Samsung Genio Qwerty Review
Overview
The Samsung Genio Qwerty is similar to the
Genio Touch phone in terms of user-friendliness and social networking support, but features a physical keyboard for more realistic typing.
Pros
The shape, style and feel of the Samsung Genio Qwerty are impressive. With curved corners, a full QWERTY keyboard and vibrantly coloured back, the phone is nice to hold as well as look at. And if you are not mad about the yellow back which the phone comes with, you can simply swap it for a different coloured battery cover.
The Cartoon interface makes exploring the phone simple and enjoyable. The features are geared for ease of use so, for example, if you find the contacts screen a bit dull, you can simply enliven it by creating your own buddy list for your most-contacted friends. Each friend in this list has multiple communication options for you to select including text, instant message, email or call; and you can see all the messages and call history for each friend too. Another example is the support for emails – the Samsung Genio Qwerty has an Email Setup Wizard which makes adding new addresses a doddle.
With a physical QWERTY keyboard and screen, the Samsung Genio Qwerty differs from the Genio Touch with its touchscreen keyboard and the
Genio Pro with its slide out keyboard. The phone’s keyboard is comfortable for typing on although the keys do take a bit of practice if your fingers are not small. One of the installed games on the phone is the QWERTY training one for super fast typing, so even if you struggle a little at first, you’ll be a whizz before long. There are also some nice shortcuts on the Samsung Genio Qwerty’s keyboard for directly accessing your text messages and music.
The screen may be relatively small at just 2.2 inches but it manages not to seem so and is more than sufficient to enjoy all the phone’s features. You can customise the home screen with your favourite applications, either from those pre-installed – which include popular social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster, Flickr and MySpace – or from those which are available for downloading like Twitter and YouTube.
The Samsung Genio Qwerty phone has a function for multi instant messaging, so you can interact with a few friends at once. You can also merge all your separate instant messaging accounts into one and send and receive messages via AIM, GoogleTalk, ICQ, etc. The text message feature is interactive and it shows each text sent and received as one long conversation – similar to the text message feature on the
iPhone 3G S.
Cons
The Samsung Genio Qwerty supports a web browser but not 3G or Wi-Fi. However, the phone is designed for instant communication rather than large downloads or super fast internet connection.
With a music player and 2-megapixel camera, it is a slight shame the internal storage is less than 40MB. However, with space for up to 8GB via a microSD card, there should be plenty of memory for messages, songs and photos.
Conclusion
The Samsung Genio Qwerty is good to communicate with as it offers friendly, flexible features and a fun shell which is comfortable to hold in the palm of your hand as you text, type and message.