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 Samsung SyncBudget music phone for Cingular customers offers plenty of features and content options for the money. Price: $49.99 (after $100 with a two-year contract)
By Rachel Metz 
Aggressively priced but chock-full of features, the Samsung Sync ($49.99 after signing a two-year contract and sending in a $100 mail-in rebate) is among the first handsets to take advantage of Cingular's array of new music services, including XM satellite radio and support for Napster and Yahoo Music (for subscription or a la carte downloads). Throw in a two-megapixel camera and external music controls and you have a very good reason to leave your nano or Shuffle at home.
The Sync is hardly a slim phone, weighing four ounces and measuring one inch thick. Its black body is a bit forgettable looking, but it feels solid and has good-sized flat buttons that are easy to press. On the outside, the Sync sports a one-inch color screen; the internal screen is 2.2 inches and supports 262,000 colors. We like the Samsung Sync's menu layout, which you can view as either a grid or a list. In list view, you will also get to see Samsung's new sublist feature, which lets you see the contents of each menu as you scroll, without having to dig around. The Sync's focus on music is clear from the get-go. It comes with a dedicated music button that leads users right into the Cingular Music menu. You can load your own tunes onto a microSD Card (about $40 for 1GB), but the Sync also lets you purchase music from Napster and Yahoo Music and transfer those tracks to the phone form your PC. You can buy individual tracks for 99 cents or get all-you-can-eat music by signing up for a monthly subscription plan ($14.95 per month for Napster and as low as $11.99 per month for Yahoo). Unlike Sprint's or Verizon Wireless' music phones, you can't download songs over the air, but you can bookmark tracks to be downloaded once you get back to your PC. Customers can also side-load tracks from eMusic ($9.99 for 40 songs). Regardless of whether you go the a la carte or rental route, you'll need to spring for a $40 accessory kit to sync your Sync; the kit includes a USB cable, headphones, and software. That's $10 more than Verizon Wireless charges for its kit and only $10 less than the phone itself. If you don't want to bother with synching the Sync, try streaming radio through MobiRadio ($9.99 per month) or XM Radio Mobile ($8.99 per month). These services let us flip from Christina Aguilera to the Beastie Boys with just a few clicks. MobiRadio has more than 50 channels; XM Radio Mobile has 25 channels. Though both streams cut out a few times, it wasn't a big inconvenience. We also appreciated the Cingular-exclusive Music ID feature, which listens to a few seconds of a song and then identifies the track. It couldn't ID the first single we played ("Wake Up" by the Ditty Bops), but it identified Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" in less than 30 seconds. We could then choose to download recommended ringtones (in this case, Bowie's "Space Oddity") or send the ID tag on to someone else. We would like to have been able to tag songs for download after the service identified them. You can listen to music with the Sync open or closed. When you receive a phone call the music stops; when your phone call ends, simply press the play button to resume listening to music. The external touch-sensitive controls make the closed Sync seem more like a real MP3 player, though the phone initially refused to skip forward through our track list. This problem soon righted itself mysteriously. The Sync's speaker was surprisingly loud and fairly clear even when turned up to maximum volume. It could definitely come in handy for rocking out at the beach or a hotel room. For mobile listening, we used Samsung's earphones, which double as a headset. They were a little uncomfortable, and while the sound quality was okay, they didn't get very loud. If you're looking for more options, you can use the Sync with Bluetooth stereo headphones; we had no problems pairing the Sync with Bluetake's i-Phono. Because this quadband phone rides on Cingular's high-speed HSDPA data network, the Sync supports Cingular Video for watching music videos, as well as entertainment and news clips from the likes of CNN, ESPN, and HBO. Unfortunately, videos looked pixelated on the Sync's small screen. We were pleasantly surprised to see a two-megapixel camera on the Sync, which is a first for a sub-$50 phone. The camera took shots good enough for 4 x 6-inch prints. Recorded videos didn't look so hot, but that's to be expected with a measly 176 x 144 pixels of resolution at 15 frames per second. The Sync works fine as a phone. Conversations sounded clear in our tests, and we got very good reception in and around Manhattan. In terms of battery life, the Sync is rated for up to four hours of talk time and up to ten days of standby time. In our tests, the phone lasted about two days on a single charge with frequent multimedia use. Cingular subscribers looking for an entry-level music phone can't go wrong with the Sync. We don't like the hefty premium for the data cable and headphones, but the wide choice of content providers and streaming radio options make this one rocking cell.
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