Sprint is continuing its unique smartphone run with the Samsung Conquer 4G, a moderately priced new phone at $100 that features access to Sprint's WiMAX 4G network. While we'd like to see more capable smartphones step out at this price point, the Conquer still ends up feeling like a phone full of ill-judged compromises, though its performance is admirable given its price.
The Conquer, unlike most other smartphones today, feels light in hand at 4.2 ounces. This starts off feeling cheap, but I grew to like the weight as I used it longer. The phone's textured plastic back, on the other hand, felt cheap, though its crosshatched pattern made gripping the Conquer easy.
The haptic feedback, or tiny vibrations following touchscreen presses, reverberates a little more than on most phones, but in a pleasing way. The buzzes feel more like a tennis volley with the phone than a tiny blip to let you know the button was pressed.
The 3.2-megapixel camera on the back of the Conquer is lacking—pictures with flash seem oversaturated, while pictures without the flash tended to be washed out. The level of detail was decent on still subjects, but color accuracy was a problem.
The Conquer ships with only 430MB of internal storage, as well as a pre-installed 2GB microSD card. If you want to store anything sizable on the Conquer (apps, photos, music, videos), tack on the cost of a real microSD card to the phone—8GB cards are $10-20, and 16GB are about $25-35.
The screen on the Conquer also leaves much to be desired: at 320x480 pixels, all but cartoonishly large text is jagged and difficult to read. The text rendering of most applications and mobile sites is fine because they blow the text up, but sites or apps that aren't optimized are still hard to read when zoomed in, and you have to flip the phone horizontally to get a readable block of text.
This is largely the fault of the way Android renders its text, but Samsung should come at their designs knowing this is a problem and compensate accordingly with a more detailed screen. Above, we compare the text rendering to the iPhone 3GS, which has the same screen resolution and size, and is half the price (though on other carriers, and has hardware that is otherwise much, much older).
When it comes to benchmarks, the Conquer performs admirably at Linpack, clocking 41MFLOPS in single-threaded processes on its 1GHz single-core processor and 512MB of RAM. But in Quadrant, it performs worse than many older phones, including the Nexus One and the one-year-old HTC Evo 4G, which is currently available for the same price on Sprint. According to IntoMobile benchmarks, the nine-month-old Samsung Nexus S clocks a score around 1,600 in Quadrant, and is currently available for $30 on Sprint
Benchmarks aside, the day-to-day performance of the phone, which is running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, is respectable given its price. Games like Angry Birds and 3D Bowling play very smoothly, and moving around in the browser, e-mail, and other native apps isn't choppy or laggy, though apps do occasionally open slowly.
The Conquer comes equipped ready to access Sprint's 4G network, a feature that's hard to find in lower-end phones. While we're not huge fans of Sprint's network, particularly on 3G, the Conquer could provide access to better speeds for customers who are attached to the carrier.
As for the battery, the Conquer is rated at a paltry 6 hours of talk time and 230 hours of standby. Because the screen is not very demanding, the phone gets a little bit of a break, so it still can clock about five to five and a half hours of video playback on a full charge. In a standard use test with infrequent e-mailing, texting, and Web-surfing, the phone didn't get a full day's worth of use; I had to charge it in the early evening.
Overall, the Conquer is a solid entry at its price, particularly if you have access to Sprint's 4G network. Still, we wouldn't peg it as a good phone for non-casual users, particularly those who do a lot of Internet reading or picture-taking. Given that the phone carries a two-year commitment at this price, the Conquer's negatives would start to outweigh the positives in short order. We'd love to see $100 become the new price to beat for a great smartphone purchase, but not if it comes with this many tradeoffs.
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