Samsung Stratosphere Review
By Blake Sanders on December 9th, 2011
This phone benefits from a slide out keyboard that appears along one side of the phone. You won’t mind the slightly chunky 0.55 inch thickness when you realise that it enables the nice keyboard to be incorporated into the design. It’s a QWERTY keyboard too so it is easy to use if you are familiar with a computer keyboard. It’s large enough to minimise the instances of hitting the wrong keys.
The thickness of this phone might lead you to believe it will be chunky in its other dimensions too, but this isn’t the case. It comes in at just shy of five inches in length and just over two and a half inches wide, so it’s a nice size. Anyone looking for a reasonable size screen isn’t likely to be disappointed with the 4 inch Super AMOLED screen included here.
The Samsung Stratosphere is well equipped to handle many of our modern demands for internet capability too. It’s capable of using mobile hotspots and has an HTML browser that can handle Adobe Flash. Some people don’t like pre-installed widgets but the chances are pretty good that you’ll appreciate the weather widget and the dual and digital clocks. Add to that the fact that it’s got an Amazon Kindle Reader built in – not to mention YouTube access and Android Market access – and you can see why the Samsung Stratosphere is popular.
There are some less positive points to this phone though (we cannot really call them negatives because when they are weighed in with the price it is difficult to be too critical). Firstly the 1800mAh battery is a pleasant surprise, longer lasting than you might think it would be, but it still doesn’t quite have the juice required to support a range of uses of the phone throughout the day. It could have been worse though. Secondly the price point has also limited the amount of RAM that was included. You’ll find just 512MB of RAM under the hood, and while this is okay you feel that some people would happily have paid more to get a little more for their needs.
Still the Samsung Stratosphere is an impressive phone for the money, and one that will please those who love a proper QWERTY keyboard to play with.
