Samsung t309

With its antenna-free design and two-tone black-and-charcoal body, the three-ounce t309 makes a good first impression. Open this clamshell and you’re greeted with a nicely spaced dialpad and a 65,000-color display that’s fairly easy to read. The screen doubles as a viewfinder for the reasonably sharp VGA camera, and we had no problem sending an image to an e-mail address. The call quality on T-Mobile’s network was only fair, and we noticed that some words sounded a little garbled on our test voicemail message. When you’re in an area with decent coverage, you’ll like the convenience of the built-in speakerphone. Those good with their thumbs will appreciate the t309’s support for instant messaging (AOL and Yahoo) and addictive downloadable games like Frogger. It took about 45 seconds to download the latter over the Samsung’s relatively pokey GPRS connection.

www.t-mobile.com