Review Date May 11, 2009

Samsung Finesse SCH-r810 (MetroPCS)

  • Pros


  • Cons Abysmal e-mail program. Media players support few formats.
  • Bottom Line


By Sascha Segan

Shutterbugs and on-the-go movie addicts no longer have to pay high monthly fees for their media-savvy phones. The Samsung Finesse SCH-r810 ($349 direct) features a solid camera and capable media players, plus it's the first MetroPCS phone with a touch screen. And it works with a plan that costs only $50 per month.

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Similar to the popular Samsung Instinct for Sprint, the Finesse is a 4.6-by-2.3-by-0.5-inch (HWD), 3.6-ounce slab dominated by a 3.2-inch, 240-by-400-pixel color touch screen. Below the screen, you'll find phone Send, End, and Back buttons. There are volume controls, a Camera button, a microSD card slot, and a combination headphone and charging jack on the sides, while the Power button resides on the phone's top panel.

The Finesse uses Samsung's TouchWiz user interface, which lets you customize your home screen with widgets like an alarm clock, a calendar, a music player, or your favorite photos. Currently, it's the closest MetroPCS subscribers can get to a full-blown smartphone, unless they cough up $449 for a BlackBerry Curve, which is only available in limited markets.

You enter data with one of two touch keyboards, either a virtual phone keypad in portrait mode or a QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode. Both felt easy to use and were accurate, although the letter you're touching doesn't visually pop up when you touch it, unlike on the iPhone. But the phone does vibrate subtly when you press each key.

The Finesse is a fine voice phone. The earpiece is loud enough and doesn't distort at maximum volume. Transmissions from outdoor areas sound clear, with no background noise coming through. We couldn't test the phone's reception because we haven't yet tested enough MetroPCS phones here in New York City, but it didn't seem unusually poor. Talk time, at 4 hours and 13 minutes, isn't bad for a phone with such a large screen.

The phone paired with our Plantronics Voyager Pro mono and Motorola HT820 stereo Bluetooth headsets, and uses the excellent Nuance voice dialing system. There's no standard wired headset jack, but the Finesse comes with a stereo wired headset that plugs into the phone's proprietary Samsung jack. Ringtones are loud enough, but you can't use your own music for them; MetroPCS offers various low-quality, scratchy MP3 ringtones for $2.99 each.

But it's at capturing and playing back media that the Finesse excels. The phone supports microSD memory cards up to 16GB; our SanDisk Mobile Ultra card worked fine You can also store pictures, but not music, in the phone's 150 MB of memory.

There's a surprisingly good 2-megapixel camera with an easy-to-use, icon-based interface on the Finesse. Photos were very sharp, with bright colors and only a bit of overexposure in white areas—quite good for a 2-megapixel camera phone without mechanical autofocus. The camera also takes clear 320-by-240-pixel videos at 15 frames per second (fps). This is the best camera phone you can get on MetroPCS. (That's not saying much, but there you have it.)

This is also probably the only MetroPCS phone (other than the BlackBerry Curve) you'd want to watch a movie on. To demonstrate, Metro includes a read-only microSD card with all three Mission: Impossible movies encoded as 400-by-240-pixel MPEG-4 files at 25 fps. The movies play smoothly in full-screen landscape mode, as you'd expect. But you have to be careful about how you encode your own video to get it to play well on the Finesse. MPEG-4 TV shows encoded for a BlackBerry Curve were somewhat jerky, although 15-fps videos always played fine. Unfortunately, the Finesse doesn't come with any video-encoding software.

The music player supports MP3 and WMA files stored on the memory card, but doesn't even see AAC files; this means you're fine with Amazon and eMusic songs, but out of luck with music from iTunes. You'll need to drag and drop your files onto the phone using the included USB cable, which works with Windows PCs but not Macs, or use a PC-based card reader (which is available separately).

Both music and videos sounded good over wired headsets, but only music played over our wireless headset—videos won't play through Bluetooth.

Internet features on the Finesse aren't quite as good as the media capabilities. The Finesse is an EV-DO Rev 0 phone, capable of zipping along 3G networks at about 500 Kbps. But MetroPCS only offers 3G coverage in Dallas and Detroit right now, so in New York the phone poked along at 2G speeds of about 100 Kbps.

The Finesse runs the Access Netfront 3.4 Web browser, which can display most desktop Web pages as long as they're not too complicated and don't use Flash. The IM program supports basic AIM and Microsoft Live Messaging features. The phone also comes with an enhanced 411 application that provides maps and directions, and a GPS driving directions application, both of which worked well.

The e-mail program, on the other hand, is dismal. It wasn't designed for a touch-screen device, and it's almost impossible to configure. Trying to enter information in the settings boxes involves lots of frustrated tapping on virtual soft keys and awkwardly rotating the phone between portrait and landscape mode. In the end, I couldn't get it to receive e-mail from my AOL or Google Apps accounts, though it ostensibly supports AOL, Earthlink, Gmail, and any POP or IMAP account. I recommend using Web mail instead of this e-mail program.

Like most cell phones, the Finesse also plays games. Since it's MetroPCS's sole touch-screen phone, only a few dozen titles are available. They generally use soft keypads rather than an accelerometer to navigate; I downloaded Ms. Pac-Man, and it worked fine.

If the Samsung Finesse SCH-r810 were on any other carrier, I'd view it with a more critical eye. But compared with the other models MetroPCS offers, the Finesse is a media star. It may seem expensive at $349, considering the same phone costs $49.99 on Alltel (where it's called the Delve). But MetroPCS's $50-per-month plan—which offers unlimited calls, messaging, Web, and e-mail—would cost at least $100 per month on other carriers, so you'll make back the difference in six months or less. That said, given that MetroPCS is a value-geared carrier, I can't bestow the Editors' Choice award on a phone that costs $200 more than almost every other phone in its lineup.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 13 minutes

Compare the Samsung Finesse with several other mobile phones side by side.

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Sascha Segan

Follow Sascha Segan Twitter: @saschasegan
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