Review: Samsung SCH-u940 Glyde for Verizon

Samsung SCH-u940 Glyde

Samsung SCH-u940 Glyde

Samsung SCH-u940 Glyde

[This review is a tad less complete than some of our reviews. A bit of unfortunate timing and some transatlantic travel forced it to be written at 37,000 feet over the Atlantic ocean. Half of the photos were shot on a plane as well, with the other half being shot in a hotel. -editor]

Samsung's SCH-u940 Glyde is the latest touchscreen device to be offered by the Korean handset giant. It goes on sale today at Verizon Wireless locations. The Glyde has a lot of the same cool technology that the LG enV2 and Voyager offer, but is far more compact in size. With specs like a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, EV-DO 3G data, an auto-focus camera, and a full touchscreen UI, the Glyde could be very appealing to those Verizon customers with a bit of iPhone envy.

You will find complete specs of the Glyde on the last page of the review.

Physical Aspects

The Samsung Glyde is a very good looking, if simply designed, messaging phone. The phone feels solidly built, and the slider that reveals the QWERTY keyboard has a very smooth and mildly sprung action to it. There are few hardware buttons on the Glyde, and only one on the face of the phone: the home key. On the right edge users will find the power/lock key, the volume control, and the camera shutter button. All of the buttons work well enough.

The back of the Glyde is plain except for the camera and its LED flash and self-portrait mirror. The rear cover can be removed to provide access to the microSD card slot and the battery (which doesn't need to be removed when swapping memory cards). The only other item of interest on the phone is the covered power/headset/USB port on the bottom left edge of the phone.

In order to fit into a device as compact as the Glyde, the keyboard design had to be compromised a bit. There are only 3 rows of keys on the keyboard, which means that the space bar has to be mixed in with the bottom row of keys. As such, the keys don't line up the same way they do on a full size keyboard. For example, the M key sits under the L key instead of the J key where it would typically reside. This will make blind typing a bit harder - at least initially. In spite of the poor positioning, the keys themselves have nice tactile feedback.

The WVGA (240x440 pixel) display on the Glyde is relatively large, at 2.75" across the diagonal, and more than bright and crisp enough. Like most finger touch screens on the market, with the one on the iPhone being an exception, the Glyde's display has a bit of give to it that is required for the touch sensing technology. A combination of that with perhaps some software issues make it a bit inaccurate to use at times, but more on that later. The other problem is its widescreen format, which we found to be less than optimal for most all tasks.

In the case of the Glyde, this oddball aspect ratio takes its toll on a number of applications in the phone, most notably the browser. The very short height of the display when in landscape mode gives users very little finger room for scrolling up and down in web pages. The display does allow the phone to stay narrow, but a wider display and an extra row of keys on the keyboard would have made the Glyde much more usable.

So while superficially the Glyde has a nice physical design, the compromises made appear to be a bit too severe for a device meant to excel at messaging and use a finger based touch interface.