First Look: Samsung's two-faced iPhone fighter

Tired of waiting for Apple's iPhone? You might want to check out a potential rival that you can buy sooner: Samsung's innovative, super-slim, two-faced UpStage (M620), sold by Sprint Nextel.

On the eve of the giant CTIA Wireless trade show in Orlando, Sprint announced that it will begin selling the UpStage on April 1. Its price will be $300, or $150 with a two-year contract, Sprint representatives say.

Unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, the UpStage is a candy-bar style handset that's less than half an inch thick and not much taller or wider than an iPod Nano. Other multimedia-friendly cell phones struggle to balance the sometimes-conflicting requirements of a conventional handset and a music or video player; the UpStage solves this quandary by simply putting phone functions on one side of the device and the multimedia functions on the other side.

Face of a Phone

The UpStage's phone face has a 1.4-inch sliver of a color screen, a directional toggle, and the usual keypad -- one with soft, flat keys. The music-player/multimedia side features a 2.1-inch, 176-by-220-pixel display and a touch-sensitive navigation pad with a central button on the other. A small Flip button on the edge of the unit toggles between the two sides, but the prompt that confirms you want to stop playing music (on the music side of the phone) and make a phone call gets old pretty quick. (The phone side will of course spring to life for incoming calls, halting music playback; the music resumes once you disengage the call.)

The UpStage felt small but solid in my hand; I found its keypad quite usable, and the sound quality on voice calls was generally good. The four-way capacitive touchpad on the music side has a central, mechanical play button that took some getting used to. The excellent documentation (including a printed manual of over 300 pages) warns against trying to swipe it in a circle the way you would an iPod's control wheel, but the temptation is hard to resist. It also took a while for me to stop trying to use the central button for directional navigation (instead of tapping the touchpad above, below, or to either side of the button).

Switching Sides

Even when the music/multimedia side is activated, you will have to use the phone side whenever you need to input text -- for example, to create a playlist, search the Sprint Store's music catalog, or specify a URL for a site you wish to visit in the small-screen-optimized browser.

I was a little confused the first time I encountered a text-input box on the music side, since no alphanumeric keys and no software keyboard appeared. But the device is smart enough to recognize the need to use the phone side, and I noticed that "Flip" had appeared on screen as a soft-key option.

When I used it and began entering text from the phone keypad (T9 text input mode is a welcome option here), "Save/Flip" also appeared as a soft-key option to return me seamlessly to the multimedia side.

Your Music or Sprint's

When you first flip to the music side, the UpStage screen (outfitted with rather unattractive wallpaper that looks like a still from one of those iPod animated TV ads) displays three icons. By default, the central icon is highlighted; this musical note icon activates the phone's player functions. To its left is a small PC icon for invoking the phone's syncing mode, and to the right is a dollar sign (appropriate choice!) that gets you to the Sprint music store for acquiring tunes over the air.

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