At first glance, the Samsung Juke looks like a typical stick-style MP3 player, which it is. But swing open the swiveling cover and you’ll find a shiny keypad underneath that unlocks the advanced cellular features of this amazingly compact phone. It’s a great way to combine two devices into one, with the Juke offering 2 GB of internal memory and compatibility with a wide variety of digital audio formats. It also features USB connectivity for transferring music from your PC, stereo Bluetooth for streaming to wireless headphones, integrated GPS, a VGA camera, and downloadable games, ringtones, and wallpapers from Verizon’s Get It Now over-air service. In addition to blue, the Samsung Juke also comes in red and teal.

Offering powerful digital audio playback features, the Samsung Juke swivels to open up a wide array of cellular communication tools, including text/IM messaging and GPS navigation.

Verizon Service
This phone is compatible with Verizon’s Get It Now wireless pay-per-download service, which features application downloads, games and productivity tools. You can also personalize your handset with ringtone downloads using the Get It Now service.

With this GPS-enabled phone, you’ll be able to access Verizon’s VZ Navigator service (additional charges applicable) for voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions, heads-up alerts, local search of nearly 14 million points of interest in the US (such as landmarks, restaurants and ATMs), and detailed color maps. And Verizon’s Chaperone service lets you easily locate your loved ones from your Verizon Wireless phone or PC in real time. After defining a zone, such as an area designating a school or summer camp, you’ll be sent an alert via text message when the Chaperone handset enters or leaves the zone.

Note that this phone is not compatible with either Verizon’s V Cast music or Mobile Web services

Phone Features
The Samsung Juke functions flawlessly as a full-featured digital audio player. A navigation thumb wheel on the front allows for easy searching through music play lists, contacts and settings. The 1.45-inch TFT LCD has a 128 x 220-pixel resolution, support for 262K colors, and displays 10 lines of text. The 2 GB flash memory capacity will hold approximately 500 CD-quality songs, and it’s compatible with MP3, AAC/AAC+, and WMA/WMA Pro file formats. You can create and manage playlists on the fly, synchronize music from your PC to the phone, and multi-task using other functions on the phone while listening to your tunes. You can listen to music via the on-board speaker or the included color-matched stereo headset. Other features include a choice of music skins (visualizer or album artwork) and preset equalizer and 3D sound settings.

Amazingly thin and light, the Samsung Juke measures just 1.2 inches wide and weighs 2.82 ounces.

This phone also provides Bluetooth version 2.0 wireless connectivity with the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which enables you to stream music to compatible Bluetooth stereo headphones or speakers. It also includes profiles for communication headset, handsfree car kits, audio/video remote control, and serial port/object push for vCard.

A little flick of the thumb and the display spins up to reveal all the keys you need to dial, text, take pictures or almost anything else you want to do. Support is built in for text messaging and mobile IM. When used in combination with the phone’s built-in still and video camera, MMS opens up a whole new world of messaging fun. T9 text entry, which is a technology that makes it easier for entering text on handsets, is built into the unit–a plus for mobile email and text messaging users.

You can also snap photos on the go with the integrated VGA camera, which can capture images in three resolutions (640 x 480, 320 x 240, and 160 x 120 pixels) with variable quality settings. It features a night shot mode for less-than-ideal lighting conditions, a self timer, brightness and white balance controls, multi-shot capability, and choices for shutter sounds (including silent mode). This phone does not offer video capture capabilities.

The Juke’s internal phone book can hold up to 500 contact entries with five phone numbers and two emails per entry (as well as notes). You can also pair contact up with a group, a picture for caller ID, or one of 11 polyphonic ringtones. Other features include:

• Voice Commands: Voice dial, digit dial readout, call announcement
• Personal Organizer: Calendar with scheduler, note pad
• Tools: Calculator with converter, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock
• Speed dialing
• Speakerphone
• 72-note polyphonic ringtones
• Bilingual user interface: English and Spanish
• Hearing aid compatibility: M3

Vital Statistics
The Samsung Juke weighs 2.82 ounces and measures 3.82 x 1.18 x 0.83 inches. Its 750 mAh lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 210 minutes (3.5 hours) of talk time, and up to 250 hours of digital standby time. It runs on the CDMA 800/1900 frequencies as well as the CDMA 2000 1XRTT data frequency.
Customer Review: Poor design for an mp3 player
2.5 mm jack requires clumsy adapter sticking out sideways for any decent headphones you’ve already spent money on. Jack cover is flimsy plastic, would break quickly. No special software needed to mount or copy files, though it has annoying habit of disconnecting the mount (in Windows XP) after each copy. Even mounts on Linux! I copied over a directory from an audio book, track files beginning with 01, 02, etc… It got the sort order wrong (something my ancient USB 1.0 iRiver gets right…), so you have to create a playlist. Playlist can only be created on the device, and it’s a very tiresome and tedious interface to sort the tracks out, moving one track ‘up’ or ‘down’ in the playlist at a time. I checked out the playlist ‘tfs’ file via the Linux mount (Windows XP wouldn’t let me view the file, feh!), and it’s a binary format. Not unhackable, for creating a playlist without the device, but why bother with all this trouble? Returned it after one day. Now I see why Verizon Wireless was offering ‘buy one, get one free.’ What a lemon! Why can’t anyone make a useful and usable device? It’s not that hard!
Customer Review: The Juke is awesome!
I have had my phone for about two months now and it’s great. It’s easy to use and it actually takes really good pictures (most Samsung phones are the way to go, besides kyocera). Anyhoo…. I have the navy blue one, the other colors didn’t appeal to me. I have dropped it twice on the cement and it still looks brand new. It’s more durable than it looks and it fits just about anywhere. Its a cool little phone. It also gets really good reception….and I live in the middle of nowhere!

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