The Samsung Stratosphere has two defining features: its slide-out landscape keyboard, and access to Verizon 4G LTE. In fact, it’s currently the only phone on Verizon with both of those features. This is unfortunate news for keyboard fans, because the keyboard on the Stratosphere is hard to use and has an odd design. But if you want a 4G LTE smartphone on Verizon and can’t abide virtual keyboards, your options have been narrowed for you, to a phone with year-old internals, for a disproportionately high price.

The Stratosphere is 0.55 inches thick, which is big even for a phone with a physical keyboard. The textured plastic back and roundedness of the edges make it comfortable to hold, even though the top half can start to slide open a little too readily. The haptic feedback is short and tight when the phone is open, but can be barely felt at all when it’s closed.









A sleep button sits toward the top on the right-hand side, and a volume rocker is toward the top on the right. The standard Android buttons are soft keys along the bottom of the screen, and sliding the weakly spring-loaded top half of the screen open reveals the Stratosphere’s defining feature: a keyboard.

The keys in the keyboard include a number line at the top and physical iterations of the standard Android buttons on either side. All of the keys are wide and squat, almost flush with the surface, though each protrudes almost imperceptibly in its center. The buttons are widely spaced and don’t depress very far—there’s some resistance, but you can feel when your press has gone through.

When the phone is open for keyboard access, it doesn’t feel adequately balanced for use that way. If you don’t hold it with your index fingers wrapped behind the screen and just hold the bottom without trying to brace it in some way, trying to type will result in the phone wobbling around.

We couldn't type very fast on the Stratosphere’s keyboard, partially because it’s so wide. Button presses register easily enough, but what slowed us down the most was the keyboard’s width. The Stratosphere has a 4-inch screen, so the phone is edging out of the size range where you can make a landscape keyboard comfortable.

You can still choose to use the virtual keyboard, but then you have bought an unduly thick phone for nothing.

The single speaker on the Stratosphere is on the back towards the bottom, and can get loud with the volume all the way up, though it’s tinny. A front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera sits above the screen, and a 5-megapixel camera is on the left side of the back as you look at it.

The Super AMOLED screen on the Stratosphere will make the camera’s pictures look oversaturated—when taking demo pictures of basil, the plant appeared almost lime green on the phone. When I got the picture onto a computer, though, the actual color level captured was truer than the phone’s screen has suggested, but still a little bright. The level of detail the camera captures is only okay, but it does have tap-to-focus.

Otherwise, the 800x480 Super AMOLED screen is nice, and has less of a yellowish cast than some of its Galaxy brethren, like the Galaxy S II. It renders even small text readably, and while the browse is a slouch when it comes to benchmarks, pinch zooming is very smooth.

The Stratosphere is technically part of the Galaxy line, and has been called a Galaxy S (released in mid-2010) plus a keyboard. With a 1GHz single-core processor and 512MB of RAM, the OS runs well enough, but even simple native applications can take upwards of a few seconds to open and sometimes the phone will leave you wondering whether it really understood the input that the haptic feedback corroborated just before. YouTube videos inline in the browser are choppy as often as not.







The benchmarks for the Stratosphere are pretty lackluster, as befits a phone with a hardware profile first released over a year ago. Sunspider tests show that there’s a lot left to be desired in browser speed (the iPhone 4S scores under 2200 milliseconds). The Stratosphere clocks only 14-16 MFLOPS on single-threaded processes in Linpack, but does okay on GL Benchmark 2.1 given its specs, with 24-25 fps in the Egypt Standard test and 43-44 fps on the PRO Standard test (the iPhone 4S scores 58-60 fps on both tests).

The battery life on the Stratosphere can be scarily short, despite its 1800mAh and undemanding internal hardware. Just while the phone sits idle with the screen on, the remaining battery percentage trickles down quickly. It can hold on well enough on standby, and over a couple of days of sporadic use we could turn back to it and find it hadn’t yet died. Samsung estimates the phone gets eight hours of talk time, and we clocked its video playback time at around four hours with brightness and volume at 50 percent.

Unfortunately, the Stratosphere’s price is way out of line given its capabilities. The Samsung Continuum, which is another a modified Galaxy S with a smaller screen, is priced at $50 on Verizon right now, while the Stratosphere is $150. The Droid 3, another slide-out keyboard phone on Verizon, is priced at only $50 more and has a dual-core processor. What the Stratosphere does hold above both of these models, though, is access to Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Phone pricing can be pretty fluid depending on demand, but if LTE is a priority for you, you’re going to pay handsomely for it at the moment. We wish we knew why the few QWERTY phones that are still getting released keep getting the short ends of the hardware, design, and pricing sticks.

The Good:

Has access to 4G LTE on Verizon

Super AMOLED screen is bright has great detail and nice colors, if sometimes oversaturated

Keyboard keys have a good level of tactile feedback

Sliding action is better than the only other QWERTY slide phone on Verizon, the Droid 3

The Bad:

Nothing slows our typing down more than the width of the keyboard

Battery life is not great

The Ugly: