The Today screen--the Behold's home screen--has a widget bar running along its left side. You can arrange the widgets in any order, as well as drag one into the main part of the screen to launch its respective app. To end the application, you slide the widget back onto the bar. Available widgets include a calendar, a phone book, a music player, and a clock. But other than rearranging widgets and removing them, you don't have a lot of room for customization; you can't add new widgets to the bar or buy new programs (there is no app store), which was disappointing.
The Behold offers a full HTML browser, which is a nice addition for a non-smart-phone handset. The browser is difficult to use on occasion: Scrolling through pages wasn't as smooth a process as on other touch-screen browsers, and getting the hang of navigating took time. For example, to zoom in on a page, you must touch the magnifying-glass icon at the top of the browser and then select the page size to view. The phone doesn't do Wi-Fi, either, but that didn't seem like too big of a loss; Web pages loaded very quickly over T-Mobile's 3G network.
The Behold's standout feature is its 5-megapixel camera, with 4X digital zoom and a power LED flash. The camera has four resolution settings, light metering, adjustable ISO, a self-timer, a self-portrait mirror on the back cover, an antishake feature, and a setting for shooting backlit subjects. It also has three fun shooting modes (continuous, panorama, and mosaic), as well as a smile-shot mode that will take another shot if the subject is frowning.
Image quality was very good--definitely better than most camera-phone images I've seen. Colors were sharp and clear in photos taken both indoors and outdoors. The camera's touch menu is intuitive, and I enjoyed trying out all of the different settings. Luckily, the Behold has 180MB of internal memory and a microSD slot for expanding the storage up to 16GB, so you have plenty of space for pictures. You can also shoot video in two resolutions (320 by 240 and 176 by 144).
The Behold isn't a full-on multimedia powerhouse, though. I was disappointed that the Behold didn't come loaded with the Samsung TouchPlayer, an impressive media player we tested on the Omnia. Instead, the Behold has a bare-bones music player that supports album art and playlists, and has shuffle and repeat modes plus six equalizer settings. But like the Omnia, the Behold is missing a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can't charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. On the upside, transferring music from your PC to the Behold via the USB cable is a simple drag and drop.