Samsung Blast for T-Mobile Cell Phone Review - Software
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Mark Brezinski Published on August 30, 2007 Comment on this |
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OS (3.0)
The Blast's operating system is a pretty basic proprietary OS. The Main menu is laid out in a three-by-three grid of icons, which have corresponding keypad shortcuts. Each icon has a four-frame animation it cycles through when highlighted. We were a bit confused as to why the voice note program merited a shortcut off of the Main menu. The main problem we had with the OS was the content of the menus. Most of the time when you hit whichever soft key brings up a menu, the items contained within it seem like a fairly random assortment of options. They're not organized well, and some options we felt would need to be frequently opened were near the bottom of lists. Other than not being the most intuitive OS out there, once you get a feel of what's where, the Blast's interface is pretty simple.
Home Screen Score (4.0)
The home screen is dominated by the "Fav Five" interface, with five silhouettes you can replace with your contacts' faces. The left soft key opens up the menu while the right soft key opens up the phone book. The select key is dedicated to fiddling around with your Fav Five. Left and right on the d-pad march the faces around in a circle. Up is a shortcut to Call Records and down opens up the contact list. You'll need to go through the menu to access all the other software. The home screen is really limited to just phone functionality.
The top contains the regular lineup of phone info, such as signal strength, date and time, and remaining battery life.
Extensibility (3.0)
The Blast is essentially limited to simple Java applications, such as Opera Mini or Java games. It was nice to get Opera Mini up and running, since the default browser leaves much to be desired.
Customizability (4.0)
You can do a few things to customize your Blast. Like most phones, you can change your wallpaper. There are two different skins to choose from: white and black. You can also alter the text style and color of the "info display," but as far as we could tell, all that affected was the tiny "T-Mobile" displayed on the home screen.
Also, as seen above, there are myriad new, hot things available for download via T-Mobile's online store.
OS Responsivness (9.0)
The one thing the Blast really has going for it is a quick OS. We never experienced any lag, and our inputs were carried out quickly. We have no complaints in this department.
Browser Features (3.0)
The browser on the Blast is incredibly basic. It supports HTML and WAP sites as well as images, but not much else. Java, Javascript, and Flash applications won't work. The same goes for RSS feeds. The Blast doesn't offer any sort of encryption, password management, or automatic field fill-in. It doesn't even support frames.
Browsing Interface (2.0)
The Browsing interface, like most interfaces on the Blast, is simple as a result of limited functionality. The left soft key brings up redundant options like select (a link) or back, which you can just hit the clear button for. The right menu button opens up the menu with the all-important enter URL option. The menu also contains the bookmark feature, a button to return to the home page, and five options worth of gravy.
Once you've managed to stumble across a website, you'll find pictures are scaled to fit the tiny screen, which will most likely make them unviewable. Text stretches down toward infinity, as the Blast can only fit five words per line. There aren't any view options, you can't view pages in landscape, and the text can't be resized. You can bookmark it, and if you choose to you'll be whisked away to a screen with 15 blank slots. This is your bookmark keeper; you have 15 slots and no ready way to organize them.
If there is browser history, the user is not given access to it. You can choose to empty your cache, but we couldn't find this "cache" stored anywhere on the phone, so we couldn't use that to retrace our Internet journey.
Taking the Browser features and slow EDGE connection speed into consideration, along with the above points, we really can't recommend you use the Blast for Internet browsing in any capacity. If you really need to browse the Web on the Blast, download Opera Mini.
Browser Access (6.67)
This test judges how easy it is to get the browser to a website, starting with the phone closed. Unlike our other timing tests, we count the number of steps it takes rather than time. We do this because, since it deals with an Internet connection, times could vary greatly based on location or other conditions. The Blast takes six steps to get to a website, including sliding it open. Once the home screen shows up, you need to hit the menu button, the T-zones shortcut key (3), the "Enter URL" shortcut key (2), enter in the URL, and hit select to set the browser chugging along.
| Cell Phone | Steps | Score |
| Samsung Blast | 6 | 6.67 |
| Apple iPhone | 4 | 10.00 |
| Sanyo Katana DLX | 8 | 5.00 |
| Nokia N73 | 5 | 8.00 |
| Sprint Upstage | 13 | 3.08 |
| Motorola Razr | 13 | 3.08 |
Gaming (6.0)
The Blast comes with two free games and two demos, with the option to download more. The two free games are Forgotten Warrior and Cannonball. The first is an adventure game full of bad translations, a worse storyline, and jumping puzzles, even though the jump keys have fixed height and distance for each press. This game has really weird mechanics that will undoubtedly cause knee-jerk ridicule, but it somehow manages to be entertaining regardless. The second is glorified Pong, set in the future with another bad storyline. The bad story does add a humorous touch, since it was an entirely unnecessary addition in a Pong game. The two demo games are Midnight Casino and Brain Challenge. The casino game is exactly what it sounds like. Brain Challenge is hopping on the Nintendo-set trend of brain teaser games such as Big Brain Academy and its ilk. You'll find similar fare in this mobile puzzler.
Calculator (7.0)
The calculator is in the Organizer header in the Main menu. This makes sense seeing is how calculators organize our numbers for us. The interface is pretty basic, with each of the four directions assigned to an operand and the select key set to the equal sign. The Options menu gives you access to more advanced functions, such as sine/cosine/etc., exponents, factorials, natural logarithm, and pi. This is a pretty comprehensive calculator. The only way we would've given it more points is if it were a full scientific calculator.
Alarm (8.0)
You can set up to three alarms on the Blast. Technically there is a fourth "alarm" that refers to the phone ringing or vibrating on startup. The first alarm is called the "Wake-up alarm," where you can set a time and the days of the week you want it to go off. You can also set it to every day or once only. Of course, you can set the alarm tone. The other two alarms don't have specific intended uses. They have all the same options as the alarm clock, but they also have a snooze alarm option that you can set to one, three, four, seven, or 10 minutes. We were wondering why you couldn't change the snooze settings for the alarm clock, since that's undoubtedly the button most hit on actual alarm clocks. While we don't like to see a limit on alarms, there was a good degree of functionality here.
Document Software (0.0)
The Blast can neither view nor edit any Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or PDF documents.
Other Software (0.0)
There isn't any other software of note.
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