CrunchGear reviews Samsung M520 and writes "One feature that piqued my interest was the music player and the ability to put it in the background while you surf the Web or text message. The music player itself stinks and you won’t have much control over what’s going on other than playing, deleting or stopping tracks, which is fine because the M520 isn’t a music-centric device. It will, however, shut off when navigation is enabled or you want to use the camera/video recorder. You can download tracks from the Sprint Music Store or just load some content onto the microSD card like I did. I even got it to work with some mp3s I purchased through iTunes. Speaking of navigation, services are provided by Telenav and it works like a charm. The 1.3-megapixel camera works about as good as any other camera with the same resolution. The same goes for video quality. The conditions have to be perfect.

Watching Sprint TV isn’t too shabby, either. It’s more of a network specific quibble, but videos aren’t very smooth. Some lag occurs so the picture becomes pixilated or the bottom half becomes stagnant. It eventually clears itself up, but it’s a network snafu rather than a hardware issue. When going into full screen mode the picture flips from portrait to landscape and doesn’t shut off when you slide the phone closed.

A couple minor things that are nice to have include Bluetooth and the ability to use the device as a modem. Another cool thing I like is the addition of Favorites. From the home screen you can drop down into your favorites, which includes apps, services, or anything your heart desires as long as it doesn’t exceed 12 items. Setting up e-mail is very easy to do and syncs with AOL, AIM, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, POP or IMAP accounts, but you’re limited to three, which should be sufficient enough for most folks. Voice commands work great, though I never use such things on any device I own."