In an age of powerful smart devices, many consumers still want cell phones that are "just phones." A perfectly fine example is the Samsung M360 ($19.99-209.99), a modest flip phone that feels well-built and sounds good on voice calls. It's far from the most exciting device we've tested. But it's a decent choice for anyone looking for a cheap cell phone on Sprint's main network. Sometimes, that's all a person needs.

Design and Call Quality
The Samsung M360 measures 3.9 by 1.9 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.6 ounces. It has comfy, soft-touch black back panel, and a glossy, royal blue front cover. The passive-matrix external LCD is reasonably informative. Flip the phone open and things improve further. The internal 2.2-inch screen sports a sharp 240-by-320-pixel resolution, vibrant color, and crisp fonts even in small sizes. The diamond-shaped, five-way control pad was a little weird, but it was accurate enough, and the UI responded quickly to button presses. The oversized numeric keypad is very easy to dial numbers on.

The M360 is a dual-band EV-DO Rev 0 (850/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality was full and warm in the earpiece, and not as trebly as some other Sprint phones I've tested. The M360 also went deafeningly loud. Caller said I sounded crystal clear, and reception was also good. Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. Voice dialing worked perfectly over Bluetooth without training. The speakerphone was surprisingly loud, and good enough to use outdoors. Battery life was also good at 5 hours and 31 minutes of talk time.

Apps, Multimedia, and Conclusions
The M360's UI was simple to navigate and responded quickly to key presses. The Access NetFront 3.5.1 browser delivered sharp WAP pages, but it botched HTML sites. On the plus side, the home page features a Google search box right at the top. Text messages are threaded. There are no e-mail or IM clients, but that's not a huge loss on a basic phone.

Sprint Family Locator support makes this a good phone for kids or their parents, with Safety Check geo-fencing and secure texting features. The phone also supports Sprint's parental controls, which lets you restrict incoming and outgoing calls, and limit access to some of the phone's features. There's no actual GPS navigation, though.

As is obvious from the specs, this isn't much of a multimedia phone, either. There's no music player, video player, or camcorder. The 1.3-megapixel camera lacks an LED flash and auto-focus capability. That said, test photos looked fine both indoors and out, with reasonably balanced color and lighting, although they could have been sharper. There's no memory card slot; the only way to get photos off the phone is to send them over the air. There is just 1.5MB of free internal memory, which is good for only 46 photos at the default resolution.

Despite the M360's sparse feature set, it's a fine phone for anyone who wants a budget-priced device on Sprint. I like this phone better than the Sanyo Vero (Free, 2.5 stars) which has no 3G and steps down to a monochrome LCD; the M360 is worth the extra 20 bucks up front. The Samsung Seek SPH-M350 ($19.99, 3 stars) loses the hardware numeric keypad in favor of a touch screen, but it gives you a real music player and a memory card slot—two very useful features to have. Finally, the LG Rumor Touch (Free, 4 stars) is our current Editors' Choice, and a much more powerful option that includes a QWERTY keyboard, powerful music and video players, and social networking compatibility. You'll need to pay extra monthly data fees to access some of those features, though.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 31 minutes

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