Thumbs Down:

A bit heavy and the slider key board makes the phone thick.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: CDMA2000
Band: CDMA2000 1X
Phone design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: GPS, music player, camera, AMOLED display.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 has a 3.1 AMOLED touch screen which gives a resolution of 800X480 pixels. It is a color depth of 18-bit (262000 Colors)

The music player of the phone can play formats of AAC+, MP3, AAC, WMA, eAAC+. Video player can play H.264, H.263 and MP4 formats. The phone has a 3.5 mm phone jack. The device has a 3 mega pixel camera with flash and self portrait mirror. It also has a full size slide out QWERTY keyboard.

For messaging there is support for PDF documents, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint. The handset has 1000 memory for phone book-contacts and there is a 90 entry memory each for missed calls, dialed calls and received calls. Lithium ion battery gives you a talk time of 282 minutes and stand by time of 300 hours.

Razzle Dazzle:

The Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 looks good and had it not been for the QWERTY keyboard we would have called it sleek too. It is on par with most of the smartphones when it comes to the looks department. There isn’t much clutter of physical buttons below the screen; just three buttons make up the front face.

Inside Dope:

We are not sure why Samsung put in the QWERTY slide out keyboard in the back of the mobile phone. The big screen has a good virtual keyboard plus the phone would have had a bit slimmer.

The screen of the Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 is AMOLED which means great video viewing and more battery life since AMOLED screens consume less power as compared to standard LCDs. AMOLEDs are supposed to withstand bright sunlight but we found the screen has not quite clear when you take it out there. But this screen is definitely better performer than standard LCDs.

3.1 inch screen of the Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 gives 480×800 pixel resolution and support for 262,000 colors. The screen lives up to what you expect from AMOLED display and the picture is quite sharp, video viewing was excellent and browsing the internet was also a great experience.

In the display you can adjust the size of the dial font, backlight, format of the clock on the home screen, font style of the menu and the effect of transition between the menus. The phone has haptic feedback which means it will vibrate when it registers a touch. The phone also has Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, a bar which is hidden on the left side of the screen wakes up to reveal a host of short cuts of applications that you use the most on the phone. The bar is collapsible and will go away if you don’t want it to ruin the brilliant wallpaper of the screen.

Along with these, there are four icons at the bottom of the screen like dialer, contacts, message and menu, which are the functions that one uses the most on a phone. The phone has a touch screen dialer interface as well as the numeric buttons on the QWERTY keyboard. Likewise, when typing messages, there is virtual keyboard as well as QWERTY keyboard.

Just three buttons make up the physical buttons on the bottom of the screen; they are call, end and the clear key. The end key also doubles up as the power button of the phone. There are a few physical buttons on the sides of the phone like the volume rocker, key to lock the screen, speaker phone key, key for voice commands. The speaker phone key which is also on the sides can be used as a zoom key when in camera mode. The card slot on the sides of the phone is always welcome as you don’t have to go digging inside the phone for accessing the card. Also we were glad to see the phone having a 3.5 mm phone jack which lets you plug your favorite head phones.

Below the Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 is the full sized QWERTY keyboard which is quite unique in design. We said before that the phone could have been fine without the keyboard. But the keyboard is here and looking at the keyboard we think Samsung is trying to say ‘look we have a new design for keyboard’. And we really do think that the keyboard is unique. You seldom find raised keys in a slider keyboard, even slider keypads are known to be flat on the surface because they might come in the way of the slide.

But this keyboard does have raised keys which means you can type on these babies for hours and your fingers won’t howl at all. The built in accelerometer changes the display from portrait to landscape when you slide out the keyboard. Other than this, the accelerometer will work for a few more applications like photo gallery and web browser.

The Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 has a 1000 entry phone book for you to store contacts. The SIM card can take 250 more contacts. A single entry will accept up to five phone numbers, IM screen name, two e-mail addresses, birthday, postal address and notes. There are 22 ring tones for you so that you can give a unique ring tone to a contact. You can also set up a photo caller ID on the phone by clipping a contact to his/her photo.

Other features on the Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 include speaker phone, vibrate mode, calculator, alarm clock, calendar, stop watch, notepad, world clock, timer. There is also a sketch pad where you can draw things and send them to people.

Advanced features include voice commands, file viewer for reading MS office documents and PDFs, USB mass storage and GPS which has VZ Navigator support.

For messaging there is support for instant messaging clients like Yahoo, Windows Live messenger and AIM. For e-mail there are options of mobile Web e-mail, corporate e-mail and mobile e-mail.

You can groove to music on your Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 with the built in music player. The player supports formats like WMA, AAC, MP3 and AAC+. The phone supports 16 GB of expansion through microSD card. Using the music player was easy; the songs got automatically sorted by genres, artists and albums. You can edit and create playlists on the fly and there is also the shuffle and repeat function. You can hook up pictures with tracks using the album art feature but we were disappointed to see that we could not do other tasks with music player minimized in the back ground. There is a search bar which lets you look for the music in your phone library.

The 3.0 mega pixel camera of the phone was certainly great for taking pictures. The phone has both flash and self portrait mirror. The camera is capable for eight resolutions the highest being 2,048×1536 and the lowest is 320×240. There are settings like auto focus, three quality settings, macro focus, self-timer, autoshot mode, three options for metering, adjustable ISO of up to ISO 400. There are also settings for contrast, saturation brightness and sharpness. Advanced features include 10x digital zoom, five color effects, ready sound and three shutter sound along with silent option. There are five shooting modes like mosaic shot, multishot, panorama shot, frame shot and single shot.

The video mode also gives you above average quality. If you intend to send a clip as MMS 176×144 resolution is the only option for you and for saving files on the memory there are two resolutions 640×480 and 320×240. You can adjust brightness, white balance, flash LED, self timer and color effects.

For gamers the huge size and the AMOLED screen will be great to play games at. The phone comes bundled with games like Resident Evil: Degeneration, Need for Speed Undercover and Tetris. You can always download more if you are a gaming enthusiast. There is also a e-dice which is just like a virtual version if you ever need it.

We tested the Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 for call quality that the handset is one of the best when it comes to call quality. We could hear clearly what our friends were saying and they could hear us properly too. The voice was clear and loud too so you wont have much problem with high-noise environments.

Speaker phone calls were also good but you must accept the fact that all speakerphone dip in call quality because they attract a large amount of background noise. But at least you can keep this phone away from your mouth and still make yourself heard. Some of the other phones that we tested had to be kept close to the mouth. When it comes to listening to music on the speakers, it is not that good in quality. The speakers lack bass and we would recommend you to use the wired headset for music.

We also tested the Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 with come Bluetooth headsets and the quality was great. But that again depends on the head set that you are using.

The battery of the Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 will give you a talk time of 4.7 hours and standby time is 12.5 days.