After Behold and Memoir, the Samsung T749 Highlight is the latest touch phone released by Samsung. This phone comes in a nice candy bar shape with a sleek design and weighs around 105 grams, which is pretty good for a touch phone. Released in July 2009, the phone is currently available in a ‘Fire’ color scheme, with bright orange and red colors, or ‘Ice’, with more subdued dark gray and teal colors. The display of the phone is a 3-inch TFT touch screen with a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels and allows for 16 million colors. The touch screen is very clear and vivid so that images and texts are displayed with clarity and soothing colours. This device runs the TouchWiz interface, which has become very popular with Samsung’s touch phones. Easy to use and very interactive, this platform integrates many applications and widgets. It incorporates an accelerometer sensor that facilitates automatic rotation of the user interface in landscape or portrait mode.

The Samsung T749 Highlight is essentially a quad band GSM based device, but it is also compatible with the 3G service network. As a result, users can use this device to make video calls in addition to downloading data at a very fast speed through HSDPA. The internal memory available in the Highlight is 60 MB, but this can be expanded up to 16 GB by using external memory cards in the card slot. Up to 2000 contact entries can be stored in phone book records. This phone is also enabled with Class10 GPRS and Class10 EDGE which allow convenient access to the mobile Internet in the embedded WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML web browser. Bluetooth and USB have also been added which help in cost-effective transfer and sharing of data between compatible devices. Messaging is quite fast and responsive and is available in the form of SMS, MMS, email, and instant messaging. The phone easily integrates widgets and applications for popular mail clients like Gmail and Yahoo. Sending an email or a text message becomes very convenient using the virtual QWERTY keyboard.

The camera of the Samsung T749 Highlight phone is a 3.15 megapixel unit with a maximum resolution of 2048×1536 pixels. Outdoor shots get the best results with rich color reproduction and fine detail. Videos can also be recorded very conveniently in a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The music player included in it is capable of playing various file formats like MP3, WMA, and eAAC+, while the video player can play H.263, H.264, and MP4 formats. Music can be enjoyed through the headphones that came with the phone or on the stereo speakers that have been provided for you. The sound from the speakers is free from distortion and does not break up even when set to the highest volume. All these applications are powered by a standard 1200 mAh lithium-ion battery that supports a talk time of more than 6 hours and a standby time of almost 450 hours. Although the Highlight lacks some of the advanced features, it can be a very nice phone for beginners and first-time users of low-cost touch phones.