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This Review Submitted By: Carol

Samsung continues to refine its 3G flip phone designs with the sleek, eye-catching SCH-A950 for Verizon Wireless. Complete with a 1.3-megapixel camera, a TransFlash expansion slot, Bluetooth, a speakerphone, and a quartet of music controls below the colorful display, the stylish SCH-A950 just might knock the Motorola E815 off its pedestal as our favorite Verizon V Cast phone--the bigger but flatter Razr V3c notwithstanding. At a reasonable $130 (or $80 with a two-year service plan), the Samsung SCH-A950 ranks as one of the most affordable 3G phones we've seen from a major carrier.

That said, we're as annoyed as ever by Verizon's continued policy of limiting Bluetooth access to wireless headsets and forcing MP3s to be converted to WMA format for playback on the phone. With its silver curves and glossy red trim, the Samsung SCH-A950 is certainly a looker. On the sides, it has the same oval-shaped stereo speakers as Sprint's Samsung MM-A920, while the camera lens and 1.1-inch, 65,000-color screen on the outer flap also look familiar. The big change, however, is the addition of a large jog dial just below the external display that's surrounded by buttons for next, skip, play/pause, and stop. Pressing and holding the play button when the phone is closed launches the phone's music player, while the jog dial lets you scroll through playlists, scan forward or backward within a song, and select a track for playing--similar to "scrubbing" on an iPod. Although it was a handy feature overall, the phone's scrollwheel was a bit small for our thumb. At 3.4 by 1.9 by 1.0 inches and 4.6 ounces, the solidly built SCH-A950 is exactly as large and heavy as the Motorola E815, but it fit better in our jeans pocket, thanks to the welcome lack of an external antenna. We like the SCH-A950's sleek, colorful style.

The Samsung SCH-A950 comes loaded with most of the features you'd expect from a 3G multimedia phone. Starting with the basics, you get a 500-name phone book, with room in each contact for five phone numbers and two e-mail addresses; caller groups; a calendar with week and month views; voice dialing and memos; picture caller ID; a vibrate mode; a speakerphone, which, as we noted, you can turn on before making a call; an alarm clock; text and multimedia messaging; a world clock; a calculator; and a TransFlash memory expansion slot, which is expandable up to 512MB, though you'll have to buy your own card. Although the handset comes with Bluetooth, it supports only wireless headsets; Verizon has (again) disabled Bluetooth file transfers, contact syncing, and the ability to tether the handset to your PC as a modem. What's more, since only music, pictures, and videos can be saved via the TransFlash card, you'll have to buy third-party syncing software if you want to transfer any other files.

Using the included USB cable, you can sync the phone with your tunes using Windows Media Player 10 on your PC (sorry, Mac users), but with one important caveat: Any MP3s in your collection will need to be converted into WMA files--and lose audio quality in the process--before they're transferred to your phone. Verizon has taken a lot of heat for this limitation and rightfully so; however, we should point out that this restriction applies to all Verizon V Cast phones and not the SCH-A950 in particular. The SCH-A950's camera lens comes with a flash. The Samsung SCH-A950's built-in 1.3-megapixel camera includes all the requisite features, including an LED flash; a 10-image rapid-fire mode; resolutions ranging from 160x120 all the way up to 1,280x960; a 10X digital zoom at the camera's lowest-resolution setting; a 5- to 10-second self-timer; and several white-balance and color settings. It also has a pair of more advanced settings we don't typically see in a camera phone: ISO speed, ranging from auto to 100, 200, and 400, and metering (Average, Center, and Spot).

I successfully paired the phone with the Plantronics Explorer 320 Bluetooth headset and enjoyed good clear quality, though the volume was somewhat low. We were impressed by the Samsung SCH-A950's EV-DO performance; our Web browsing was speedy, and videos and full-length music tracks downloaded in about 30 to 40 seconds. We noticed some network slowdowns as the phone attempted to connect to the V Cast Music servers and while acquiring DRM licenses; once the actual downloads began, though, they were swift. Our videos streamed cleanly and rarely, if ever, paused for buffering; however, we experienced some occasional but distracting lip-sync problems. As noted before, the Samsung SCH-A950's picture quality was slightly above average for a 1.3-megapixel camera phone, with decent detail, reasonably rich colors, and slight to no video noise, although our snapshots obviously paled in comparison with those taken with 2-megapixel camera phones.

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