Samsung Alias U740 Review

Interface:

There are a total of 5 themes on the U740. Two of which are the new FlashUI themes My Desk and Amoeba, while the other three themes are the standard Rainbow, Business, and Tropical. The My Desk theme is loaded as the default. It shows a picture of a desk with 5 icons on it: Phone (recent calls), Address book (contacts), Tool box (settings & tools), Mail box (messaging), and a TV (get it now). Selecting any of those icons will then open a menu on top of the desk showing the sub-menus. Even though the My Desk theme is very graphical, we found it a bit cumbersome to go though sub-menus to find what you are looking for. The Amoeba theme is not as graphical, but it has a streamlined appearance and gets you to where you want to go a lot faster. Out of all the themes, this was the one we preferred using. The other 3 themes (Rainbow, Business, and Tropical) are the standard Verizon UI that has been around for over two years. It would be nice if the U740 came with more than just two FlashUI themes.


Phonebook:

Most Verizon phones share the same Phonebook features, and the U740 is no different. Up to 500 contacts may be stored, each with Name, Mobile 1, Home, Work, Email 1, Group, Mobile 2, Fax, and Email 2. There is also the capability to select a Picture and Ringtone to be associated with each contact. When that person calls, the Picture will be shown on the display and their specific ringtone will be played. To access saved contacts, you simply press the right soft key on the phone’s keypad. Stored contacts will be listed alphabetically. If you have a lot of contacts, you can type in their name in the “Go To” field and search for it. This saves time, instead of scrolling though pages of contacts. There are 98 speed-dial locations that contacts can be saved to.

The VoiceCommand feature will allow your voice to operate certain features of the phone. The most useful of these is the voice activated dialing. With it, you can speak the name of the person (saved in the contact list) that you wish to call, or you can speak the digits you want to dial. This features works well in quite environments with little background noise. We were able to use this feature in a car, but with wind noise it had some problems understanding. Other features of the voice commands are Send Message, Lookup Name, GoTo Menu, Check item, My Account, and Help.

The speakerphone can be used with the flip opened or closed. Even though there are stereo speakers on the U740, the over all quality is somewhat lacking when in comparison to the enV. There are 5 volume settings, but we found raising it higher than the first level (Low) would start to cause distortion in the speakers. The louder the volume, the greater the distortion. This reminded us of the poor sound quality that we encountered last year on the LG Chocolate and VX8600. Because of this poor quality of speakers used on the U740, we cannot recommend someone buying this phone if the use of a speakerphone is a main concern. They would be better off with the KRZR or enV, which provides a high quality speakerphone experience.


Organizer:

Accessing the Calendar can be accomplished with pressing the down button on the 5-way navigational pad. It will start by displaying the current month with the date highlighted. You can then use the directional pad to go to any month/date/year that you want. Each date will allow you to enter multiple events, including the appointment name, start date, end date, start time, end time, recurrence (once, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly), alert tone (ringer, vibrate, or lights), and reminder. Once the alert is saved, the phone will notify you by playing the selected ringtone and by showing the appointment information on the screen.



There is a total of 60MB of internal memory on the U740, with 10MB being used by the phone’s software. The rest of this can be used for saving ringtones from Get it Now, pictures and videos, and other downloadable applications. There is also a MicroSD slot that allows you to insert a MicroSD card with MP3 music, pictures and videos from your computer.