Product Spotlight: Samsung Glyde Video

Product Spotlight: Samsung Glyde Video Transcript

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>> It's a touch screen phone with a QWERTY keyboard that's pocket friendly. I'm Brian Tong for CNET dot com and today we're show casing the Samsung Glyde on Verizon Wireless. At first glance, the design kind of looks similar to the iPhone. You get a touch screen with a single button on the front, with a quick slide; you get a full QWERTY keyboard. The touch screen has haptic vibrating feedback so you'll get a response when you press on it and the screen measures two point seven five inches. But that's pretty small for a touch screen phone. The Glyde is smaller in size, but the QWERTY keyboard is spaced out pretty well and hands small or large shouldn't have a problem with the physical keyboard. Now, you'd expect this phone to be feature packed and it doesn't disappoint. It's loaded with Bluetooth, a two megapixel camera, full HTML browser, GPS navigation, e-mail, a full range of V CAST services, and that number and letter that people really care about with phones these days, 3G is here. So let's jump into some of the features. The two megapixel camera has a ton of photo quality and color options with a 9X zoom and an autofocus that actually works. Video clips are limited to 30 seconds for multimedia messages. With all that media, the GLYDE has 45 megs of internal memory, which is a good amount, but you can add up to 8 gigs with a microSD card. The Glyde's web browser defaults to landscape mode and will be able to see web pages the way they were meant to be. GPS is rock solid, using the VZ Navigator for turn by turn directions. And the V CAST features also defaults to landscape mode and the media quality for video and audio is what you'd expect. Call quality was very good overall, which is typical for most Verizon phones and we didn't have static issues and we had no problem getting a signal. A real small complaint is sometimes we heard a slight hiss, but people on the other side of the line didn't hear the hiss at all. The 3G network connection was solid even if we were in buildings, so we were happy with the performance there. Battery life is rated at three and a half hours of talk time and our labs tested it out to just under five hours. So where does this guy need help? We talked about how it was pocketable, but really this phone is a little too small to be effective as a touch screen phone. Its small touch screen feels cramp at times and sometimes you'll miss hit because of its size. Sure you can zoom in to read web pages, but the default text is really small and once you're zoomed in, you'll have to do a lot of swiping. We said the Glyde supports e-mail, but you have to go through the web browser to do it too. You can only access accounts individually and you can't even view any attachments. Photo quality on the camera was also disappointing. The colors were washed out and images were blurry compared to other phone cameras. I'm Brian Tong for CNET dot com and the Samsung Glyde is a solid phone feature wise, but its cramp touch screen really limits it from complementing its other features. ^M00:02:44 [ Music ]