As an EV-DO phone, the SPH-M610 offers full support for Sprint's 3G service. You can connect to Sprint's Power Vision steaming video service and its Music Store to download songs to the onboard digital music player. A newer application is Sprint Movies, which delivers full-length pay-per-view movies straight to your phone from studios like Buena Vista, Sony Pictures and Universal Pictures. The SPH-M610 comes with 37MB of internal shared memory, which borders on the low side considering its multimedia prowess. You'd be wise to secure a microSD card (one came with our review model), which in any case is required to download music. Furthermore, you get Sprint's On Demand service for access to a host of information such as news headlines, sports scores, and weather updates personalized for your zip code. And for the perpetually lost, the SPH-M610 includes a trial of Telenav's GPS navigation application. In all, there's an impressive assortment of options.
The SPH-M610's 2-megapixel camera takes pictures in five resolutions from 1,600x1200 down to 320x240. Other camera features include three quality settings, brightness and white balance controls, a spot metering multishot mode, a self-timer, 5 color effects, 10 fun frames, and a 4X zoom that's not usable at the highest photo resolution. There are also three shutter sounds plus a silent mode. The camcorder records clips in 176x144 resolution with sound; clips meant for multimedia messages are capped at 30 seconds or you can shoot for as long as the available memory will permit. Editing options were similar to the still camera. For easy photo printing, the SPH-M610 supports PictBridge technology for transferring images directly to a printer. In our tests, photo quality was good but not great. Colors were sharp and there was enough light, but unless we held the camera perfectly still (which was difficult to do) images tended to be blurry.
You can personalize the SPH-M610 with a variety of screensavers, color themes, clock styles, alert sounds, and greetings. If you want more options you can download them from Sprint. For play time there are demo versions of five Java (J2ME) titles: Brain Juice, Diner Dash, Midnight Bowling, Pac-Man and Tetris. It's too bad Sprint doesn't include at least one full title.
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900; EV-DO) in San Francisco using Sprint's service. Call quality was admirable with great voice clarity and almost no static. Though they could tell we were using a cell phone, callers said we sounded good, and they had no trouble hearing us. On the other hand, volume tended to be somewhat low; users with hearing impairments should try the SPH-M610 before they buy. Speakerphone quality was somewhat diminished--there was some fuzziness, and callers had more trouble hearing us--but it was decent overall. Bluetooth headset calls produced a similar experience. On the reception side we had no trouble getting a signal, and EV-DO coverage was strong. Web browsing was zippy, and songs downloaded in less than a minute.
Music quality was decent overall despite being bass-heavy at times. Yet we can't grasp why all music-centric phones don't offer stereo speakers. As a result, the volume level is rather low, so we suggest using the included wired stereo headset. In addition, Samsung uses a proprietary plug so you can't use your own headset unless you have an adapter. Video quality was quite good, the best we've seen on a Sprint 3G phone in quite a while. Though the overall picture was small for the display's overall size, there was little pixilation and voices matched the speakers' mouths. Also, the video never froze or paused for rebuffering. That said, our eyes grew tired after watching such a small display for too long, and we can't imagine viewing a full-length film.
The Samsung SPH-M610 has a rated talk time battery life of 3.5 hours, but it has a tested talk time of 3 hours and 35 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests the SPH-M610 has a digital SAR rating of 1.09 watts per kilogram.
What You'll Pay
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