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The majority of mobile phone buyers evidently believe that small is beautiful. Despite the obvious functional advantages of bigger, chunkier PDA phones, most will opt every time for little bitty phones.

The trouble is, tiny phones with tiny numeric keypads and tiny screens make it very difficult to enter text for SMS messages, e-mails or to add data to address books or to-do lists. The only text input method available on most involves pressing numeric keys once, twice or three times to select one of the alphabetical characters associated with it. Users eventually get used to it, but this makes for v-e-r-y slow input.

The Samsung p207, a tiny trimode GSM/EDGE camera phone available from Cingular Wireless and in Canada from Rogers Wireless, does not entirely solve this problem, but it goes part of the way—far enough to make it intriguing as a model for future products.

The p207's claim to fame is that it is one of the first mobile phones, if not the first, to offer built-in speech-to-text capabilities. We tested the p207 on the Rogers network.

Dictation
Some phones already offer speech-based command and control capabilities, and have done for a few years. You can speak commands such as Call, Search, Check, etc. When you tell the phone to Call, for example, and then say the name of the person you want to call, it looks up the name in your phone book and calls the number associated with it. Or you can say the numerals in a phone number instead of hunting and pecking at tiny keys.

The p207 can do that too.

What's new is that it also lets you dictate text messages to send via the cellular operator's short message service (SMS). It translates your spoken words into text on the screen as you speak. This is a terrific boon if you're a heavy SMS user, and the speech-to-text technology - VoiceMode from VoiceSignal Technologies - works reasonably well, though far from perfectly.

But for reasons we can't quite fathom, VoiceMode is only enabled on the p207 for text messaging. It's not available for composing e-mails or for entering data in the phone book or for anything else other than command and control. Since e-mails tend to be longer than text messages, it would have been at least as useful for mail as SMS.

Hoop Dreams
The p207, in fact, appears to be mainly targeted at consumers who are perhaps less likely to want to use e-mail. It is possible to set up the unit to send and receive POP e-mail, but not without jumping through hoops. Neither Rogers nor Samsung, which provides technical support from a U.S. call center unfamiliar with Canadian carriers, was able to provide useful help in setting it up on my test phone. I gave up after over an hour of tech support calls.


               p207 Closed

The phone did come configured to send e-mail over the Rogers Wireless network, including multimedia messages with pictures taken using the integrated VGA (640x480) still and video camera or music downloaded using the WAP browser or audio clips made using the phone's sound recording functions. These messages arrive with a carrier return address.

The multimedia features are reasonably well executed. The audio recording function, in particular, is very good, the recordings clear, with good volume. You can easily make voice notes when speaking directly into the microphone, but it's not really useful for recording voices of people at distances greater than a few feet.

Its camera, being a fixed focus device with VGA resolution, is fine for making pictures and videos to show on a phone but not for much else. There is no integrated flash. The p207 (and Rogers) make it easy to send still pictures to other phones via multimedia messaging (MMS) or to e-mail addresses.

Specs
The p207 is an unremarkable phone in many ways. It's small enough at 3.4 x 1.8 x .9 inches and 3.2 ounces, and it's reasonably elegant in shiny black plastic with silver accents. But it's no stand-out in the design department, just a classic flip phone.

Samsung claims continuous talk time of up to five hours and standby time of 200 hours. The main display (visible when the phone is flipped open) is a 176 x 220-pixel TFT LCD capable of displaying 262,000 colors. The display on the outside surface of the flip top, which shows the time, incoming call numbers, etc., is much smaller and only able to display 65,000 colors, but that's perfectly adequate for the purpose.


               p207 Open & Closed

In our testing of its voice capabilities on the Rogers network, the p207 performed well, but no better than many other phones. Even in rural areas where signal strength was low, voice quality was usually good enough.

VoiceMode: Come or Comma?
The only thing that really sets the p207 apart is the VoiceMode speech-to-text features. Unlike high-end speech recognition systems for PCs, VoiceMode offers non-continuous speech recognition. You have to say each word separately with a slight pause between words. Before you can even begin to use the feature you have to "adapt" VoiceMode to the characteristics of your voice and speech. You do this by reading a series of words. It's a tedious process but takes less than five minutes.

To create a new message using VoiceMode, you have to work through the menus (Messaging.1.1) to the point where you would normally start inputting text using the keypad. Now click the right-hand soft key which toggles through the various input methods until "VoiceMode" appears at the bottom right of the screen. At this point, you press the button on the right edge of the phone (it doubles as a shutter release in camera mode) and start speaking at the beep.

In testing, I was rarely able to input a complete sentence without at least one mistake, even after getting the knack of speaking each word clearly and separately. The word "come" might be interpreted as "comma," for example, with the result that the program would input a comma. VoiceMode often didn't like the way I said the word "a" and variously interpreted it as "how," "at" or other incorrect guesses. And it wasn't as good at names as words, not surprisingly.

It obviously has common names in its dictionary, though, even some surnames. It recognized Watson, for example, but not Blackwell. I was "Jerry blackmail," "Jerry blackhawks," "Jerry blackboard," etc. - a different guess every time.

When speech-to-text programs make mistakes, the results always seem laughable, making it easy to dismiss speech recognition as a technology toy that just don't work. But you can improve input accuracy with practice. And even with the mistakes, it's still faster entering text this way than using the keypad.

To correct words, you backspace through the text until the word is highlighted and then press the 0 key. This pops up a list of possible alternatives. In my testing, the correct word was more often than not in the list—even names, such as the correct spelling of my given name with a G.

Use the arrow keys to scroll down to the correct word, click the OK button and the program automatically inserts the correct word in place of the incorrect one. One weakness: if you deliberately or accidentally exit the text input screen before you've finished correcting - which is easy to do - the correction tool is no longer available when you come back to that screen.

If the correct word is not in the list, you can elect to spell it. Now you're back to using the keypad. Why not let the user spell the word using VoiceMode at this point?

T9
The p207 does include one other way to input text that beats the old multi-stroke method. T9 is a proprietary predictive text mode that lets you enter text by pressing keys only once. It guesses the word you intended by comparing what you've input to its dictionary.

It's surprisingly accurate, though not perfect. For example, it guessed "jazz" when I meant "lazy," for example. Speech input is still faster than T9.

If you're a heavy SMS user, but don't need e-mail or a way to synch calendar and phone book with a PC, the p207 is worth considering. Cingular has it for $100 with a two-year contract. Rogers sells it with one, two and three-year plans for $85 to $190.