There’s nothing wrong with dressing up Android. HTC did it brilliantly with the Hero and Droid Eris. But Samsung slapped their TouchWiz interface on here, which feels awkward at times.
The Behold II has solid, good-looking hardware. Like so many other phones nowadays, it’s a slab with a big touch screen and a bunch of buttons at the bottom. There’s a four-way cursor rocker instead of a trackball or optical mouse. The screen is a super-bright AMOLED panel with great color. On the plastic back, there’s a stylized map of the world.
One of the physical buttons activates the Behold II’s weirdest UI touch, the “cube.” The cube is an entirely pointless 3D graphic that lets you go to YouTube, the Amazon MP3 store, the music player, the video player, the Web browser or the picture gallery. If you shake the phone, the cube spins until it picks a random selection. It looks like somebody’s demo of their 3D graphics acceleration technology. It’s entirely silly.
You can ignore the Cube, but you can’t ignore all the other things Samsung has done to Android. Samsung dropped a bunch of buttons and menus on here to make the Behold II work and act like their other TouchWiz non-smartphones, devices like the Samsung Rogue and Highlight. That means a “quick list” button that pops up a very non-smartphone-looking menu grid. The standard Android apps drawer pops out of the side of the screen.
Here’s what Samsung decided to add: A new, much better camera app. A new camcorder app. A new music player , with a CoverFlow-like thing going on. A new and pointlessly ugly SMS app. New Exchange e-mail, but everybody does that with Android 1.5. New and uglier on-screen keyboard. New memo pad app, photo gallery, dialer, call log, video player. I could go on.
I’m not saying the changes here are all bad, but there sure are a lot of them, and they’re not as obviously positive as HTC’s changes were. Some UI elements and images seem rougher and less-finished even than the stock Android seen on the Samsung Moment for Sprint. For instance, I can’t figure out why they changed the dialer, and the stock Android dialer is nicer. The camera app, on the other hand, looks more like other Samsung cameraphones, and has lots of options.
Want to judge for yourself? Check out our slideshow which includes a UI comparison between the Behold II and Samsung Moment.
Beyond the new UI, the Behold II has a 5-megapixel camera and a pretty standard Qualcomm 528-MHz ARM11 processor, the same one that’s in the G1 and the MyTouch 3G . I’m not expecting any big performance surprises from this phone. But given that the G1 and MyTouch 3G are both a big step behind Sprint’s and Verizon’s Android phones in power, the Behold may be the leading Android choice for T-Mobile. We’ll see.
We’ll have a full review of the Behold II soon.
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This phone is awesome. Good that I did not get the Samsung i7500 unlocked version. This will be cheaper if I get it with a contract on T-mobile.
Does anyone know the exact date of availability of Behold II?
We feel the article is really interesting. I am very interested in reading a lot more.
Just acquired a Mythic for myself and will likely be acquiring one particular for my wife soon! It has just the suitable mix of functions. just short of the full smartphone. I’m maintaining an eye around the Captivate for a potential long term telephone..
.prices are way too higher when released. I’ve been in great tech for 20+ years and essentially hack almost everything I own to generate it much better laptops, GPS, vehicle navigation techniques, etc. and yes cell phones as well. Inside the few days I’ve owned the telephone I’ve already installed Opera Mini, Bolt 2.1, freecaddie, Google Maps w/GPS functionality, deleted all locked ineffective apps following backing them up and completely modified the menu method to my exact needs with no all unproductive apps.
Nicely I’ve been addicted to flashing, caused by VZW not looking us to possess access on the GPS on our phones. So I uncovered the threads that tought me to flash my cell phone. Can even cook a tiny, but you’ll find significantly far better chefs in existence, so I’m happy to toast their perform. I at this time am running Lioryte’s 23529 create of the WinMo 6.five.1 on the Samsung Omnia with VZW. So now I’ve won the Behold 2 from Samsung, been playing with it for any couple of months.I’ve it rooted, I’ve BusyBox on it and aHome UI. looks excellent, performs very good, but too significantly bloatware. (The Cube and far more) Tried the Galaxy trick, quite rapid and full of useable memory. It is Android 1.five pure. I would rather update the B2, not revert to Galaxy, and construct from that. I will if that’s the only way, I’ll check new Odins to the B2 and do what ever help I can to aid the B2 community advance the excellent of this mobile phone.I’m searching forward to helping make the B2 the finest Android phone offered.
I have had my droid since december but had to get a replacement as a result of the software ruined my cellphone when it up to date itself. So for sure having troubles & found this glorious website lol i do have a questio tho…my ram storage is gettin smaller & smaller..is there nethin i can do to help get sum back?