Samsung Array (Boost Mobile)

Boost Mobile may be home to a diverse, capable collection of smartphones, but not everybody needs or wants one of them. There are still plenty of people out there looking for a phone to just make calls and send the occasional text message. The $59.99 Samsung Array is for them. It's a simple phone with a decent keyboard that allows you to save money over time with one of Boost's unlimited plans. It suffers from a lack of 3G and a limited feature set, but it's worth a look if your primary interests are talking and texting.

Design, Keyboard, Call Quality, and Pricing
The Samsung Array doesn't push things very far in the design department. It has the standard slider look, and measures in at 4.41 by 2.12 by 0.59 inches (HWD) and 4.14 ounces. The back panel is made of textured gray plastic, and there's a silver plastic ring around the face of the phone. The black number keys are a little small and flat, but the gray and silver functions keys above are bumped out and easier to press.

The 2.4-inch display features 320-by-240-pixel resolution. It's not great, but text is readable, and you can increase the font size if you want. The screen has a rather poor viewing angle, so if you look at it from any direction other than dead-on it becomes difficult to see.

Texters will be happy with the Array's four-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard, though it isn't anything special. The keys are well sized but flat. It often felt like I was typing incorrectly, though I never actually did. But I think it's something you'll get used to, and you can certainly type much faster on this keyboard than you can on any standard number pad.

The Array is a single-band (1900 MHz) CDMA device with no Wi-Fi that runs on Sprint's nationwide 2G 1xRTT network. It's the only phone on Boost without at least 3G, but that's only a problem if you're planning to use it to surf the Web (more on that soon).

Reception was good, and call quality was average. Voices sound hollow and trebly in the Array's earpiece, but are very clear and easy to hear. Calls made with the phone are also clear, but background noise reduction is poor. It let through lots of wind noise outside on a day that wasn't even particularly windy. The speakerphone sounds fine but doesn't get loud enough to hear outdoors, and calls made using a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset were solid. I was able to trigger the Nuance-powered voice dialing app over Bluetooth and use it without a problem. Battery life was average at 6 hours and 1 minute of talk time.

Boost offers unlimited talk and text plans for just $45 per month, and you don't have to sign a contract. For every six months you pay your bill on time, your monthly fee reduces by $5, until you reach $30 per month. That's about as cheap as you can get for all the talk and texts you can handle.

Apps, Features, and Conclusions
The Array has a simple interface that's easy to navigate. The home screen displays your wallpaper, and allows you to pull up your contacts or messages. Press the central function key to access the main menu, and you're given additional options for the camera, GPS navigation, setting, and Web.

The Array's NetFront browser does a decent job with basic WAP pages, but those 2G data speeds make it painfully slow. If you're looking to browse the Web, even occasionally, you're better off with a 3G phone like the LG Rumor Reflex?.

Considering the keyboard, the Array's messaging capabilities are somewhat disappointing. Text messages are grouped together, but they're not quite threaded in the same easy-to-read fashion you'll find on the Motorola Theory?. Web-based email support is included for AIM, AOL, Comcast, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users, and you can check IMAP and POP3 email accounts as well. Unfortunately, there's no support for instant messaging.

A number of apps and games come built-in, including an alarm clock, calculator, calendar, memo pad, Pac Man, and Tetris. TeleNav GPS also comes preloaded. You can download additional ringtones, wallpapers, and games from Boost, but you can't use your own.

The Array is merely adequate as a media phone. It comes with 39.4MB of available memory, as well as an empty microSD card slot on the right side of the phone, which worked with my 32- and 64GB SanDisk cards. I was only able to play MP3 and WMA music files, but the standard 3.5mm jack on top means you can use just about any pair of wired headphones, and music sounds good. Another plus is that the phone was able to find the music files on my card without having to place them into a specific folder first. Unfortunately, there's no video playback for anything other than what you record with the phone's camera.

The 2-megapixel camera is decent for what it is. Without zooming in, photos look sharp enough and colors appear accurate. Of course, once you zoom in it starts to look like a big mess, but it's usable for the occasional shot. Videos don't fare as well. The camera records small, choppy, 174-by-144-pixel videos at just 15 frames per second. They're barely large enough to see, so you're better off not wasting any space on them. You can save photos and video to a microSD card, which makes it easier to move them out of your phone later.

The Samsung Array is a decent choice if all you're looking to do is talk and text. The LG Rumor Reflex?is an eco-friendly phone with a larger display and a nicer keyboard, though its touch screen and more complex user interface means it's not as easy to use. The Motorola Theory?is another good choice, with better call quality and a sharper display, as long as you like the BlackBerry-style slab design. There's also the Kyocera Innuendo, which we reviewed over on Sprint, though that phone lacks a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

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