The Samsung Gravity for T-Mobile is a thoroughly average midrange phone with a great keyboard for texting. It's become a best seller recently because of its unbeatable price: With some promotions, it's free with contract. Within T-Mobile's thin choice of cheap QWERTY devices, it's our pick, but it's outmatched by competitors on other wireless carriers.

The Gravity looks very similar to the Samsung Rant, LG Rumor, or LG Scoop AX260: a chunky (4.53 by 2.07 by 0.7 inches, 4.3 ounces) candy-bar phone with a QWERTY keyboard that slides out of the side. In this case, the keyboard has three rows of large, rubbery, well-spaced keys that are easy to type on, if a bit sticky. The 2.1-inch screen is bright enough, though at 176 by 220 pixels the resolution isn't very high. The image automatically rotates into landscape mode when you pop out the keyboard, so you can turn the phone sideways for texting. The keys make irritating beeps when you press them, but you can turn those off. With the phone closed, you dial using a set of bumpy number keys, which are a decent size if not well separated.

The Gravity is a fairly good quad-band EDGE phone, but we've heard better. Reception is average. The earpiece is loud, but in a quiet room you can hear a background hiss behind calls. When I spoke directly into the phone my voice tended to sound muddy, with a lot of background noise coming through. The speakerphone, though, was too quiet to use outdoors—and there's no voice dialing. The phone works with both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets. For wired headsets, the Gravity uses a proprietary, flat Samsung jack rather than the standard round jacks. Battery life was quite good, at 10 hours 52 minutes of talk time, though heavy use of the e-mail program can sap your battery life.

You can customize a little "messaging" button right on the front of the keyboard to launch e-mail, IM, or text messaging (but not all three). The IM and e-mail clients are basic but better than AT&T's. The IM client supports AOL, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo but shows AIM buddies only from your "mobile" group. The text-only e-mail client supports AOL, Yahoo, and any POP3 or IMAP e-mail account, which is more flexibility than you'll find on AT&T's texting phones. Both IM and e-mail run in the background and alert you when new messages come in.

I found the e-mail client buggy: It gave me odd error messages when I tried to log in to my Yahoo account and timed out when I tried to download an e-mail with a JPEG attachment from an AOL account. (I got my attachment on the fourth try, and I was able to download and save it to the phone.) IMs and text messaging worked fine, though.

Web browsing feels too cramped, though you can easily do basic tasks on mobile-formatted pages. The NetFront 3.4 browser renders Web pages surprisingly well, if very slowly on the EDGE connection, though the screen is too small to display much of them. You can't load Opera Mini as an alternative because of T-Mobile's infuriating practice of blocking third-party Java applications on many phones. As for other applications, the Gravity scored poorly on the JBenchmark Java benchmark tests, so I wouldn't try to strain it with action games or complex downloaded apps.

The Gravity isn't much of a media machine. It supports only microSD memory cards up to 2GB, not larger cards. Samsung says it supports 4GB cards, but our 4GB SanDisk ones didn't work. You can use your own MP3 files as ringtones, and the phone played our unprotected MP3 and AAC music files over both the included wired headset and an Altec Lansing BackBeat stereo Bluetooth headset. It didn't display album art or play any of our test video files, however.

The phone's camera is also mediocre, at best. It takes 1,280-by-1,024 photos and 176-by-144 videos at 15 frames per second. Videos looked relatively smooth and sharp, but the photos were generally muddy and dark, with bright areas blown out and dim areas underexposed. There's a fun onboard image editor that lets you apply various filters to your pictures, but the resulting images are still of pretty poor quality. At least you can send photos to and from your PC using Bluetooth.

The Samsung Gravity is an unexceptional phone, except in one big way: There's nothing cheaper with a keyboard on T-Mobile. With the demise of the Sidekick iD, the Gravity becomes the go-to phone for heavy texters and IMers on a budget. There are better options out there that cost more or run on other carriers, but if you're shopping for a Gravity, those probably aren't options. If that's the case for you, pick this up and text away.

Compare the Samsung Gravity with several other mobile phones side by side.

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