Samsung Memoir Review

Messaging:

The Instinct has arguably the best onscreen QWERTY we’ve ever tested, so we were not surprised to see the Memoir perform admirably.  Like the Instinct, the Memoir allowed for quick, virtually error-free typing right out of the box, and it one-ups its iPhone killing brother by ACTUALLY offering a T9 keypad in portrait mode!  One very cool feature is that when you select a key it is enlarged by stretching it to the side so that you can see the letter you pressed even though your finger is covering it.  The left half of the keyboard stretches to the right side and the right half to the left.  That software designer deserves a raise.  The handwriting recognition mode worked pretty well too after a few minutes of getting used to it, but the delay between the input and recognition makes it an impractical solution.  One thing we were sad to see omitted was threaded SMS messaging.



One of our gripes with the Pixon was the email client’s lack of preconfigured clients.  For example, we couldn’t even set up our Gmail account without manually entering the servers.  Luckily T-Mobile has tapped OZ for their email client, and on the Memoir it clocks in at v2.8.10.  It comes preconfigured with most popular providers and if not found you can provide your own settings.  Our Gmail setup was quick and easy this time around.  Performance, however, was decidedly slow.  We got several errors when trying to load the inbox, and even when it and messages did load it took forever (minutes, sometimes.)  We’re in a 2G market, but app is not graphically intensive so email shouldn’t have any problems loading in a few seconds.


Connectivity:

The Memoir is a quad band GSM phone.   Where available it offers HSDPA 1.8 for 3G data, or EDGE when in 2G areas.  It features Bluetooth 2.0 and supports the HSP, HFP 1.5, OPP, FTP, SAP, A2DP, AVRC, BPP profiles.  It allows for GPS navigation using A-GPS for faster locks.

The web browser is listed as a full HTML browser, but in reality it is pretty limited.  Like we’ve seen with the Instinct and Glyde, the browser isn’t nearly as capable as offerings from Apple or Opera.  Though the phone does support Java and we were able to download Opera Mini, we could not get it to actually connect to the internet which is a huge drawback when trying to browse the internet.  With the included browser page rendering was good but over EDGE it took forever to load, so much so that only mobile pages were wroth the effort.