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The Samsung SCH-a950 can access Verizon's heavily advertised V Cast entertainment service and is able to make speedy downloads anytime, anywhere. Unfortunately, what it's downloading is money-from your wallet to Verizon's account.

This phone has few features and many services: services that you can buy or rent monthly. V Cast is fun and offers some entertaining content, so if you don't mind the monthly bill this could be the phone for you.

Design
The Samsung SCH-a950 is a silver flip phone with flashy deep red accents and dual-band (800/1900) CDMA service. It's small when folded, yet thicker and more solid than you'd think (3.59 x 1.91 x 0.95 inches, 4.55 ounces). The phone lists for $149 with a rebate and a two year service contract.

It offers two screens: a smaller one (128 x 96 pixels) on the front and a larger one (176 x 220 pixels) when opened. The front of the phone has music playback buttons. Press and hold the Play/Pause button to play all of your stored music. You don't get a list of the songs, just a link that says "Play All." That's only a sample of the phone's poor menu design. The front also holds the 1.3 megapixel camera.

When opened, the phone offers a familiar array of buttons, including soft keys (contextual buttons that change depending what's on the screen), call send and end buttons, and a five-way directional pad. The only oddity is the Clear button on the left side, which either erases what you've just typed or takes you back a level. That function is usually on the right, so it took us a few tries to remember it.

The left side holds a volume button and a proprietary headphone jack, while the right side holds a camera button and a TransFlash card slot. The best part of the design is the two speakers built into the phone's center hinge. They're large and pretty decent sounding for a cell phone.

Press the directional pad's center button to call up the phone's menu. Navigate around and you'll find that there's almost nothing on the phone itself, just calendar and note functions, as well as a few small tools such as Alarm Clock and Calculator. There's not even a single game. You'll need to use the menu's Get It Now page to get the good stuff (Note: good stuff costs extra).

Services
The basic V Cast subscription costs $15 per month and gets you access to the music catalog (music downloads cost extra), basic video clips in the News, Sports, Entertainment and Weather categories (i.e., leftover clips from VH1's "Best Week Ever" and Comedy Central's "The Daily Show"), and unlimited access to "Mobile Web 2.0," which means pulling up information snippets and should not be confused with actually surfing the Web.


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As poor a value as it is, we prefer V Cast to the Sprint PCS Vision service, which we reviewed along with the Sprint MM-7400. Sprint PCS Vision is a poor value since you have to subscribe to video channels individually, plus we constantly had lousy connections (even a 3 minute video clip had to be rebuffered several times). V Cast is also a poor value, but video and audio downloaded pretty quickly in our testing, and we only had to rebuffer once.

While online you can buy songs ($1.99 each), that can be transferred to your PC if you buy the $29.99 Music Essentials kit, which includes stereo headphones and a USB cord. No, headphones and a USB cord don't come with the phone.


       Music Playing Software

Seriously. The phone comes with Bluetooth, but you can't use it for file transfers; you can only use it for connecting a mono headset. Song purchases can't be used as ringtones, although you can go online to buy ringtones ($2.99 each, which is more than full songs). You can also buy or rent games (approximately $2.99 per month or $6.50 for unlimited use). And before we forget, storage cards, which allow you to carry a decent amount of songs, are also extra.

The SCH-a950 is no bargain and it's all too ready to add charge after charge to your monthly bill. If money is no object and you adore postage stamp-sized video, then go for it. For the rest of us, there are better phone values around.