Wiredglitz

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.