She turns her nose up at touch screens.

She says "Get a map!" to GPS on phones.

She has no interest in surfing the Internet or downloading music or watching live TV on a phone.

"I want a phone that makes calls, not coffee," Lisa says. But she perked up when she saw the new Verizon Wireless Juke by Samsung.

"It's cute," she said.

Indeed it is.

The sleek, slender, stylish, almost lipstick-small Juke is a head-turner. It's the first "flick" phone. It opens sort of like a switchblade, which is fun and a good conversation-starter.

And it does as good a job in terms of connecting with consistent call quality as any phone I've tested in recent memory.

It's a sweet little music player with surprising sound from its tiny external speakers.

This is how small the Juke is:

I was in a meeting this week with the Juke in my jacket pocket. I bumped it, accidentally causing it to start playing a song--loudly. But the Juke is so tiny and I was so flustered that I that I had a hard time finding it to shut it off.

The Juke is not for showoff techies. It's lacking in features. It doesn't have 3G support, so it won't download songs on the go from Verizon's VCast library. They must be downloaded by USB cable from your computer.

But the truth is that most people don't often download songs over the air because it's expensive.

It doesn't have an expandable memory slot, but at a very reasonable $49 price with a two-year service contract, the 500 songs its 2 gigabytes of internal storage holds is sufficient for the Juke's target audience--which seems to be sensible consumers on a budget who want a functional phone that's also fun.

It's music player supports mp3, wma and unprotected .aac files.

It's GPS-capable and can also be set up with Verizon's "Chaperone" service, which parents can use to locate their children.

It's Nluetooth capable, has a 1.3 megapixel camera with night shot and can download ringtones and games on the go, but not music. It has no e-mail, but it is capable of text and picture messaging.

Not a lot of features to speak of in this age Swiss army knife-type of convergeance.

No, it doesn't make coffee.

But it does what it does--play music and make phone calls--very well.

Michael Zitz
540/846-5163
mikez@freelancestar.com