. Reception on our end was clear, though the phone picked up a fair amount of wind noise. Also, while the volume was fine for us, we've definitely used louder phones in the past, and on a couple of occasions, sound actually cut out for a split second. As such, users with hearing impairments should test the T509 before buying. On their end, callers said they could tell we were using a cell phone but reported they could understand us overall. They had more trouble in noisy conditions, such as when we were walking along a busy street, but it wasn't particularly bothersome they said. Speakerphone call quality was quite good and we could hear callers plainly even though the speaker faces the rear of the phone. Speakerphone calls weren't as good, however. Though we had no trouble connecting to the Plantronics Explorer 320 Bluetooth headset, call quality diminished significantly. We noticed a fair amount of static and callers had trouble hearing us. That could be due to the headset, though.
The SGH-T509 trumps the Motorola Slvr L6 by including support for GPRS and EDGE networks. We were glad to see the faster data speeds, particularly since T-Mobile's EDGE network is the fastest data coverage the carrier offers at the moment. Data speeds were around 90Kbps.
The SGH-T509 has a rated talk time of 3.5 hours and a promised standby time of 7.2 days. In our tests, we beat the talk time by an hour and measured 5 days of standby time. According to FCC radiation tests, the Samsung SGH-T509 has a digital SAR rating of 0.74 watt per kilogram.
What You'll Pay
- Set Price Alert
