Samsung debuted the Comment on Wednesday, a middle-of-the-road smartphone with an emphasis on texting and cheap calling plans.
The BlackBerry-esque design has a full qwerty keyboard and a center joypad for navigation around the plain-vanilla Cricket operating system. There's also Bluetooth connectivity, the obligatory back-facing camera (1.3 megapixels), and Cricket's proprietary app storefront. Other than the expected niceties, the phone has little going on inside.
Though the Comment's $90 price tag feels a tad high for a phone with relatively few features, Cricket's monthly plans are a cheap alternative to a pricier Android or iOS phone and plan. Picking up an Android or iPhone 4 handset will set you back around 200 bones, not to mention around $90 a month for services. Cricket's monthly plans float around the $40 range, which is just about right for the cellular company's target audience; most Cricket customers fall in the 35-and-under category, with an income of less than $50,000 a year.
If recent buying trends continue in the United States, phones like the Comment may end up a relic of times past. According to a recent Nielsen survey, a majority of cellular phones bought in the United States right now are smartphones despite the availability of cheaper alternatives. Compare that to just three years ago when less than 20 percent of all phones sold were smartphones.
It seems that mobile customers are getting used to having the world inside a glowing glass rectangle. The single-function phone of yore, for which SMS and basic web browsing are the apex of these models' ability, seems to be waning in popularity.
If the Comment has one thing going for it, it's the appeal of a solid, middle-of-the-road plan with anytime minutes, long distance calling, picture messaging, and mobile web access.
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