Review of Samsung U420 "Nimbus" Cell Phone from Alltel Wireless

The Good:
- Small and lightweight design
- Big, beautiful screen
- Abundance of features

The Bad:
- Poor keyboard
- No bluetooth-to-computer
- Magnet issues

The U420 is a small and light slider phone from Samsung. It's very well designed and packs a lot of good features into it's small package. All of features work very well, with very few shortcomings.

The first thing you notice about the U420 is its small size. The phone is less than 4 inches long when closed; it's small enough to lose in your pocket. Sliding the phone open and closed, something I was leary of at first, is easy and natural with one hand. The phone feels solid in your hand, and mine has survived several drops from about waist height.

The majority of the closed phone is dominated by its relatively huge screen. The screen is fantastic. Viewing pictures on it, something I've come to hate doing on a cell phone, is almost tolerable. The VGA camera, which features a flash and a small mirror for taking self-portraits, is exactly what you'd expect. Picture quality is fine for a cell phone, way too bad if you want to use it for anything else.

Opening the phone reveals its biggest flaw: the keyboard. The keys are very flat, seperated only by a small line. Typing messages without looking takes a bit of getting used to. The biggest problem is that the top row of the keyboard sits right up against the top part of the phone. Someone with large fingers would find it difficult to hit the top row of keys. Indeed, I have small fingers, and I have a hard time sometimes. The keyboard isn't horrible, but it takes a lot of getting used to.

I've connected the phone to several different wireless headsets without problem. All the devices were detected without any trouble. However, as far as I can tell, there's no connecting this phone to a computer via bluetooth. No backing up your address book, no pulling off pictures, no uploading your own ringtones, unless you buy a data kit.

The rest of the phone is very good. Menus are fairly intuitive and easy to figure out. There is very little that you can't customize on this phone. You can even make it vibrate and ring at the same time, a feature that is, if you ask me, essential, but seems to have been removed from a lot of newer phones. Call quality is very good, and reception is reasonable. The phone seems to struggle to stay in digital and out of analog mode when other phone don't.

I do have one final complaint. When I bought the phone, I also purches a small case with a magnetic clasp. I noticed very quickly that the magnet in the clasp seemed to have a weird effect on the phone. Moving the phone past the magnet, something that happens every time it is removed, makes the phone come out of its dormant mode. It also hangs up on whoever is calling if the phone is removed while it's ringing, making it pretty much impossible to keep it in the case.