Review: Samsung Sway

The Samsung Sway is a lightweight, relatively thin slider phone that has been available for some time. Long enough for it to sell out on Verizon's site recently. It's a great little mid-range small profile cell phone that comes encased in a silver chassis that makes it appealing to the eye. It comes equipped with a 2 megapixel camera, camcorder capability, MicroSD storage and Bluetooth. Despite Verizon's great reputation, the Sway had had mixed reviews.

The screen is a small, 2.2" color saturated display that provides excellent clear graphics and photographs. Navigation is via the keypad, but is more difficult than other cell phones because the Sway lacks raised keys. It compensates for that by adding ridges for easy key recognition. The layout is good, but users complain that their finger slips off the keyboard to the screen accidentally.

The Sway's camera can take pictures at three different resolutions with a choice of three photo quality settings. Other camera features include a timer, spot metering, and adjustable ISO, brightness and white-balance adjustment, multishot, autoshot, and low light settings, and digital zoom. These features are surprising for a cell phone camera and users report the photos the Sway takes are top quality. The option for extra storage via a MicroSD card was wise, given that most users will want to take lots of photos with this phone.

In addition to the feature-rich camera, the Sway also has a built-in camcorder that allows you to shoot either short videos or full SD card capacity videos. Without the SD card, the Sway only has 50 MB of storage, so if you plan on using this as more than just a phone, buy a MicroSD card. Camcorder graphics are reportedly also excellent and can be uploaded to the net via usb connection.

Voice quality using the Sway as a handset or Bluetooth device were equally good, which is usually the case with Verizon phones. The battery is rated to last about 5 hours, but with a lot of camera, flash and video use, this will be much lower, so consider investing in a car charger. The Sway doubles as an MP3 player as well, with great quality, but without the ability to use Verizon's V-Cast Music system. The music player is bare-bones, but usable, as is the web browser.

Bottom line? The Samsung Sway is at best, an average looking, average featured phone with a nice sleek look. The camera's features are above and beyond what you would expect on a cell phone, and the camcorder feature is a nice addition. As always with Verizon, you get top notch service and quality and enough built-in features to make it an attractive, albeit average, cell phone.