Samsung Mantra SPH-M340 (Virgin Mobile)

Pros : Simple. Cheap. Inexpensive prepaid plans.

Cons : Very poor camera. Tiny external display. No music, video, or camcorder.

Bottom Line : The Samsung Mantra SPH-M340 is a cheap, decent option for voice calls on Virgin Mobile, but not much else.

At $19.99, the Samsung Mantra SPH-M340 is a very cheap cell phone for Virgin Mobile's equally cheap PayLo prepaid plan. You don't get much for your money, but then again, you aren't really paying much to begin with. If you only need to make calls and are looking for a simple, inexpensive device, the Mantra will do. But if you're looking for anything more than that, you're better off looking elsewhere.

Design, Call Quality, and Bluetooth
The Mantra looks sleek for a basic flip phone. The front and sides are clad mostly in shiny black plastic, while the back is a rubberized grey. It measures 3.8 by 1.9 by .7 inches (HWD) when closed, and opens up to a comfortable 6.9 inches. The hinge is sturdy, and the phone feels solid overall. There's a postage stamp-sized external color LCD which displays battery life, date, messages, reception, ringer, and time. It's useful, but a little too small. Opening the phone reveals a 2-inch, 128-by-160 pixel LCD; it definitely looks low res, but there isn't much to see here anyway. The keypad features large, well-separated keys, and the control pad is simple and easy to use. Texting wasn't a problem, nor was finding my way around the phone's extremely basic UI.

quality was excellent over an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars) and the Nuance-powered voice dialing worked just fine without training. Battery life was average at 5 hours and 27 minutes.

Virgin Mobile's payLo plans for the LG 101 are quite inexpensive. A 1500-minute, one-month plan that includes 500 text messages and (a rather measly) 10MB of Web access costs $30. You can also get a 400-minute plan for $20, or pay 10 cents per minute and 15 cents per text message. You activate the phone via a serial number, either through the phone (if you're topping off an existing number) or through Virgin Mobile's Web site (if you're starting from scratch). We'd like it better if each plan didn't expire after one month, though.

Features, Camera, and Conclusions
The main menu consists of nine large icons arranged in a grid. There are links to your contacts, messaging, the Web, and a number of other basic functions. All of the usual low-end phone apps are in place as well, including an alarm clock, calculator, notepad, tip calculator, world clock, and voice memo function.

The e-mail client works fine, but it only supports a limited variety of accounts, with AOL and Yahoo being the two most popular. Gmail is missing. The IM client also works well, but only supports AIM or Yahoo Messenger accounts. Virgin offers direct links to custom WAP pages for Facebook and MySpace directly from the Messaging menu. The pages load relatively quickly, though it all looks rather poor on the phone's limited display.

The Openwave 7.2 browser did a decent job delivering WAP pages. It can't handle desktop Web pages. Since there's just 4.5MB of free internal memory on the phone, the amount of personalization you can do is limited. You can choose from various preloaded themes, wallpapers, and ringtones, or download additional ones through Virgin, but that's it. There's no music player, video playback, or camcorder. There's a mono 2.5mm headphone jack for hands-free headphones.

The 640-by-480, VGA camera is just plain bad. Photos taken had decent lighting, but were otherwise lacking in detail and basically blurred beyond recognition. They look bad on the phone's screen, and even worse off of it. There's no good way to get images off the phone, other than uploading them online or sending them via picture message or e-mail. But it's really not worth the trouble.

Virgin's PayLo lineup doesn't have any great phones; it's really all about the cheap minutes. With that in mind, if all you plan to do is talk, the Samsung Mantra SPH-M340 is a fine phone with which to do it. For much better hardware, you'll have to go to Virgin's more mainstream monthly plans. Our Editors' Choice on Virgin Mobile is the LG Rumor Touch ($99.99, 4 stars), which offers a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a touch screen, and plenty of multimedia power. But it's larger and more expensive at $99.99, and it doesn't use Virgin Mobile's cheapest payLo plans like the LG 101 ($14.99, 2 stars) and LG Flare.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 27 minutes

PCmag