Samsung Mysto Review - Design & Features

Design & Features
Mysto is one sleek, thin cell phone, and it looks great.  Measuring just over 12mm from front to back, Mysto will fit in all but the tightest of pockets and won’t weigh you down when you head out the door with it in tow.  The front panel of the phone features a gorgeous 2.2” QVGA display that’s really one of the best screens you’ll find on a slider right now.  Beneath the display is a navigational array built around a circular four way D-pad that looks like a jog dial but doesn’t actually scroll - instead it clicks up, down, left, right, or in the middle, and from the home screen each of the five clicks corresponds to a different shortcut.  The pad works pretty well, but based on its look I was disappointed that it didn’t double as a scroll wheel.

Surrounding the circle are four touch-sensitive electrostatic keys: Talk, Back, and two softkeys.  Touch controls are a cool idea, but sometimes they don’t work out so well.  I really had problems with the performance of these controls; sometimes I couldn’t make them work, while other times they false-triggered by way of an accidental brush of my thumb.  While the haptic feedback that comes with each virtual button press is a nice touch, all in all I would have preferred actual buttons to this implementation of touch controls.

Also, the End key is mounted on the right side of the phone, which makes sense in theory but becomes a pain in practice.  While this placement puts the End button in easy reach of right-handers thumbs when we hold it up to our ears, people are so used to looking for the Talk and End keys on the fronts of their phones that Mysto’s End key winds up being pretty inconvenient.  Beyond that, it’s too easy to accidentally hang up on someone by gripping the phone a little too tightly.  And speaking of bad placements, the microSD card slot is hidden behind the battery which makes hot-swapping of memory cards impossible.

Sliding the phone open reveals a flat keypad with raised ridges between the rows of keys.  The standard dialing layout is well-spaced, and while I found it easy enough to use, some might not like its rather slippery finish.  A sensor, LED flash assist light, and self-portrait mirror for the 2MP camera are found on the back side of the front panel of the phone, which means that you have to slide Mysto open to use the camera, but also that the camera sensor is protected when the phone is shut.