Samsung Focus 2 (AT&T)

The Samsung Focus 2 ($49.99 with two-year contract) is Samsung's first Windows Phone with 4G LTE. It's a follow-up to the Samsung Focus S ($99.99, 3.5 stars) and smaller Focus Flash ($49.99, 3.5 stars), two of the more popular cell phones to grace Microsoft's latest mobile platform. But rather than advance the design in any way, Samsung appears to have fused the two together, rounded the edges off, and called it a day. It's a fine choice, but there are certainly more tempting options.

Design, Screen, and Call Quality
The Focus 2 is essentially a piece of white glossy plastic, albeit with a chrome accent band around the edges and a glass screen. It's just four-tenths of an inch thick, and it weighs 4.3 ounces, which is on the thin and light side for a phone with these specs. It feels pretty good in hand, considering it's made of plastic and not a classier substance. The bundled black USB cable and power adapter look a bit odd when plugged into an all-white phone.

The 4-inch, 800-by-480-pixel Super AMOLED screen is standard fare for Windows Phones. It looks sharp and colorful, with deep blacks, good brightness, and decent-if-not-spectacular viewing angles. Three brightly lit touch buttons sit beneath the screen. Typing on the on-screen QWERTY keyboard is easy and fast, and I still love the little key click sound on Windows Phones.

The Focus 2 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), tri-band HSPA+ 21 (850/1900/2100 MHz), and single-band LTE (700MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Here in New York City, LTE speeds were on the low side of good in our tests, averaging 8 to 10Mbps down and 1.3 to 1.6Mbps up.

Call quality was mixed. Voices sounded fine in the earpiece, with plenty of available gain and a sharp, bright tone. Transmissions through the mic were less clear, though, and sounded excessively computerized. That said, the phone did a nice job of suppressing external sounds on a noisy street. Reception was solid. Calls sounded fine through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars), and voice dialing worked perfectly. The speakerphone is quite loud and easily usable outdoors, although it sounds a tad harsh. Battery life was fine at 6 hours and 10 minutes of talk time.

Hardware, Apps, and Multimedia
Underneath the hood, you'll find a single-core Qualcomm MSM8255 1.4GHz processor and 512MB RAM. As a proper Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) handset, the Focus 2 should have no problem running any of the 80,000+ third-party apps in the Windows Marketplace. Unfortunately, Microsoft has left it unclear whether all phones will get upgrades to Windows Phone 8 (Apollo) later this year.

Like all Windows Phones, the Focus 2 is fun to use, with its sliding tile interface, smooth animations, and clearly labeled icons. Desktop webpages looked sharp in Internet Explorer in our tests, but there's no way to force WebKit pages to appear the way they do automatically on Android phones and iPhones?you either get archaic WAP or the full desktop site. AT&T preloads its usual bloatware, including the U-verse mobile TV app, and AT&T Navigator, which delivers voice-enabled turn-by-turn GPS directions and real-time traffic alerts for $9.99 per month.

There's 6.18GB of free internal storage and no memory card slot. That could get a little cramped after a while. A standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack sits on the top edge of the phone. Music tracks sounded clear through Plantronics BackBeat Go Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 4 stars), and the stock Windows Phone music player is a pleasure to use. MP4 and DivX videos played smoothly in full screen mode, but one H.264 test file I use stuttered more often than usual. There's no Xvid support. I had no problem transferring music and videos between the phone and my Lenovo laptop using Zune software, aside from a slight driver hiccup during the initial installation.

Camera and Conclusions
The 5-megapixel camera offers 720p audio recording, and includes an LED flash. There's also a front-facing VGA camera for video chats. Test photos looked fine for this class of camera. Outdoor test shots were colorful, but the sky became all white. Indoor shots lacked sharpness, though. Recorded 1280-by-720-pixel (720p) and 640-by-480-pixel (VGA) videos looked sharp and smooth at 30 frames per second. There's no image stabilization, but the Focus 2 adjusts to changing lighting more smoothly than some other phones I've tested.

The Focus 2's biggest problem is Nokia?specifically, the stellar Lumia 900 ($49.99, 4 stars), a Windows Phone with a larger and more vibrant screen, 16GB of internal storage, and a slimmer and classier design, all for the same price as the Focus 2. We're also more confident Microsoft will deliver an Apollo update to the Lumia 900, given the company's tight relationship with Nokia.

If you have more money to spend and aren't devoted to Windows Phone, our current Editors' Choice on AT&T is the HTC One X ($199.99, 4.5 stars), which offers faster LTE speeds, a dual-core processor, a gorgeous 4.7-inch high-definition display, and the latest version of Android, although it's a significantly larger phone. Finally, if you want something small but powerful, the Apple iPhone 4S ($199.99, 4 stars) has the best multimedia and third-party apps you can get, although it lacks LTE data speeds and has a smaller (if sharper) 3.5-inch screen. Both the iPhone and One X offer 1080p video recording and have superior cameras too.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 6 hours 10 minutes

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