Samsung P735

Someday, we'll all have phones with hard drives inside with our entire music collection loaded and ready to go. Until then, there's Samsung's innovative P735, which comes with a built-in MP3 player and a 32MB memory card for downloading some tunes to enjoy on the way to work or anywhere else you take your phone. Throw in a megapixel camera, swiveling display, and a few cool 3D games, and you know why it's worth $499.

How do you get music onto the phone? Samsung makes things easy by including a 32MB memory card. This is no ordinary card, though; it's a new format called Reduced Size MultiMediaCard (RS-MMC). Thankfully, the thumbnail-sized card snaps into an adapter so it can slip into any SD card slot. If your notebook does have such a slot, you'll have to spring for a card adapter. We used a USB card reader from SanDisk.

While 32MB is better than nothing, keep in mind the included card provides enough storage capacity for only about seven or eight songs. We recommend springing for a 256MB card, which goes for about $50. That should give you enough room for anywhere between 60 and 80 tunes, depending on the bit rate you use.

We ripped U2's Vertigo CD to MP3 using iTunes, then dragged the files over to the memory card on our desktop. Once we plugged the card back into the phone we had to change the memory location on the handset from "Phone" to "MMC" in order to start playing the music.

Even through jumping through these hoops is a tad annoying, the music sounded surprisingly clean and loud, without any distortion, both through the included headphone/headset combo and the phone's speaker. We really liked how we could still listen to our tunes with the display closed; in fact, a little equalizer shows up on the external OLED display, along with the song title. Too bad we had to open the flip again to move ahead or back in our playlist. We also wish we could use other applications while the music plays, like the calendar or wireless Web browser.

Ergonomically, the P735 is a little odd. We like the 262,000-color main display and that it can swivel and lie flat against the dialpad if you want to use features like photo caller ID. But, the overly large circular hinge often gets in the way. In addition to being an eyesore, the hinge also houses the navigation control. Meanwhile, the menu buttons are on the bottom half of the clamshell, so we found ourselves constantly shifting our eyes up and down to wade through the menus.

Much more fun are the included 3D games. Weekend duffers will really appreciate Zio Golf, a realistic simulation complete with challenging courses, wind conditions, and more bunkers you can shake a sand wedge at.

Otherwise, T-Mobile's data services are fairly standard. We downloaded a New York Yankees logo for our wallpaper and sent a few Yahoo instant messages without a problem. But the phone took anywhere from 20 to 40 seconds to pull up CNN's wireless Web home page. Plus, the handset failed to send our good-looking but large one-megapixel photo of Times Square to an e-mail address.

Is the P735 ready to replace your iPod? Not by a long shot. But if you're currently carrying a flash-based MP3 player and you're looking to buy a new phone, this Samsung does a good job combining the worlds of telephony and music into one device.