More and more people these days use their phones for texting and email, but not everyone needs something as sophisticated as a Smartphone. So, phones like the Samsung Blast are appealing to many people who just want a phone that they can easily use to send emails and text messages.

The Samsung Blast has a very nice form factor. It’s a thin slider with a 20 button keyboard. It’s very light weight and has a nice sized screen. The Samsung Blast is an all-in-one phone. Not only does it have a camera, but it’s also great for texting. It’s an MP3 player with a 1.8 inch LCD screen.

The first thing I did with the Samsung Blast was test sound quality for both phone calls and music, and I have to say it was pretty good. It was better than my T-Mobile Dash’s sound quality; the speaker phone was even good. Something I have noticed about Samsung phones is that their speaker phone feature is crystal clear, unlike many others that crackle and are hard to understand. When playing music, the sound quality was pretty good. My only problem was the headphones. I wish there was a 3.5 mm I could use instead of the propriety headphones included, but I was able to use Bluetooth headphones to listen to music.

The phone can hold as many songs as you can fit onto your microSD card. It supports up to 2 GB cards. I tested it with a 4 GB card, and it was a no go.

Texting on the Samsung Blast was a blast. Although it does not have a full keyboard, I found myself sending texts pretty fast. The keyboard at first is a bit confusing, but once you get used to it, you will be texting and emailing people like a pro. I am used to full QWERTY keyboards, but I could survive with the keyboard the Blast has if I had to.
If you love to take pictures with your phone, you will love the camera on the Blast. The picture quality isn’t the best, but its damn good for a camera phone. You can even add effects to the camera which was fun. The camera also records pretty good videos. The camera is 1.3 megapixels.

The UI for the phone is great also; it has probably one of the top 5 easiest user interfaces to use and probably one of the easiest phones to use in general. From the volume and camera button on the sides to the stop button on the front under the screen, all of the buttons on the phone are where you would expect them to be.

Battery life for the phone was great. I was able to get over 6 hours of talk time and over 24 hours of music playback.

Overall the Samsung Blast is great. It has all the features you’d expect from a Smartphone, but without having to buy one. For that, we award it our 5 Star Must Have award.

The Samsung Blast is available from T-Mobile for $99.99 with a 2 year contract or $229.99 without.