Samsung's solar-powered Blue Earth touchscreen phone review

At its core the Samsung S7550 Blue Earth is a simple and limited feature phone. But with an eco-friendly focus - from its design to its packaging - and a solar panel for charging on the back cover, it's a very unique device that will please gadget lovers and environmentalists alike.

Physical Aspects

The 108mm x 56mm x 14.2mm (4.25in x 2.2in x .55in) Blue Earth sports a candybar form factor that's very intuitive to use. It feels very small and, at just 90g (3.2oz), it's light in the hand and pocket. The plastic shell has a beautiful dark blue finish that fades to a brighter sky-blue shade around the screen. Upon close examination I noticed some small sparkles in the paint that added to its premium looking paint job. The front of the Blue Earth has send and end keys and a centralized key for accessing the phone's home screen from any menu. The end key also doubles as a power button. A volume rocker is on the top left side of the device and a micro-USB port and a hold/camera toggle switch are on the right side of the phone.

The rear cover is home to the device's 3.2-megapixel camera as well as its solar panel, which dominates most of the rear. If you remove the battery cover you can add a microSD card as well. Oddly, the Blue Earth lacks a 3.5mm headphone jack, but thankfully comes with its own headphones and a micro-USB adapter for listening to music and using the FM radio.

I found that the send and end keys offered very good feedback when pressed, but I think the keys should have been moved up just a hair so that they were below the screen. When I hung up phone calls I often overshot the end key with my thumb.

The 3-inch, 400 x 240 pixel resistive display, with haptic feedback, was bright enough to view under direct sunlight even at a 50 percent brightness setting, but I thought it should have been a little larger given that it serves as the main form of input on the phone. I was able to choose an "Eco mode" for the screen also, which set the backlight duration to just 8 seconds and the brightness to a level of 2.

Core Functions

During my testing period, using AT&T's network in New York City, I found that the Blue Earth offered good, but not extraordinary, call quality. Calls made to friends on landlines sounded clear, if a bit hollow, but I didn't experience a dropped calls or any fuzziness or loss of quality while walking around my apartment. Callers could hear me just fine outdoors, although they reported background noises such as cars passing behind me. Volume levels were more than adequate.

I was able to achieve a day and a half of battery life with the Samsung Blue Earth before charging again. Its solar panel can be used for charging the device, although I wasn't able to juice it up from a completely dead state by leaving it under sunlight. Also, you can't just simply rely on some small amount of light; even leaving it on a table in a room with a ceiling light might not be enough to activate the sensor. I had to physically hold it up within a few feet of a bulb to activate the charging. Still, it's a fun and unique feature that can help you maintain long battery life if you live in a sunny location.

You can add contacts to the Blue Earth by pulling up the dial pad from the home screen and entering in a number, or you can open the main menu, click Phonebook at the bottom of the screen, and then click Create Contact. The device lets you enter in the following fields: contact photo, first and last name, display name, two mobile phone numbers, e-mail, a group name, ring tone, ring profile, birthday, and notes. You can add more fields, too, like a URL, nickname, or job title. To search contacts I had to open my address book and then use an alphanumeric keyboard to type in the search field. The standard address book is boring, but a second application called "Photo Contacts," lets you add photos for your favorite contacts and scroll through them in a fun animated fashion. Oddly, I couldn't find a way to add someone as a speed dial contact, but whenever I held a number on the dial-pad it would tell me the speed-dial option was empty.

There are seven different phone profiles: Normal, Eco, Silent, Driving, Meeting, Outdoor, and Offline. Oddly, there's nothing particularly "Eco," about the Eco call profile, it has a high-pitched ring that barely resembles a bird, but that's about it. Thankfully, you can quickly switch between vibrate and ring mode by adjusting the volume rocker at any time. The Blue Earth lacks voice dialing, a feature most modern phones have. When I set the phone down on my desk and activated speakerphone during a phone call, I found that I needed to use its highest volume setting for it to be adequate even in a quiet room. Call quality through speakerphone was good and I didn't experience any echos, although my caller could tell I was using speakerphone.

