First Call: Samsung Juke
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Mark Brezinski Published on October 25, 2007 |
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Verizon are advertising the Juke widely; leading up to the holidays, they seem to think that this small, funky looking handset will be the hot thing to have. But is it any good? We just got our review unit in, so here are our first impressions of the unusual cell phone.
The very first thing that struck us about the $99.99 Juke from Verizon was its size. It's hard to tell from pictures where there's no scale, but the phone is incredibly short and narrow, and very thick. The thickness isn't something we've seen in any advertisement, so it was definitely surprising to see. The screen is 1.3 inches tall and 0.75 inches thick, which means it has a diagonal measurement of just under 1.5 inches.
On the photo on the left, you see the Verizon V9, the Juke and the AT&T Tilt. As you can see, the Juke is a small little thing, but as the photo on the right shows, it's a bit on the chunky side. From the bottom in the right photo we have the AT&T tilt, the Verizon V9 and the Juke at the top. In a world full of iPhones and E90s, the Juke's screen is Liliputian in scope. Most watches have a bigger screen than the Juke (38mm diameter is about 1.5 inches, which gives an area of 1.77 square inches versus the Juke's meager 0.975 square inches). It's very hard to not get lost when creating an entry that requires you to fill out multiple fields, since only three are displayed on screen at a time. Note: the following pictures are not actual size -- the actual size is much, much smaller.
The Juke doesn't even include a browser, which makes sense as it would be pretty much impossible to browse the Web on a device this size. In a baffling decision, however, the Juke doesn't support VCast; the manual instructs you to visit the VCast site instead, on your PC, and then transfer via the included proprietary USB cable. We cannot fathom why Verizon would leave VCast off a device they're very heavily marketing as a music handset.
The second thing we of course fooled around with was the fancy new swinging barn door flipping action. Obviously, the first test we did was to see if we could flip it open and closed with one hand, just by swinging it. While opening it is quite easy, getting it shut is rather hard. Once you get the technique down, you can probably do it and make it look cool about 80-90% of the time, which means you'll fail, retry, and look like a fool about 10-20% of the time. We also didn't like how you have to close the phone in order to use the media player. All in all, this phone appears to have a unique look, but not much else. It also feels more like an old MP3 player with a tiny display than a phone.
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