The Hue's 1.3-megapixel camera takes pictures in five resolutions, from 1280x1024 down to a 240x1280. You're provided a fair number of photo-editing choices including three color effects, 20 fun frames, a self-timer, spot metering, a night mode, three shutter sounds, four quality settings, adjustable brightness and white balance, multishot and mosaic shot options, and a digital zoom. The camera menus are well-designed and you can select from three shutter sounds, but you can't turn it off completely.
The camcorder offers a similar set of editing options. Clips meant for multimedia messages are capped at 13 seconds; otherwise you can record for as long as the available memory permits. The SGH-T639 offers 30MB of shared memory, which is less than half of the Hue's storage space. That's not a lot, so we suggest you invest in a microSD card. The camera offers relatively good photo quality. Our only complaint was that the images had a yellow tint.
You can personalize the SGH-T639 with a display wallpaper, a greeting message, and an alert tone. You can always download more options from T-Mobile via the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. For playtime you only get demo versions of two games: Platinum Sudoku and Lumnies Mobile. You'll have to buy the full versions for extended play. The SGH-T639 also offers a music player, which is close to the player on the Hue. Presently, you'll have to transfer music onto the phone using a USB cable or a memory card, but that might change once T-Mobile activates its 3G network.
Performance
We tested the SGH-T639 in San Francisco using T-Mobile service. Call quality was generally solid. The volume level was loud enough and our signal was clear and free of static. Voices warbled occasionally, as they did in the Hue, but it wasn't enough to be distracting. Our only other complaint is that the SGH-T639 has a sensitive sweet spot, which is something we didn't notice on the Alltel handset. If the phone was next to our ear, we could hear well, but if we moved it just a little bit, the sound faded. On their end, callers said we sounded fine. They could hear us well, though some said we sounded a bit tinny, and we had no trouble being understood by voice automated systems.
The Samsung SGH-T639 has a rated battery life of 4 hours talk time and 10.4 days standby time. We managed to get a talk time of 5 hours and 22 minutes.
User reviews
- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 9 reviews
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
"this phone face plates slide off.and you can not set bluetoothed ringtones and a message tone."
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