Samsung Gravity TXT

Remember feature phones? Well, they are still around although the world is now being attacked by an army of smartphones. One such feature phone determined to survive the crusade is the Samsung Gravity TXT. Being a socially connected messaging phone, it tries to capture the youth market. Will it succeed in doing so? Read on to find out.

Design
The Samsung Gravity TXT makes you reminisce of the phones that you used to have in the past. Those candy bar phones with round edges and small screens. However, once you are done thinking about that phone you once used to love, come back to reality and you will realize the Samsung Gravity TXT is rather behind in terms of design but it does have that QWERTY keyboard that slides out. The plastic exterior gives a very worrying feeling that it might fall apart at some point. Aiming to be a messaging phone, you might get the feeling that too much texting on this one might cause it to crack open. Measuring 4.41 x 2.09 x 0.55 inches, it has to be said that it is one of the thinnest feature phones out there. Tipping the scales at just 3.95 oz, it turns out to be super light too. The display is a 2.4 inch QVGA TFT display which we will soon find out didn’t perform too well either. As mentioned earlier, it is the keypad that brings you back to your phone from the days before smartphones. It’s a pretty straightforward keypad but with some well-sized buttons that is also very responsive to our touch. However, the optical joystick on the Samsung Gravity TXT didn’t do as well as the keypad as it was unresponsive thus making your life hard when it comes to navigation. The 4-row landscape style QWERTY keyboard is also not the best in town. The buttons are tiny plus the whole keyboard is flat making it hard to feel those keys one from the other. On the right side of the Samsung Gravity TXT, you will find the Mirco-USB charger port as well as the camera button. Meanwhile the volume rocker and microSD card slot can be found on the left side of the phone. Meanwhile on the top is the standard audio jack. When you flip it around you will find a 2MP camera sitting there together with some speakerphone notches to give it company.

Features
There’s really not much to talk about the phones CPU and the like, so we will jump straight into the interface and software stuff. Well, you cannot expect anything close to HTC Sense from this phone but sadly what we got was really bad. The platform wasn’t really attractive although it was extremely easy to get around. Adding on to that, there isn’t much in the way of customization as the most you can do is changing the background wallpaper and the main menu layout. So at this stage, we really stop and wonder how on earth they are going to capture the youth market with the Samsung Gravity TXT’s lack of appealing graphics. Nevertheless, there were no complains on the phone’s speed. However, as mentioned earlier, using the joystick to navigate around the phone is a total downer and you might want to stay away from it too.

 Since it was aimed at messaging, let’s focus on that for a bit as it is a highlight for this phone. Pressing the dedicated messaging button brings you to messaging instantly. The Conversations option was something that caught our attention as it manages to organize messages between multiple recipients. We noticed a slight annoyance while typing a message, you’ve got to hit shift every time to get your letter to be in caps because it doesn’t work if you just hold the shift button. The Samsung Gravity TXT has an email app too, and it really helps to get out an email in a matter of seconds. Besides, we also like the fact that the Samsung Gravity TXT offers support for Exchange emails. To stay connected with your friends, the Social Buzz is there to give you the low down on what’s new. This is because it aggregates content from Facebook and Twitter and also allows you to create new posts there and then.

The 2.4 QVGA (240 x 320) TFT display gives no reason to cheer about as it is rather low in quality. We say this because the pixilation was obvious and color production was just dull. Adding to this is the issue of being able to view it under direct sunlight as it was impossible to view anything. Viewing angles were not good either as we lost a significant amount of color with just a slight tilt.

With the Samsung Gravity TXT, it might be a good idea to just stick to texting as using the camera might not be such a good idea. The 2MP camera produced some bad results. Photos taken under low light conditions were drowned by digital noise. So since we would rather you not taking photos, we would obviously not want you to be taking videos.  Recording at a resolution of 320 x 240 at 14 fps is enough to tell you the kind of results you can expect.

The Samsung Gravity TXT albeit being a feature phone definitely still provides for web browsing. However, we were often told that pages were too large to load hence leaving us baffled on what to from there.  Adding to that, sometimes there are media contents that the phone fails to load leaving white spaces behind as a mark. Again, doing any sort of navigation or in this case scrolling with the Samsung Galaxy TXT was no fun.

The earpiece posed some problems as the tones produced were weak thus making it hard to clearly make out the exact words although we could hear the person speaking clearly without much noise. It was no fun for our friend on the other end too as he could not make much out of our hollow voices on his end.  Signal strength wasn’t much of an issue although we faced some fluctuating signal reception at times. Battery life on the Samsung Gravity TXT finally gives it some positives. WE could get 10 hours of talk time from just one charge which is great for those who talk all night with their girlfriends.

Pros and Cons
The Samsung Gravity TXT is definitely a cheap feature phone. Adding to that is the great battery life.

However, the build relates closely to the price by giving you a really cheap feeling. The optical joystick was also not responsive plus the web browsing experience was bad.

Conclusion
The phone could use some improvements in terms of design. But if you are looking for a phone for some texting and making a lot of phone calls, the Samsung Gravity TXT might be one to consider.