PhoneScoop: Samsung Rogue

[0]Today phonescoop is taking a quick look at the Samsung Rogue, a new messaging phone for the Verizon network. You can see we have a fairly large touchscreen device here that is little bit on the thick side. Of course it is thick to accomodate a full QWERTY keyboard. On the front there is just a couple of buttons here at the bottom they are Clear key and Send and end keys. On the left side of the phone, we have got a volume toggle here. The volume toggle is easy to find. It has good travel and feedback. Here we see Samsung proprietary charging and data port. Little bit disappointed to see the proprietary port on here. Some of Samsung's newer phones have switched to microUSB so this phone must have been in the pipeline before that decision was made to switch to microUSB. On the bottom you can see nothing but the microphone hole there and we have got a whole lot going on here. [1]On the right side of the phone. We have got a dedicated camera key here, we have got a speakerphone key here, a voice application key here, and a lock key here, a slot covering the microSD hatch here and this is a full 3.5mm headset jack. And we have got the lan loop there. On the top we have nothing. And on the back you can see the camera. And this camera is a 3MP shooter. And you can see it has a flash and vanity mirror there, so you can preen yourself in shots. All the hardware feels pretty good, cant complain too much although it is a little thick for my tastes. Opening it up, you see a full QWERTY keyboard here and it is a nicely spaced 4 row keyboard. The row at the top dedicated to numbers which is always nice to have makes using a keyboard a little bit easier. And you can see on the space [2]bar here we have got a short cut to emoticons, and smiley faces and such although not too many other shortcuts here from the keyboard to things such as launching a text message or launching a browser or music player. Just the normal letters, numbers character, and you can see some control keys over here to move the cursor around so if you are wondering what system the rogue uses, of course it runs the TouchWiz user interface from Samsung and its the Verizon version of TouchWiz. So you can see we have got the dock the 4 main things on the bottom, the dialer, contacts, messaging and main menu just above the main buttons here, you can see this little status bar. So that tells you if and when you have got all sorts of different notifications. So the notifications bar is something that is nice to have and nice to see it on this phone's user interface [3]Of course, we have this sliding dock which can be used to quickly access a lot of the phone's systems. And as with other TouchWiz phones if you want to drop something on to the home screen you can do that. And of course you can take it and drop it right back in to the dock. Going to the main menu, we will jump in there and you can see the Going to the main menu, we will jump in there and you can see the Verizon icons here for the main menu and once you get here its a pretty similar to other TouchWiz phones. Hitting the settings tool, you will see the standard menu system for controlling the phone. And we can jump back out to see the browser. We will let the browser fire up here and even though we dont have massive amounts of coverage we will see how quickly the browser manages to launch itself there. And this is the new Verizon portal. You can see it is slightly optimized for finger [4]touch. We have got icons here on the home screen that we can easily touch to get the latest news. So we will hit the news one and see what it pulls up and we have got plenty of little news items down here. And this is a dock along the bottom that lets you control the way the browser behaves and if we hit the menu there you can see all the different things you can do on websites. We will jump all the way back out and exit the browser and look at some of the other applications The Rogue also supports email. Looking at email here we have three choices We could do mobile email which is Verizon's onboard email client. It could do corporate email for exchange accounts and mobile webmail which will use the mobile web to connect to the Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo and such to check mail via the browser rather than onboard client. So [5]we have got a lot of applications here preloaded on the phone. You can see Twitter and YouTube MySpace and Facebook. So nice to see social networking integration thats all good stuff and if we jump back into the main menu you can see that the main messaging client also supports visual voicemail. You have got instant messaging here, another link to email, chats, lots of different settings so That is the Samsung Rogue, a new TouchWiz based messaging phone for the Verizon network. Features a full QWERTY keyboard for easier messaging.

Channel: phonescoop