Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G (T-Mobile)

What happened to all of T-Mobile's great keyboarded smartphones? I remember a time, not long ago, when the T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide shared shelf space with the Sidekick 4G. Fast forward one year and we've traded those for the pretty average myTouch Q?and now the $149.99 Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G. Don't get me wrong: The Galaxy S Relay is a perfectly respectable smartphone, with a spacious slide-out keyboard and fast performance and data speeds. In fact, it's the best keyboarded smartphone on T-Mobile right now. But with its bulky build, average camera, and mediocre call quality, it just isn't great.

Design, Network, and Call Quality
The Galaxy S Relay measures 4.96 by 2.56 by 0.53 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.29 ounces. That's actually a bit more manageable than many other keyboarded smartphones, but it's still pretty big. It's made entirely of black plastic with a lightly textured back panel. It feels solid, but not particularly premium.

The 4-inch, 800-by-480-pixel Super AMOLED display looks bright and rich, but the PenTile pixel arrangement is really pronounced here, lending a rather fuzzy look to everything. There's a large hardware Home key beneath the display, flanked by a capacitive Options key and a Back button. The 4-inch screen is fine for typing, but you're not buying this phone to type on the touch screen.

Slide the Relay open to reveal its backlit five-row QWERTY keyboard. The rubbery keys are a little flat, but they have a nice clicky feel and I was able to type quickly and accurately during testing. I also love the top row of number keys. This isn't the best keyboard out there (that's currently attached to the Motorola Droid 4?on Verizon and the Photon Q 4G LTE?on Sprint), but it's far from bad.

For data, the Relay hits T-Mobile's HSPA+ 42 network, which often matched AT&T and Verizon's LTE on download speeds in my tests, averaging 10Mbps down. And now that T-Mobile offers plans with truly unlimited data, it's an even better deal than either of those carriers. You can use the Relay as a mobile hotspot to connect up to five devices for an additional $15 per month.

Unfortunately, voice quality isn't great. Incoming calls sound a little scratchy, with an ambient hissing sound in the background. Calls made with the phone are a little better, but voices sound distant and noise cancellation is poor. The speakerphone sounds hollow and abrasive, but it's just about loud enough to use outside. Calls sounded okay through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset. Samsung's S-Voice virtual assistant is on board, and I had no trouble using it over Bluetooth. Talk time was excellent; the battery lasted 11 hours and 47 minutes in my tests.

Hardware, OS, and Apps
The Relay is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8620A processor. Benchmark scores were excellent?right up there in Samsung Galaxy S III/Galaxy Note?territory. In fact, the lower screen resolution on the Relay actually means that gaming frame rates are often faster here than on those phones. It's great for gaming, and running the rest of 500,000+ apps available in the Google Play store.

The Relay runs Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and there's no word yet on an update to Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). Samsung has modified the OS here in much the same way it has on its other recent Android phones. There aren't as many customizable features as there are on the GSIII, but you get the aforementioned S Voice, as well as plenty of motion-activated controls.

There are five customizable home screens that come preloaded with some rather unfortunate-looking wallpaper, apps, and widgets. This isn't a problem, since you can customize these home screens to your liking, but out of the box it looks a little depressing. T-Mobile has loaded the phone with bloatware, and none of it is deletable. You can disable it so that it won't show up in your app menu or elsewhere, but you can't remove it from the phone.

Still, the benefits of Android outweigh these annoyances, and you'll be able to put the excellent email and messaging apps to good use with the QWERTY keyboard.

Multimedia and Conclusions
The Relay comes with 4.89 GB of free internal storage. There's also an empty microSD card slot underneath the battery cover; my 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine. All of our music test files played back except for FLAC. Sound quality was good over?Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones, but there's was a faint background hiss audible when using wired 3.5mm headphones. All test videos played back too, at resolutions up to 1080p, except audio clipped in and out on DivX files.

The Relay's 5-megapixel camera isn't a major selling point, but it also isn't a reason to pass the phone up for something else. In short, it's average. Shutter delay is a bit pronounced, at an average of 1.2 seconds. Photos taken have standard color and detail. I've seen better on other phones with similar sensors, but they're fine enough to share online. Video capture is about the same. The Relays records 720p video at a smooth 30 frames per second indoors and out, but it looks a little blurry and washed out. There's also a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat.

The Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G is a perfectly good keyboarded smartphone?it just isn't anything special. The keyboarded T-Mobile myTouch Q is strictly low-end, but then again it's free. If you don't really need a hardware keyboard, your options increase dramatically. The HTC One S?and the Samsung Galaxy S III are both top picks. Each will get you a larger, higher-res display, better call quality, and a more capable camera. But if you can't bear all the on-screen typing, the Relay will serve you fine. Just don't expect a Galaxy S III with a keyboard.

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