Samsung Galaxy Rugby Pro (AT&T)

Choosing a smartphone?can be tough, especially when you're choosing a tough smartphone?there just aren't that many options available. AT&T makes it easy with the $99.99 Samsung Galaxy Rugby Pro, the best rugged smartphone we've tested. It has a tough build, a powerful processor, and smoking fast LTE data speeds, offering an excellent balance of form and function, making it our latest Editors' Choice for rugged smartphones.

Design, Rugged Tests, and Call Quality
The Rugby Pro measures 5.04 by 2.65 by 0.50 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.6 ounces, which makes it a good deal bulkier than the Samsung Rugby Smart?, our previous top pick for rugged smartphones. Luckily, that bit of girth is channeled into a bigger display and much faster hardware. The back of the phone is textured black plastic, with a plastic silver lock to make sure it stays put. The sides of the phone, meanwhile, are made of thick, grippy, rubberized plastic.

The 4-inch, 800-by-480-pixel Super AMOLED display is bigger than the 3.7-inch screen on the Rugby Smart, but it's the same resolution, so it isn't as sharp. It still looks bright and saturated, though the PenTile pixel arrangement makes text and images appear fuzzy if you look very closely. The onscreen QWERTY keyboard is just large enough to type on comfortably, though, for some reason, I sometimes had trouble when trying to swipe across the screen horizontally. There are three clicky, textured physical function keys beneath the display, a covered 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, and a covered power port on the bottom. There's a Power button on the right and volume controls on the left, along with an extra, customizable key.

The phone meets U.S. military spec 810G for dust, humidity, rain, shock, and temperature. When all of its ports are tightly closed, you can submerge the Rugby Pro in up to 3 feet of water for 30 minutes. I placed it in a container of water for 30 minutes with the screen on and it came back out just fine. But as far as dropping the phone, things aren't as reliable. I dropped the Rugby Pro onto the hard, rubbery floor of the PCMag Lab from a height of five feet about ten times. Roughly half of those times the phone's battery cover opened partially, secured only by the lock on the bottom. And twice the phone's battery became dislodged and nearly popped out. So while this phone can stand up to mild abuse, and probably isn't going to break from a fall like your standard smartphone might, you should still be careful with it.

The Rugby Pro uses AT&T's super-fast LTE network, which makes it the first rugged LTE smartphone we've tested. It scales down to HSPA+ where LTE isn't available, and connects to 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi on the 2.4GHz band. It also works a mobile hotspot to share your connection with additional devices with the appropriate data plan.

This is a good voice phone. Reception is strong, and calls sound full and clear in the earpiece, though there's a slight humming sound in the background. Speakerphone quality sounds fine, but it isn't loud enough to hear outdoors. Calls made with the phone sound clear, if a bit robotic, and feature good noise cancellation. In my tests, calls sounded clear over a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset and Samsung's Siri-like S Voice app worked well. Battery life was very good, at 12 hours and 40 minutes of talk time.

Processor and Apps
Rugged smartphones have been historically underpowered compared to their more fragile counterparts. Not so this time around. The Rugby Pro is powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 processor, which beats the heck out of the single-core Rugby Smart. It performed very well in our benchmark tests, turning in scores similar to other top-tier phones like the Samsung Galaxy S III?. It doesn't match the quad-core performance of a phone like the LG Optimus G, but there aren't many quad-core phones out there yet. The Rugby Pro should be able to handle all of the 600,000+ apps and games in the Google Play store without a problem.

The Rugby Pro runs Android 4.0.4 "Ice Cream Sandwich" with Samsung's TouchWiz extensions. So far, Samsung hasn't announced if this phone will receive an update to Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean." You get five customizable home screens that come preloaded with apps and widgets, some useful, and some not as much. There's a decent amount of bloatware, including an AT&T-branded messaging client and QR code scanner. You can't delete any of it, but you can disable it so it doesn't show up on your Apps page.

There are some useful preinstalled apps, like the aforementioned S Voice. It's not quite Siri, but it does a pretty nice job with voice commands and searches. There's also Kies Air, which lets you view your phone's contacts, messages, and media through a PC's Web browser.?

Samsung has added a tiny strip at the bottom of the home screen and Apps menu that allows you slide through pages just by dragging a finger over it, which is helpful. There are also a couple of motion-sensitive controls you can activate: You can flip the phone over to mute the ringer or any other sounds that are playing, and you can shake it to scan for compatible Bluetooth or Kies Air devices.

Multimedia and Conclusions
You get 4.87GB of free internal storage, and there's an empty microSD card slot under the battery (my 32GB and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine). I was able to play back all of our audio test files except for FLAC, and sound quality was good over both wired headphones as well as Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones. All of our test videos played back at resolutions up to 1080p, though audio stuttered on DivX files.

The 5-megapixel camera is average. Shutter speeds are a little slow, at 1.1 seconds to capture a photo. Both color and detail are slightly above average, and images tend to favor softness instead of noise. The video camera records 720p video at 30 frames per second indoors and out, though details were a little soft on video recorded indoors. There's also a 1.3-megapixel forward facing camera for self portraits and video chat.

If you need a tough smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Rugby Pro is it. Not only is it tough, but it's just as powerful as many other of the high-end phones out there. The LG Optimus G has a more powerful quad-core processor and a larger, sharper display. The?Apple iPhone 5, meanwhile, features a gorgeous new 4-inch retina display and an unsurpassed app catalog. And the Nokia Lumia 920 gets you a gorgeous polycarbonate design with Microsoft's latest Windows Phone 8 software. But if you drop any of those phones, chances are, you're going to need to replace it. So if you're tough on your stuff, or just clumsy, the Galaxy Rugby Pro can't be beat.

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