Recently, Samsung sent us their newest Sprint phone, the Conquer 4G. This phone is meant to be the first “budget” 4G phone, coming in at $99 after contract. But is it worth even that?
The Conquer 4G is a classic candy bar style smartphone. Black with silver trim around the sides, it resembles the iPhone 4 on many levels. The four buttons on the front bezel and the massive “Samsung” make it clear that you’re not using an Apple product, but it’s hard not to see the inspiration here. To be fair, I’m going to try to stick with comparing it to other options on Sprint, specifically the Nexus S 4G and the Epic 4G – both Samsung products like the Conquer 4G.
The Conquer 4G absolutely wins on weight, being the lightest of the three at 4.1 oz. It’s also a tad smaller than the Nexus S 4G or the Epic 4G. That may have something to do with the fact that the screen is 4.5” instead of 4” (and not having a keyboard, like the Epic, helps). Also, it’s worth noting that the screen is classic LCD, instead of OLED like the other two. It’s a darn good LCD, but once you’ve used an OLED, other screens tend to pale in comparison.
The Conquer 4G surprises me by running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) without a whiff of Samsung’s TouchWiz skin. This out-of-the-box feature is one of my favorite things about the Nexus S 4G and it wins points here again. I also like that the four standard Android buttons on the front were real buttons, instead of capacitive like the Nexus S 4G. Much more satisfying to me, but someone I showed it to thought it looked cheap.
The 1 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon was nice and zippy for day-to-day purposes. In fact, my daughter kept swiping my review unit to use for her games because it was faster than her Replenish.
One thing that this $99 phone lacks is built-in storage. You get a mere 2 GB microSD card to mess with. I suppose it would have been too much to expect the same 16 GB that one finds in the Nexus S 4G, but even an on-board 4 GB would have been better.
The expected front and rear cameras are found, and although some may balk at the mere 3.2 of the rear camera, it does the job. The phone also includes SprintID, a feature I don’t see the point of much so I didn’t mess with, as well as Visual Voicemail, which has yet to get boring.
Once again, my area proves unable to connect to the 4G network, so I’m not fully able to test this feature. What I did love about the 4G implementation was that there was a toggle widget to disable it that comes in handy for saving battery life.
The main appeal of the Conquer 4G though, is meant to be the price. The price of $99 for a 4G smartphone sounds groundbreaking at first. That is, until one spends even two minutes looking and sees that the better-spec’ed Nexus S 4G is usually less than that, if not free, at Best Buy, Wirefly, or Let’s Talk. Heck, even big box giant Walmart has it for cheap.
It’s not atypical to see phone prices drop quickly. My daughter’s Samsung Replenish, for example, is a free phone from Sprint. I suspect we’ll soon be seeing the Conquer 4G soon become the first free 4G phone direct from carrier. At that price, it might be worth it. If the store is out of Nexus S, that is.
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