Due to its poor onscreen keyboard, the Samsung Blue Earth is not a good messaging phone. I was only able to enter text in using an alphanumeric keyboard and T9; there isn't a landscape QWERTY option. Coming from a full QWERTY keyboard, this was a lesson in frustration every time I wanted to answer a friend who sent me an SMS. If you're coming from a T9 phone already, you may not feel it's as bad as I do. The Blue Earth supports Exchange ActiveSync for syncing your calendar, e-mail, and exchange contacts with the phone, and while that's adequate for checking your e-mail, you probably won't want to send long responses. I found I was also able to add POP or IMAP e-mail accounts and I configured my Yahoo account in minutes.

The Blue Earth supports WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, and AT&T's EDGE network in the United States. On AT&T's EDGE network I averaged 107Kbps with a full signal, which is far slower than you could expect in a country that supports full 3G on the phone.

Multimedia / Applications

Photos taken from my fire escape with the Blue Earth's 3.2-megapixel camera looked good, but without auto-focus, objects didn't always come out as crisp as they did on my BlackBerry Bold 9700, which has autofocus. Also, the Blue Earth doesn't have a flash mechanism, so images shot in the dark didn't come out very well at all. Unless I was playing it back on the phone's screen, the 320 x 240 video wasn't very good; it was pixelated and audio sounded washed out. I did like the camera's interface, however, which relies on its touch screen. I was able to quickly adjust settings by tapping on the various on-screen menu choices.

Web browsing is poor at best because of the awful keyboard and relatively low resolution display. Long addresses took forever to type out, and when I had to add a backslash I had to go to the third page of a symbols menu to find it. Full HTML web sites load, barely, but the text is too small to read without zooming in, which requires a double tap. You probably don't want to view anything other than mobile sites. Thankfully, I was able to turn the phone sideways and activate its accelerometer to view sites in landscape mode.

The Blue Earth serves as a decent music player. It comes with its own comfortable earbuds that plug into a micro-USB adapter. Its volume levels through the speakerphone were adequate for filling my living room with music, even though it was a bit tinny at its highest level. I was able to create playlists for organizing my songs and was able to play my songs back through a Bluetooth gateway I have connected to my home stereo. You can drag and drop files from your PC to the device, provided that you have a microSD card installed in it (and you'll need one, as the device only has 130MB of storage).

The Blue Earth comes with your typical serving of personal information management (PIM) apps, including a calendar, alarm clock, calculator, timer, voice recorder, world clock, and a converter.

User Interface

The homescreen has three options on its bottom menu: keypad, phonebook, and menu. It's very intuitive to use. There's a small gray arrow tab on the left hand side of the home screen that, when pressed, reveals Samsung's TouchWiz user interface. TouchWiz lets you drag and drop small widgets to the home screen. The Blue Earth has three different home screens that you can customize with widgets. You simply swipe your finger across the display to access the others. TouchWiz, not surprisingly, felt a bit sluggish on the Blue Earth, but the widgets are still welcome.

Like most feature phones, the main menu consists of an array of icons, which are spread out across three different screens. There are 30 applications installed in total that range from Messages, Camera, and Internet to WiFi, FM Radio, and more. The unique Eco Walk application tells you how many steps you've walked, which you can also translate into calories burned. The phone doesn't offer very much in the way of customization; you can change the home screen image and change the menu ribbons to four different colors, but that's it - apart from the widgets.

Conclusion

Put on a table, the Samsung Blue Earth will stand out among other phones simply due to its unique solar panel and bright blue coloring. It serves as a solid device for phone calls and light messaging, and many will also appreciate its music player, GPS functionality, Bluetooth, and WiFi support. However, its lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, poor web browsing experience, and awful on-screen keyboard are cause enough for some alarm. On the other hand, I know it's not for everyone: Many will buy this phone for its eco-friendly packaging and industrial design, and they'll be sacrificing some functionality to do their part for the environment. Either way, we still give the Samsung S7550 Blue Earth a "Recommended" rating.