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Samsung t719The Samsung t719 from T-Mobile features push e-mail and a slim design, but it’s no Pearl. Price: $199 (with a two-year contract)
By Jeffrey L. Wilson 
When we first heard about the Samsung t719, the first clamshell to feature BlackBerry push e-mail, we were intrigued. But that was last spring. Since then, the BlackBerry Pearl was introduced, and it packs more features into an even more compact design for the same price. We took this quasi-smart phone for a test drive to find out if it was worth the wait.
Weighing a very light 3.5 ounces, the t719 feels solid, unlike Samsung’s Nicole Richie-esque Trace. The silver-and-gray exterior isn’t the most eye-catching, but the contoured corners and 3.7 x 2.0 x 0.7-inch clamshell body give the handset a certain level of sleekness. A small external screen displays the standard time, power, and signal strength readouts, but it has a pea-soup-green background until you open the clamshell and a multicolored background appears. On the inside, the t719 sports a bright, 2.2-inch internal display with 262,000 colors. The resolution is only 176 x 220 pixels, however, compared with the BlackBerry Pearl’s 240 x 260 pixels. A large D-pad and soft menu keys made navigating menus and our Inbox a cinch. Beneath those buttons is the SureType keyboard, which squeezes two letters on most of the keys and uses software to predict the words you are typing. SureType isn’t as good as a full QWERTY layout, but it beats the multitap method. Even though it’s not a true smart phone, the t719 can synchronize your calendar and contacts with your PC using the included USB cable and Samsung PC Studio software. The phone can store 1,000 contacts, and we had no problems synching. Calendar entries, complete with notes, also transferred to the phone easily. Like a true BlackBerry, the t719 does a good job of delivering e-mail as soon as it hits the server. You can send and receive messages from up to five different addresses, whether they’re enterprise or consumer POP3 accounts. We were able to access a Gmail account by simply entering our username and password, but we didn’t have the same success with our Hotmail or Yahoo accounts. Unfortunately, the t719 cannot handle attachments (either sending or receiving), so you can forget about opening Word docs or other files sent via e-mail. On the other hand, we liked the built-in instant messaging application, which includes the AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo clients. Because it lacks a smart phone operating system, the t719 isn’t very good at surfing the Web. We visited Yahoo and were met with an error message stating that the page was too large to load, which also occurred when visiting a few other sites. Refreshing those pages sometimes resulted in the content properly loading, but it took forever to do so. Photos shot with the 1.3-megapixel camera looked okay when there was a lot of ambient light, and the swiveling lens made taking self-portraits easy. The t719 also shoots video, but the footage looked grainy and the movements jerky. You’ll have to store images and videos to the 25MB of built-in memory, as the t719 doesn’t come with a memory card slot. (The BlackBerry Pearl uses microSD Cards to bolster its memory.) Yet another strike against the t719 is its lack of a music player. The Pearl can play both AAC and MP3 files. Bluetooth is included for wirelessly synching a headset or computer or for updating the t719’s calendar. Although having BlackBerry functionality in a clamshell design is cool, we can’t recommend the Samsung t719 over the identically priced BlackBerry Pearl, which features a media player, a microSD Card slot for memory expansion, an attachment viewer, and a sleeker design. If T-Mobile drops the price to $149 or $99, then we’ll talk.
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