Samsung’s U420 :

I’ll be the first to admit it – I can be a very busy man at any given time. Twenty four hours in a day is not enough for me to get everything done that I’d like to. I’m on the move a lot and as you can imagine, I use my cell phone frequently. So when my Motorola V265’s battery failed miserably, I didn’t have time to wait until my mobile phone contract was up to get a new phone. So I had to pay a visit to my local Alltel shop to find a suitable replacement, which was an event in itself. Amongst my clique of friends, I’m known for being a big fan of Alltel’s call quality and range in this region, and a fierce critic of their phone selection. Poking around a bit turned out to be a great idea, as it lead to me purchasing my current favorite toy, the Samsung SCH-U420 - also known as the “Nimbus”.

The Nimbus is an extremely small slider-style handset available exclusively through Alltel Wireless that appears to have been made specifically to counteract Verizon and LG’s Chocolate. One of the best features of slider phones is that they’re generally - as a rule - pretty small. The Nimbus may take that concept to an extreme, weighing in at a minuscule 3.4 oz (91 grams). In a non-scientific test, I was able to determine that the Nimbus is no longer or wider than an Apple iPod nano, and is roughly twice as thick (when closed up). There’s really no other way to put it: This phone is tiny.

While the phone itself may be tiny in its physical dimensions, the feature set that it has certainly is not. Bluetooth, VGA camera with LED flash, organizational tools, speaker phone, and side panel rockers for volume, speaker, and camera are all there and done very well. To be frank, I’m much more impressed with the innovation that the phone brings to the table in terms of the user interface. The navigation of the phone is simplistic enough for everyone to understand and versatile enough to be quite useful. The Nimbus is also fully compatible with Alltel’s Axcess initiative which allows you to get XM radio content, more ringtones, GPS, and all kinds of things that you wouldn’t normally expect a phone in this class to be able to do. Axcess doesn’t require a special deal when you use it, but it does have a separate fee for the content you download.

If you choose to not purchase any of the Axcess extras, the phone still has more than enough very useful features to keep you covered. The contacts list can store up to 500 contacts, with five numbers, an email address, custom ringtone, and picture ID per contact. The included live search function is a godsend for using that contact list. It uses the alphanumeric keys on the phone to narrow down the contact you’re looking for as you type it in. Having 500 contacts on your phone is nice, but would you really want to scroll through 281 to get to the contact you’re looking for? In addition to voice dialing, the Nimbus also offers voice memo, call recording, and voice control functions, all of which work very well, and are user-customizable to help make it work better just for you. The phone has a high degree of customization available to suit your tastes, even though the defaults are usually just right.

The Nimbus features an extremely bright 1.8” vertical screen. There are no contrast options on the phone, but the font and resolution used is very legible at all times. Call quality on the phone is absolutely fantastic, with most of the people I’ve called on it being unable to tell that I was even on a cell phone. Obviously, the Nimbus has an internal antenna, but despite the stigma that’s typically associated with those, reception has been wonderful in this region. The Nimbus is rated at four hours of talk time and nine days of standby mode, I have actually gotten better-than-rated talk time on the phone. The phone also recharges itself very fast, which is always a big plus.

Not everything on the phone is perfect, though. The Bluetooth functionality of the phone is a bit crippled, not allowing for picture transfers or apparently even synchronization with computers. It seems to be strictly Bluetooth headsets and hands-free devices that it interfaces with, which it admittedly does well. Samsung did not include a standard headphone jack on the phone, more or less forcing Bluetooth headsets on its users for hands-free usage. There is also no expandable memory anywhere on the phone. As mentioned, the Nimbus is an extremely small phone, and those with larger hands like me may find the smooth keys a little cumbersome to work with at first. They’ve become second nature to me after three months of significant time with the phone. I also wish the ringer and speaker phone were a hair louder, but for most people they’ll get the job done.

So the Nimbus isn’t a revolutionary phone by any stretch of the imagination. However, the phone is quite solid in that almost everything it does is done very well, and occasionally with some intuitive concepts in the user interface. I wish the Bluetooth functionality of the phone were a bit more fleshed out, and that it had expandable memory, among a few other minor things. Aside from those, you would be hard-pressed to find a better small phone for the value. The Samsung Nimbus (SCH-U420) is available exclusively from Alltel for $39.99 with a two-year contract.