Design, Keyboard, and Call Quality

The Samsung Replenish, Sprint's first eco-friendly Android cell phone, is a relatively rare beast: a BlackBerry-like, slab-style Android phone with a physical keyboard. The world needs more of those, and the Replenish's green cred helps add to its attraction. But it's too sluggish, with short battery life and an awful low-res screen, and we just can't recommend it to anyone for those reasons.

The Replenish measures 4.8 by 2.4 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.1 ounces. It's made entirely of plastic; I tested a black version, although you can also get one that has the lower keyboard portion in bright blue. Sprint is promising a pink version for June. While the phone itself doesn't feel cheap, the plastic 2.8-inch touch screen is awful. It's too small, it's unresponsive, and it's too dim, with flat colors. Worse, its 240-by-320-pixel (QVGA) resolution is cramped and tough to read. Small text always looks fuzzy. Four thin, plastic buttons sit in between the screen and the keyboard. These are tough to press and wobbled a bit in their perches when I tried.


OS, Apps, and Multimedia

The Replenish sports a sluggish 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7627 CPU and runs Android 2.2 (Froyo); Samsung has not announced a date for an upgrade to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). There's one MSM7627-based Android phone that feels speedy, the LG Optimus One, aka the LG Optimus S (Free, 4 stars) on Sprint. But otherwise it can be hard to work up a head of steam with this processor, and the Replenish fails to do so. Sprint ID lets you download custom app packs from Sprint, including a green themed one. But these tend to fill the phone menu and home screens with bloatware. Aside from that, you get all the usual Android 2.2 features, including a powerful browser, push e-mail, good Facebook and Twitter apps, and free GPS navigation.

But using this handset simply isn't satisfying. It's not just the fuzzy fonts; you can't fit much of a Web page on the screen at once, for example. Some apps are missing from Android Market, including most of our usual benchmarks, as they aren't compatible with the super-low-res screen. One loaded, but then crashed immediately. Portions of the menu system, such as Settings and Bluetooth, are difficult to use because you can only see a couple of options at a time on screen; get ready to scroll up and down often. Android just doesn't work on a 320-by-240 screen.

There's a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack on top, and a microSD memory card slot underneath the battery cover. Samsung includes a 2GB card, and my 32GB SanDisk card worked fine. There's also 135MB of free internal storage. Music tracks sounded a little muffled through Samsung Modus HM6450 Bluetooth headphones ($99, 4 stars). The stock Android player displayed small album art thumbnails. Standalone videos only played back properly if they matched the Replenish's native screen resolution; otherwise, they either didn't show up in the gallery, or generated an error message if one did and I tapped on it.