Call Quality

To test the voice quality I placed some calls to land lines from a quiet spot, then from beside a busy street in San Francisco. The person I called said they could hear me very clearly but that my voice sounded like "radio voice"--that is, very present but without much body. I heard the same thing coming through the ear speaker on the Charge; the voice was clear but didn't sound exactly human, as it does on the iPhone 4.

When I called my friend from beside the busy street, I learned two things: the ear speaker was loud enough for me to hear my friend's voice clearly, without even turning the volume all the way up. Most importantly, my friend said that the traffic noise I could hear so clearly on my end sounded no louder than a dull background noise on his end. The noise cancellation in the Charge must be of fairly high quality.

Bottom Line

Samsung's Droid Charge is a strong second for Verizon, especially for people who like to stream high-quality video, video chat or play web-based games. The combination of the impressive AMOLED stream and the fat LTE pipe to carry loads of high-quality media down to the phone is a powerful combination. If you can deal with the not-so-impressive battery life, Samsung's somewhat cluttered user interface and the general biggishness of the phone, the Charge might be a good phone for you