Last year’s Samsung Focus (4 stars) is the best-selling Windows Phone 7 device to date in the U.S. The new Samsung Focus Flash ($49.99) could be another winner, as it packs a 1.4GHz processor and a 3.7-inch Super AMOLED Plus screen for a suprisingly low price. It’s a nice smartphone, but as yet another midrange black slab, it doesn’t stand out enough to get new cell phone buyers to take a chance on Microsoft’s fresh OS.
Design, Call Quality, and Apps
The Samsung Focus Flash measures 4.6 by 2.3 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.1 ounces. It’s a fairly indistinct touch screen slab, with a tapered back panel, black glossy plastic, and a glass display. You can easily lose this phone among a sea of lookalikes at the retail counter. The 3.7-inch, 480-by-800-pixel, Super AMOLED Plus touch screen looks as crisp and vibrant as always. In fact, it looks sharper at this panel size than it does on larger Samsung screens, since the resolution is the same across the board. Typing using both portrait and landscape keyboards is easy, and I still think Microsoft has the best keyclick sound effect.
The Focus Flash is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSPA+ 14.4 (850/1900 MHz) device; that makes it three-and-a-half G in our book, instead of 4G. It also has 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. This is a good voice phone; callers sounded clear and warm in the earpiece, and no one had trouble understanding me through the mic. Reception was a little below average; the Focus Flash struggled to hold onto 4G signal in an area that other AT&T phones don’t usually have trouble with.
Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars). The TellMe-powered voice dialing worked perfectly over Bluetooth with repeated tests, and the speakerphone sounded full and loud. Battery life was fine at 5 hours and 34 minutes of talk time.?
The Qualcomm MSM8255 is a single-core S2, 1.4GHz processor. It runs Windows Phone 7.5 well. The OS itself is great; suffice it to say that Windows Phone 7.5 Mango offers a unique, compelling design based on sliding tiles with real-time updates, plus more comprehensive Office, Exchange, and Facebook integration than what iOS or most Android phones offer.
AT&T adds a considerable amount of bloatware. Some of it is useful, such as AT&T Navigator, since Windows Phone doesn’t come with its own voice-enabled GPS app the way Android does. Samsung adds a single news, weather, and stock quote aggregator. It’s quite attractive, with a minimalist design that matches the rest of the OS, but it crashed on me after reading a single Yahoo News article. Windows Marketplace offers 40,000 third-party apps, but Android and iOS have many more.
Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
All Windows Phones are more or less identical on the multimedia front. You get a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack, 8GB of internal storage, and no memory card slot. Music tracks sounded fine through Samsung Modus HM6450 Bluetooth headphones ($99, 4 stars), with no audible artifacts.?The built-in Zune software is much better than most people give it credit for, with beautiful, full-screen album art screens (for some artists), a clear UI, and smooth animations. The iPod ship may have sailed years ago, but Microsoft did get the software right in the end. The Focus Flash syncs smoothly with both Zune desktop software on the PC, and Windows Phone 7 Connector on the Mac (which syncs with iTunes). Standalone videos played smoothly in full screen mode, including 720p and 1080p files transcoded in real-time.
The 5-megapixel camera includes an LED flash. Test photos were about average for this level sensor; performance was quite good with sufficient outdoor lighting, and then fell considerably as indoor lighting dimmed. The two-stage auto-focus was easy to use; without it, the Focus Flash saved photos instantly, but blurred many of the indoor shots. The autofocus added about a second to each shot, but made them sharp. Recorded 1280-by-720-pixel and 640-by-480-pixel videos were smooth at 30 frames per second, with surprisingly high recorded bitrates. But I found a bug: switching from HD back to VGA stretches the aspect ratio in the wrong direction. Exit and enter the camera, start in VGA mode, and it works fine. On the front, there’s a 1.3-megapixel camera for video chats.
The Focus Flash is a quality smartphone. It’s our favorite Windows Phone. It makes more sense than its more expensive sibling, the Focus S ($199.99); all you gain for a whopping $150 are six-tenths of an inch in screen size, more storage and an 8-megapixel camera sensor. Everything else, including screen resolution, CPU, HSPA+ 14.4, and apps, remains the same. But Windows Phone is an underdog, and it needs to shout to be heard. Another midrange black slab phone isn’t going to draw shoppers away from the more proven Android and iOS platforms.
The Android-powered Motorola Atrix 2 ($99, 4 stars) gives you a dual-core processor, HSPA+ 21 data speeds, and a larger and sharper screen. Our Editors’ Choice on AT&T is the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket ($299.99, 4.5 stars), which is obviously much more expensive, but it includes 4G LTE data speeds, a 4.5-inch screen, an 8-megapixel camera, and a fast 1.5GHz dual-core processor. Both Android phones can tap into over a quarter million apps in Android Market, far more than what’s available for Windows Phone 7.5.
Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 34 minutes
More Cell Phone Reviews:??? Samsung Focus Flash (AT&T)??? Samsung Transform Ultra (Boost Mobile)??? HTC Rezound (Verizon Wireless)??? HTC EVO Design 4G (Sprint)??? HTC Rhyme (Verizon Wireless)?? more
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