At $99.99 after a two-year service agreement and mail-in rebate, the Samsung Conquer 4G is Sprint's first 4G smartphone to launch at less than $100, although some older 4G phones now cost less than $100 up front. Luckily, the Samsung Conquer 4G is packing plenty of power, fast 4G speeds, and fantastic call quality. It's not designed to compete with Sprint's top-of-the-line Android phones, but it's an excellent bet for getting 4G on a budget.

Design, Call Quality, Performance and Apps
The Conquer 4G looks nice, if not particularly luxurious. It measures 4.6 by 2.4 by .5 inches (HWD) and weighs a refreshingly light 4.1 ounces. The back is made of textured black plastic, with a chrome band separating it from the matte black plastic on the front. The 3.5-inch capacitive LCD has 320-by-480 pixel resolution. Though it's bright, responsive, and standard for midrange Android devices, it pales in comparison to the higher-res screens on most of its 4G brethren. Typing on the on-screen QWERTY keyboard was fine, and the four physical buttons that sit below the display are large and easy to press.

The Conquer 4G connects to Sprint's 3G CDMA and 4G WiMAX networks, as well as to Wi-Fi. 3G and 4G speeds were right on par with the excellent Motorola Photon 4G ($199.99, 4.5 stars). Running Ookla's Speedtest.net app, I saw 4G download speeds up to 9Mbps down, which is pretty great. They averaged closer to 4Mbps, which is still good. Like all Sprint 4G devices, the Conquer is capped at 1.5 Mbps for 4G uploads. The Conquer can also be used as a mobile hotspot to provide network access to up to five devices with the proper plan.

Call quality was great. Voices sound full, rich, and natural in the earpiece, and volume goes incredibly loud. On the other end, calls made with the phone sound good, with decent noise cancellation, though voices could sound a touch muffled. The speakerphone is just loud enough to use outdoors, but voices are somewhat thin and scratchy compared to the earpiece. Calls sounded very clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars), though a bit lacking in depth. Voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. Battery life was excellent, at 7 hours 42 minutes of talk time.

The Conquer 4G runs the latest version of Android, 2.3.4 (Gingerbread), and Samsung has done very little to mess with it. You won't find Samsung's TouchWiz UI here, which makes this phone appealing to fans of stock Android. There's still some undeletable bloatware, as wells as preloaded Sprint ID packs, so it isn't for diehard Android purists, but zippy performance should make up for that. The phone is powered by a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S2 MSM8655 processor. Its benchmark scores can't touch those of the latest and greatest dual-core Android devices, but the Conquer ranks among the best of its single-core-class, turning in some excellent numbers. It also tested very well for browser performance, which felt speedy in regular use.

All of the standard Android apps are here, but not much else. There's Google Maps Navigation for free voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions. Google Talk is also included, though for some reason you can't use it for video chat, even though the Conquer is running Gingerbread and has a front-facing camera. You can use Qik (Free, 2.5 stars) for that, which is also preinstalled, though we found it to be less than ideal. Luckily, the Conquer has a standard screen resolution that most Android Market apps support, so you also shouldn't have much trouble running any of the 200,000+ available third-party apps.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
There's a 2GB microSD card preloaded in the slot underneath the battery cover; my 32GB SanDisk card worked fine as well. The standard 3.5mm headphone jack means you can use the Conquer with just about any pair of wired headphones. Music sounds great, both over wired earbuds as well as through Altec Lansing BackBeat Bluetooth headphones ($99, 3.5 stars). The music player is stock Android, and it was able to play every music format I tried.

Standalone video support is also pretty good. The Conquer was able to play H.264, MPEG-4, and XviD files just fine, though it doesn't support DivX. Still, videos looked nice on the phone's screen.

The 3.2-megapixel auto-focus camera comes with an LED flash. Though I would've preferred to see a higher resolution camera, the Conquer took decent photos in daylight, with surprisingly good detail. Shutter lag was on the slow side, at 1.2 seconds, and photos didn't fare as well in low-light conditions. Recorded videos max out at VGA (640-by-480 pixels) resolution, but they look pretty good and play back at a smooth 29 frames per second.

Sprint is the only major carrier to offer truly unlimited 4G data, which makes the Samsung Conquer 4G an even more tempting proposition. For an additional $100, the Motorola Photon is Sprint's top-of-the line super-phone. It's a world phone with a beautiful, high-res screen, and it can double as a nettop PC with the proper accessories. The HTC EVO Shift 4G ($99.99, 4 stars) also has a sharper, higher-res display, along with a fantastic slide out QWERTY keyboard, but it's running on a less-speedy 800 MHz processor. The successful but older HTC EVO 4G ($99.99, 4 stars) is still also a strong option with its big 4.3-inch screen, though voice calls don't sound as good and it's heavy as a brick.  So if you're looking for a combination of great call quality and fast 4G speeds at a relatively inexpensive price, the Samsung Conquer 4G is a great choice to make.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 7 hours 42 minutes

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