The latest in a now-crowded field of Verizon messaging phones, the Samsung Glyde is a slender, attractive handset. Though its touch screen could be smoother, it's a good addition to Verizon's lineup of text-centric devices.

I'm going to eschew the often-made iPhone comparisons for this handset. Sure, the Glyde has a big touch screen, but it really doesn't feel like an iPhone at all. It's long and lozenge-shaped, with a 2.8-inch, 240-by-440-pixel touch screen on the front. A single "hard" key takes you straight to the home menu. At 4.1 by 2.0 by 0.7 inches (HWD), the Glyde is both shorter and narrower than the hunky LG VX10000 Voyager, which it somewhat resembles. But rather than flipping open like the Voyager, the Glyde's hidden full QWERTY keyboard slides out. Even so, you still use the main touch screen when entering text with the keyboard. The Glyde doesn't have an accelerometer, but the screen rotates automatically (and snappily) when you pop open the keyboard.

Home screen buttons offer quick access to the dial pad, main menu, contacts and messaging, and you can jump to a customizable shortcut screen for things like e-mail. The Glyde uses animated wallpapers that react to your touch, which is fun. Touch-screen buttons are thoughtfully chunky enough for fingers, though there were instances when I had to stab them a few times to get the phone to respond. Like the LG Voyager, the phone vibrates slightly when you press a touch button to confirm that you've touched it. You navigate through scrolling lists (such as your contacts) by swiping your finger up and down the screen. It takes a bit of getting used to, but then this interface becomes quite easy.

The Glyde is a good voice phone, though I heard the occasional volume wobble. Sound through the earpiece, in general, was loud enough and well rounded, too, with just enough voice feedback. Transmissions through the microphone were clear as well, though with slightly fluctuating volume. Background noise does come through on the microphone. Speakerphone delivery is hollow, but clear. I found reception to be average on my tests. The Glyde worked well with our Plantronics Voyager 520 and 590 Bluetooth headsets, and it has a 2.5-mm headphone jack. Battery life, at over 5.5 hours of talk time, was excellent. The phone has speaker-independent voice dialing that can be activated over Bluetooth.

Music and video come via the standard Verizon V Cast players. You can play music from a microSD card dropped into a little slot under the back cover; a 8GB SanDisk card worked just fine. (The 35MB of internal memory doesn't hold much in the way of media.) The music player syncs with Windows Media Player using an included USB cable, and it plays MP3 and WMA (but not AAC) files. Music sounded loud through the built-in speaker, though I heard some background hiss in the Plantronics 590 stereo Bluetooth headphones. V Cast streaming videos, on the other hand, looked badly compressed and didn't play in full-screen mode.

The Glyde has a true Web browser, Access NetFront, which renders surprisingly quickly and is pretty faithful to desktop layouts. It's definitely better than the browsers loaded onto Verizon's LG phones. It even handles JavaScript and very heavy pages like our PCMag.com home page. You can also scroll around pages by swiping your finger on the touch screen. But the browser has one very annoying bug: In its default zoom mode, clicking on links is very difficult. (There's that quirky touch screen again.) I had to either tap some links several times or zoom in and then click. Annoying, too, was how YouTube's mobile streaming media page didn't work.

You can connect to and read text-only messages from POP3 and IMAP e-mail accounts with Verizon's Mobile Email program; connect to multiple IM services with the standard Verizon IM program (but, obnoxiously, not see your full AIM buddy list), and, of course, send and receive text and picture messages. The Glyde also works with Verizon's VZ Navigator GPS driving directions program. But I ran into more touch-screen problems in the e-mail and navigator apps. During their setup procedures, I was unable to click on touch buttons at the bottom center of the screen. I could hit Return as a workaround pretty easily, but I'd rather these issues were fixed.

The device works well as a modem for a PC or Mac, using the included USB cable. I connected my Glyde to both a Mac and a PC without a hitch. As it's an EV-DO Rev 0 device, you should get speeds from about 400 Kbps to 800 Kbps down. But like many Samsung and LG phones, the Glyde falls short if you want to use that USB cable to sync data with a PC. There's no way to copy your contacts and calendars over to the phone, an irritating limitation on something that could have been a fine PDA.

The Glyde's 2-megapixel camera, with a very weak flash and self-portrait mirror, is average for a cell-phone picture taker. Like many cell-phone cameras, it blows out bright areas in outdoor shots and tends to both overexpose and blur low-light shots somewhat. But outdoor shots, in general, were sharp enough. The camcorder mode is unacceptably unsteady at 320-by-240-pixel resolution, but 176-by-144 videos at 15 frames per second were clear and easy on the eyes.

For basic talking, texting, and Web surfing, the Samsung Glyde does a good job. While I still recommend the LG enV2 (which has similar features, sans the touch screen, for only $129.99 with contract) to most people, the Glyde will work for you if you prefer its slider-style keyboard layout.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 38 minutes

Compare the Samsung Glyde SCH-U940 with several other mobile phones side by side.

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