T-Mobile's Latest Android Smartphone Is Samsung's Behold II

Though not revealing pricing or an exact date, T-Mobile announced Oct. 5 that it will launch the Samsung Behold II in time for the holiday rush. The phone will be T-Mobile’s fourth to feature Android, Google’s popular open-source operating system.
 
The announcement comes even before the arrival of T-Mobile’s No. 3 Android phone, the Motorola Cliq, also said to be arriving in time to be slipped into Christmas stockings. Offering a 3.1-inch full touch screen, with a full HTML browser, the Cliq will sell for $199 with a two-year contract.

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The Behold II features a 3.2-inch AMOLED touch screen, below which are six buttons—for starting and ending calls, accessing the menu, backing up, and accessing the home page—along with what in pictures seems to be a trackball, or at least a four-way toggle. There’s also a button for the “cube menu,” which is ostensibly what designers come up with when other designers have already thought of the “dock.”
 
The cube menu offers quick access to six multimedia features, such as music, photos, video and the Web.

The Behold II additionally features Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, which offers three different home screens and the ability to customize each with widgets and shortcuts. Plus, it offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS capabilities, a 5-megapixel camera and a microSD slot for boosting the device’s memory by up to 16GB.
 
Android is said to be fated for more than just smartphones, and is steadily gaining market share.
 
“Android continues its strong growth in both North America and Europe,” reported AdMob on Sept. 30. “Ad requests from Android devices grew 17 percent month over month in August, following a 50 percent increase in July. Given the new devices launching in [the fourth quarter], it could be a huge holiday season for the Android platform.”