Samsung SGH-T809 Review - Display & Audio

Display & Audio

The 320x240, 262,000 color QVGA display on the T809 is as gorgeous as the phone itself.  Even bigger and better than the exemplary screens on the Sony Ericsson K750i and w800i, the T809's screen is sharp, vivid, and has ample room for gaming, photo viewing, and more mundane tasks like contact and datebook browsing.  As I mentioned before, the first accessory you'll want for your T809 is a case or screen protector; the one drawback of any slider or candybar phone is that the screen is always exposed to the elements.  One look at this Samsung and you'll agree, its screen is well worth protecting.

Call quality on the T809 is good, though I did find myself regularly turning the volume up towards the higher end of the available settings in order to hear comfortably.  Ringtones and music files played back through the phone's built-in speakers, on the other hand, come through with volume to spare.  Reception on the T809 over the T-Mobile network was excellent; the phone has a quad-band GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz radio inside.

Not surprisingly, the implementation of Bluetooth installed on the T809 does not support stereo audio, so while you can use a Bluetooth headset for calling purposes, you won't be able to listen to stereo music from the phone without the wired headset.  Very few phones currently offer stereo over Bluetooth, but it would have been a nice surprise had Samsung included it.

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