The large number of keys needed for QWERTY mode gives the keypad room for a bunch of shortcut buttons in number-pad mode. You can jump to the camera, voice dialing, the speakerphone, an alarm clock, a list of games, or activate Bluetooth with a single touch—it's just a pity users can't customize those shortcuts. The keys' uniform size takes some getting used to: I kept expecting the cursor, Send, and End keys to have a different size or feel, and of course they don't. But once you get acclimated, banging out messages is super-quick, since the keyboard is very comfortable.

The new home screen and menu design are overly cutesy, to the point of being a bit difficult to use. All the main menu options are icons in a "virtual living room" that you move through with a cursor. Fortunately, you can kick the menu back into a less-gimmicky, standard mode.

Overall, the Alias 2 is a solid voice phone with good reception. The earpiece is loud and doesn't distort, and there's a pleasing side-tone (the sound of your own voice into the earpiece). Transmissions sound intelligible, if a little thin. The phone transmits some background noise, but not too much. The speakerphone is quite loud, but its transmissions sound a little distant.

The phone worked well with a wired 2.5mm headset and our Plantronics Voyager Pro mono and Altec Lansing Backbeat Bluetooth stereo headsets, including triggering the no-training-necessary voice dialing. The vibrating alert is powerful, and ringtones are loud, but you can't use your own MP3s. Battery life, at almost 5.5 hours of talk time, is quite good. The Alias 2 supports visual voice mail, but you have to pay $2.99 per month for it.

Flipped into landscape mode, the Alias 2 is an unstoppable texting and e-mailing machine—or it would be, if Verizon had better SMS and e-mail software. The basic SMS program supports threaded messaging, but it isn't turned on by default; you have to go three levels deep into an obscure setting to activate it. Verizon offers two e-mail clients. Mobile Email is $5 per month and gives you basic, text-only access to POP or IMAP (including Gmail, MSN, or Yahoo accounts) with no attachment support. RemoSync ($10 per month) syncs over the air with servers running Microsoft Exchange 2003 or later, showing you your e-mail, calendar, and tasks, and letting you access your corporate address directory. But it's also text-only, with no attachment support—not even for pictures. Both programs are also relatively clumsy and visually unattractive. You can also hit your Web mail account through a lackluster WAP browser from Openwave that can view mobile-formatted versions of Web pages, but it isn't a full-blown browser.

Music syncs over a USB cable (which is not included) with Rhapsody or Windows Media Player on PCs, or you can drag and drop your tunes onto a microSD card using a PC-based card reader. The phone supports MP3, AAC, and WMA files, but you can also buy songs from Verizon's store on the phone itself. Music sounds fine through wired or stereo Bluetooth headsets. Video files didn't do as well. The phone won't sync video, and when I dropped video onto a memory card, my MPEG-4 test file was very jerky; only a 15 frames-per-second (fps) 3GP file played back adequately. You can store music, video, and photos in the phone's 100 MB of onboard memory or on a microSD memory card; our 16GB SanDisk card worked fine.

The 2-megapixel camera takes soft photos, with washed-out white areas and about 700 lines of resolution, which is typical for a not-so-great, 2-megapixel camera phone. Low-light photos show occasional blur. The video mode records 176-by-144-pixel videos at 15 fps.

The few games I downloaded played smoothly, and VZ Navigator GPS driving direction software worked fine in my tests. The Alias 2 is one of the first phones with version 4.5.2 of VZ Navigator, which adds the ability to speak the names of locations into the phone—dictating didn't work too well in my tests, but the QWERTY keyboard helped for typing directions the more traditional way. The Alias also works with Verizon's Chaperone child-tracking software, both as a parent's phone and as a child's.

You can use the Alias 2 as a modem for a PC with the appropriate service plan and a USB cable, but I wouldn't recommend it. The handset uses Verizon's slower EVDO Rev 0 3G system rather than the much faster Rev A system all of Verizon's dedicated modems, and many of its phones, now use.

Thanks to its versatile e-ink keyboard, the Samsung Alias 2 SCH-u750 is the best texting phone in Verizon Wireless' lineup right now. Our general-purpose Editors' Choice handset for Verizon, the touch-screen LG Dare VX9700, lacks a physical keyboard; and the LG EnV2 VX9100, is another solid phone with very similar capabilities, but it lacks threaded text messaging and is slightly more expensive. At $79.99 with contract, the innovative Alias 2 is a great deal for frequent texters.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 25 minutes

Compare the Samsung Alias 2 with several other mobile phones side by side.

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