Samsung SCH-U470-Juke Red Review - Introduction & Design

Introduction & Design

The Samsung Juke for Verizon is a cool little phone that makes calls, plays music, and tucks away almost unnoticed in a pocket or purse.  Featuring two gigabytes of built-in storage, a front-mounted scroll wheel for navigating through your music library and contacts list, and a unique switchblade design, Juke is small, slick, and easy to use.

Samsung and Verizon left a lot out of Juke in order to make it tiny and inexpensive.  There's no 3G data, no access to Verizon's VCast multimedia offerings, and a very small - if bright and sharp - display.  You're not going to want this phone if you text, email, or surf the Web a lot on the go, and Juke's VGA camera and low-res screen won't do much for the technophiles out there, either.  But if you're looking for a cool little handset for calling, listening to music, and the occasional GPS usage, Juke  is a neat piece of gear that works really well.  If you like its look, that is.

Juke is a uniquely designed handset.  It's long, narrow, and a bit on the thick side, and somehow reminds me of an oversized, squared-off tube of lipstick.  Samsung sent me the Blue version of the phone, which features a shiny silver click wheel as well as a silver keypad.  

While Juke measures a pretty thick 21mm from top to bottom, with a length and width of just 97 x 30 mm, this is a long and narrow phone.  As such its display is a mere 1.45" across.  The front panel of the phone is taken up by the display and the metal scroll wheel, which I found responsive and easy to use.  Flicking or twisting the panel swivels the phone open with a satisfying snap - it takes a fair bit of force to get the motion underway, but the mechanism works quite well.

Inside there's a standard dialing layout with a twelve button keypad and navigational array consisting of two soft keys, Send and End/Power keys, a Clear button and a dedicated key for the camera.  The scroll wheel doubles as a D-Pad for navigational purposes, as well.  While the keypad is a bit crowded, the buttons themselves are big and I found them surprisingly easy to use. 
 
Flipping Juke over reveals a back panel speaker mounted along side the camera lens in a black plastic mount.  When the phone is in the open position, a self portrait mirror mounted on the back of the top panel is revealed.  There's also a volume rocker switch on one side of the phone and a hold switch, charger/accessory port, and a plastic-capped 2.5mm headphone jack on the other side.

All in all I really liked Juke's design, with a few notable exceptions.  First off, the phone is pretty thick, and while it's overall diminutive dimensions and fashionable design help offset its thickness, its still, well, thick.  More importantly, direction in which the top panel swivels is a bit counter-intuitive, and whenever I flipped the thing open or shut I had to immediately turn the whole device upside down in order to read the display - someone in Samsung or Verizon's UI department should have figured out how to program Juke's screen rotation to avoid this issue.  

Also, while Juke does come with a wired stereo headset, it uses a 2.5mm headphone jack which just seems silly to me.  If you're going to bother putting a headphone jack on a music phone at all, why not just make it the universal 3.5mm size that will work with the headphones people already own?

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