It’s been nearly four years since I started writing my Electron Hut column for the Vanguard. Yesterday, my dreams finally came true: an outside organization sent us some gadgetry to review. Verizon has thoughtfully provided us with a Samsung Juke to test over a two week period with free, unlimited service included. After spending a few hours with it, I’ve come to the following conclusions.
The swivel feature is cool, but lefties need not apply: besides being a bit flimsy, the hinge only rotates in a single direction. It’s obviously been designed for right-handed users.
The internal antenna is located on the bottom of the phone, directly where most people would hold the unit. This results in crummy reception if you don’t “pinch” the phone between two fingers.
The camera has a similar problem: it’s positioned where your hand would be if you were holding the unit, blocking the view of the lens. It would make more sense if it was on the back of the swivel display.
Reception was mediocre, mostly due to the aforementioned location of the antenna. The speaker volume was surprisingly loud for a phone of this size. It certainly beats out my Blackberry 8700.
The built-in music player, while only possessing 2GB of storage (1.87GB formatted), can play AAC and “iTunes Plus” unprotected AAC files. This is the first non-Apple player I’ve used that can handle the iTunes Plus tracks properly.
There’s a cool “Music ID” feature that listens to 10 seconds of a song, analyzes it on Verizon’s servers, and then spits the song title and artist back out. It works way better than I would have expected. It’s only missed one song out of the 10 or 15 that I’ve played for it so far.
At $99, I probably wouldn’t buy one. Then again, I’m not really the target market for a “music phone” like this. Give me a QWERTY thumbboard any day of the week.