Samsung SCH-U470-Juke Red Review - Display & Audio

Juke's display is tiny but bright and easy to read, so relative to the overall goal of making a small handset with a trick design and good music player, I think Samsung did a good job here.  Just 1.45" across, the display's resolution is only 128 x 220 pixels, but it does support 262,000 colors.  As such, fonts, menus and images all rendered quite well on the LCD screen.  Customization options include adjustable font sizes and styles and display themes as well as backlight timer and brightness settings.  You can also set the background image on Juke's home screen, assign photo IDs to callers, and purchase additional background images through Verizon's Get it Now service.  

The menu implementation on Juke quite attractive.  Verizon still doesn't make the best UI in the business - their categorization and labeling choices sometimes leave me scratching my head - but they are getting ever so slightly better with time.  Juke's menus are clean and easy to read, and the animated screens are bountiful and pleasant.

I tested the dual-band CDMA Juke on Verizon Wireless' network in the San Francisco Bay Area.  My results during calls were mixed - when I had a good signal, voices came through loud and clear on my end and callers reported my sounding similarly good to them.  But several times during testing calls that seemed to go through resulted in 30 seconds or so of "Can You Hear Me Now?" style frustration before I hung up and tried again.  For whatever reason, every so often my Juke just didn't work quite right for me.

Juke features a 2.5mm headphone jack and comes packaged with wired stereo earphones with an inline microphone.  The earphones worked well for calls and sounded on par with your standard pack-in earbuds for music listening.  Using a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter, I was able to connect some higher quality stereo earphones to the device, and the results were quite good.  Juke is more than capable of taking the place of your cell phone and iPod shuffle or other portable music player for basic calling and listening - as such it's a drag that Juke isn't compatible with standard headphones right out of the box.

Bluetooth audio devices are also supported, including stereo over Bluetooth.  I had no trouble pairing a Bluetooth earpiece with the phone, and voice quality with the earpiece was good.  Stereo music over Bluetooth also sounded quite good.  The built-in speaker is acceptable for hands-free calling in quiet environments, and passable at best for "less than serious" music listening.

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