Samsung Highlight SGH – T749 – ice Smartphone Review
Samsung Highlight is a decent enough phone, and it is priced reasonably. Recommended for those who want to get in on the touch screen fad, without going over their budget. Yes, this is a phone that everyone can afford.

Touch-screen phones are somewhat of a gimmick, even so Samsung hopped on board with the trend. The Samsung Highlight is not the first touch screen that this company has produced, but it is the first of theirs that is being marketed as a touch-screen phone for the masses. If only one word could be used to describe the Samsung Highlight that word would be “average”. It is nothing new or exciting. The standard features are all included like a music player and camera. It does look good, and considering how light it is we find it to be a tough little unit. If you want a touch-screen phone but do not want to spend a huge pile of cash then the Samsung Highlight may be exactly what you are looking for.

As a low end touch screen phone it sure does look good. It sports a sleek design with round corners, and you can choose your colour. Feeling hot? Then the fire model (red and orange) will fuel your flame. Or are you the cool type? The Samsung Highlight ice (blue/green) will keep you chilling.

The Samsung Highlight is slightly bigger than similar touch screen phones on the market, but at 4.27 inches high and 2.11 wide, by 0.54 inch thick it has a comfortable feel to it. While a little larger than its rivals it is still light and weighs a mere 3.7 ounces. So light you will hardly notice you are carrying a cellular phone. The display screen is small, but not by much at 3 inches. The screen displays terrific colour, clear images and graphics. The Samsung Touch Wiz interface has icons for simplicity of use and is easy to understand.

The bottom of the screen is where the touch controls for the main menu, the Web browser, the phone book, and the phone dialer are. The dialer interface has big alphanumeric buttons and shortcuts for your list of recent calls, voice mail, the messaging folder, and your phone book.
To know you are touching a control the Samsung Highlight gives you feed-back by vibrating.
the touch screen works as it should, quickly with no delays. Customize the screen to your personal taste by adjusting how bright the screen is, how long the backlight stays on, the kinds of fonts, and the can change the brightness, the backlight time, the font type, and how much the phone vibrates when it is giving you feedback. You can also Adjustment the sensitivity of the touch screen display.

On the Samsung Highlight you have two choices for when you type in messages. You can use the regular alphanumeric keypad or the virtual keyboard. The keys are a tad on the small side, so the virtual keyboard is usually the preferred method when typing messages. When using the regular keys numbers and symbols can be a bit of a pain to use because of having to cycle through the different keyboards. The virtual keyboard offers the benefits of all the keys you need to use such as the shift key, back space, return key, and all of the punctuation. The virtual keyboard also has a key where you can turn off the T9 feature that guesses (usually unsuccessfully, thus why we turn it off) what you are about to write. With the built in accelerometer you can Turn the phone on its side and the QWERTY keyboard appears. A minor quirk is that if you turn the phone to the left the keyboard is the right way up, but it you turn it to the right the keyboard is upside down.
The only real buttons on the Samsung Highlight are located below the display screen. You have your standard talk, end/power, and clear button. They are large enough for easy use, and spaced far enough from each other that you don’t accidentally hit the wrong key. The left side of the the phone has the volume switch. On the right you will find the camera shutter, and display lock. Also located on the right side of the phone is the charger jack that also doubles as the headset jack. The back of the phone has the speaker, and camera lens.

The Samsung Highlight’s Phone book holds a whopping two thousand contacts. Each contact can save four emails, AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo I.M. names, and a website address. That’s not all you can save there is room for birthdays, anniversaries, handles, addresses and notes too. Each contact can have a photo, and their own ringtone from a choice of 17. You can organize your contacts into different groups for easy classification.

The Highlight has all the basic features you would expect from today’s phones. There is a web browser, calendar, a calculator, note pad, a to-do list. For the traveller you will find that the currency converter will make your life easier, as well as the world clock for when you travel through multiple time zones. Like all phones, the Highlight has a silent vibrate mode, and a speaker phone feature for hands free conversation. Voice recognition dialing is another feature. A added benefit is that you can sync your personal computer with the Highlight , keeping your contacts and information up to date no matter if your are on your cell or using your PC. You will also find a USB mass storage. Highlight includes a GPS and wireless Bluetooth with a stereo feature.

For a low-end touch screen cellular phone, the built in camera takes great pictures. The quality of the photos where excellent with good colour, and sharp images. There are four quality settings and you can use four different resolutions such as 2,048 X 1 pixels to as low as 400 X 240 pixels. More choices are available for your photos; four color effects, three white balance settings, and six different scene settings like night time or motion for example. For self portraits there is a self timer and the smile shot feature to capture your grin automatically the moment your, or your friends smile.

Even the built in camcorder on the Samsung Highlight takes great video footage. There are two resolutions you can choose from. You can edit your videos while they are still in the camera. We really liked the performance and quality of the videos and photos taken with this phone. The Highlight is easy to use, and the controls are very intuitive. Send your videos and photographs in your emails with ease. Need to transfer those images to another computer. That could not be easier. It is all done wirelessly using Bluetooth. Of course you can do it the old fashioned way using a USB cable or by taking the memory card out of your phone and putting it into your computer and transferring the image files. The microSD-card slot that is located underneath the battery can be replaced with a 16 GB card to increase your memory capacity from the standard 60 MB that the phone comes with.

The Samsung Highlight’s music player, like the camera, and the rest of the controls on this phone is a piece of cake to use. Not alot of extra setting in here, just playlists, shuffle, and repeat. Simple and basic. There is a equalizer for you to play with, but it is of limited use. The external speaker is not great, so bring along some earphones.

The browser loads website pages quickly, and is using the touch screen makes it fun. With hardly any effort at all you can navigate the web, scrolling pages using your finger. You can zoom in and out like a magnifying glass to view whatever you like on the internet. It streams video well, and the browser is decent overall.

As far as performance goes we found conversations to be free from static and callers had no problem hearing us. The volume was on the low side, although we where still able to hear those to whom we were speaking. Wind and loud background noise made made for some difficulties due to the low volume, but other than that it was all good. As with most speaker phones it was passable but muffled, and a quiet hiss could be heard. Automated systems did give us a problem though. This was overcome by speaking louder than normal, a little embarrassing, but that is the way it is with most cellular phones. Hopefully in the future this is one feature that will be improved on. Battery life is really good. You can chat away for six and a half hours according to the manufacturer. In reality it is probably half that. The standby time is superb. Without using your phone you should not have to charge it for two weeks or more.

Overall you get what you pay for with the Samsung Highlight. It was never promoted as a top of the line model, but as a phone with touch screen technology that everyone could afford. As a inexpensive phone it works reasonably well, and we don’t have any major complaints. If you are looking for a touch screen phone that you do not have to spend a bucket of money on, the Samsung Highlight is a good choice. Users have reported being happy with their purchase and have rated it highly. As for us we are going to give it four stars out of five. It is a good phone, not great, not bad, just average.