Review: Samsung Glyde
Look. Just open the damned thing up for messaging. Seriously. Yes, you can compose messages with the phone closed. No doubt. But it's an exercise in madness. Triple tapping out messages on a touch screen is just no fun. Especially if the touch screen is slow, has any sort of delay, or needs to be hit more than once to get a reaction. Besides, isn't this what you got the Glyde for, its physical QWERTY keyboard?
With the phone open, the screen reorients itself a bit. The shortcut bar that appears along the bottom shifts over a bit, and the three shortcuts that run along the top of the phone's screen when closed move to the left side. A fourth button, dedicated for messaging, appears. Giving it the old poke brings up a standard messaging menu, with "new message" the top choice. Hitting it and you go to a composition screen. You have to pick which type of message you want to send. Oddly, "email" is not in the list here, but "Sketch message" is. A sketch message is basically an MMS that's been made to look "art-y". Woo hoo.
The IM application is the same that's found on other Verizon phones.
As for email, the way to get it it was to go through the Get It Now application. I assume this is because our review unit needed initial programming. Perhaps a fully configured phone will have the email worked into the messaging department. Without the initial programming, we were unable to test this feature.