Samsung Eternity A867 Phone

Released for AT&T, the Samsung Eternity is a touch screen phone with a full-touch QWERTY keypad and support for AT&T Mobile TV. Featuring a black and chrome exterior, its large 3.2-inch touch screen has haptic support, providing subtle vibrations that confirms selections. Using TouchWiz UI, the Eternity can be customized with specially designed widgets. Users simply drag and drop favorite functions, such as the clock, music player, instant messaging, photos and AT&T Mobile TV all from the home screen. The Eternity has an integrated 3.0-megapixel camera with video capture, Video Share calling, advanced messaging capabilities, including Mobile Email and instant messaging (Yahoo!, Windows Live, AOL), Bluetooth technology and a microSD memory card slot supporting up to 8GB.

Samsung Eternity (A867) Features

• 3G-HSDPA high-speed data access for ultra high-speed downloads of music, radio feeds and video
• User-friendly touch screen plus TV and music applications for entertainment in the palm of the hand
• AT&T Mobile TV lets users tune in 24/7 for full-length, broadcast quality episodes of favorite TV shows on networks like CBS, Comedy Central, ESPN, FOX, MTV and NBC
• Built-in 3.0-megapixel camera with digital zoom takes photo and videos
• AT&T Navigator uses GPS directions to find the fastest route to where the destination, giving driving directions, maps and traffic update

This finger-touch phone is similar to the Behold, but for AT&T's 3G network, and trading a bit of camera resolution for MediaFLO live TV and video sharing. Other features include memory card slot, GPS, and stereo Bluetooth.

Camera Resolution : 3.0 Megapixel
Video recording : Video recording
Music Player : MP3 Player
Mobile TV : AT&T Mobile TV
Email : Mobile Email
User Memory : 200MB Shared MP3 Player and Camera
Touch Screen : Yes

Samsung's fun TouchWiz interface greets you when you power the Eternity on, filling your home screen with "widgets." You can rearrange or remove these little boxes—like a music player, world clock, and birthday calendar—at will. TouchWiz is very easy to use and runs quickly thanks to the Eternity's 400-MHz ARM11 processor, but the 240-by-400 screen can get frustratingly crowded.

For calls, the Eternity is a more-than-solid performer. The phone runs on GSM networks in the U.S. and abroad, as well as on AT&T's HSDPA 3.6 3G network. The phone offers the dialer nicely sized virtual buttons and auto-completes recently dialed numbers—both nice touches. On my tests, signal reception was strong, and the earpiece was very loud, although it distorts a little at top volume. Calls came through clearly on the other end, transmitting little (if any) background noise. The speakerphone also sounded fine and delivered calls very well. It paired easily with wired and Bluetooth headsets like Motorola's MotoPURE H15. There's only one major pitfall here: no voice dialing. On the bright side, the Eternity showed an excellent 6 hours 50 minutes of talk time on our battery-rundown test.

Since it's touch-screen-only, the phone offers several on-screen options for text entry: a portrait-style phone keypad, a landscape-style QWERTY keyboard, and a slightly temperamental handwriting recognizer. The two keyboards are easy to type on and swap automatically when you rotate the phone. There's also a slight vibration, so you know when you've pressed a key. The phone uses AT&T's standard e-mail and IM clients, which support AIM, Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, and a limited list of e-mail services, including AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo—but not Gmail.

Web browsing on the Eternity works well—for a non-smartphone, at least. It uses the Access NetFront 3.5 browser, which displays full Web pages with aplomb (though without Flash), and you can swipe and zoom through pages with your finger. Just as with TouchWiz, though, you'll probably wish for a higher-screen resolution, especially if you've caught a glimpse of the gorgeous one on the iPhone.

The Eternity's media players also work well—until you start comparing them with the iPhone's. All you have to do is dump your AAC, WMA, or MP3 music (except DRM-protected iTunes files) onto a microSD card and the phone will play them; it can also stream music from XM Radio ($8.99 per month) and Pandora (free)—though XM stuttered a bit on our test. Otherwise, music sounded great and had plenty of bass with both wired headphones and the Altec Lansing BackBeat Bluetooth headphones. The phone will play iPod-formatted MPEG-4 videos, too. You can transfer files via microSD card, Bluetooth, or USB cable (not included). If you opt for a USB cable, you can sync the phone with Windows Media Player, but not iTunes.

While the Eternity does have its own TeleNav-supported GPS, its navigation has a really big hitch: Java programs that aren't specifically designed for the Eternity don't work properly on its touch screen. Instead of tapping menu items or buttons in the GPS app, you have to use an unintuitive virtual cursor pad at the bottom of the screen. It's frustrating, to say the least.

In theory, the Eternity also syncs music, messages, contacts, and calendars with PCs using Samsung's free PC Studio software. In reality, though, it's not a good idea; PC Studio is buggy and complex, and doesn't sync with Outlook. The phone does, however, work as a Bluetooth modem for PCs—assuming you have the proper service plan. That's the first thing the Eternity can do that the iPhone can't.

You'll find a few other things the iPhone doesn't do here, but the Eternity doesn't do them all that well. Take its flagship feature, AT&T Mobile TV, for example. Run by Qualcomm's MediaFLO, this service gives you around a dozen channels of live, streaming mobile TV, including MSNBC, Fox News, Comedy Central, NBC, Nickelodeon, and movies from Sony Pictures. MediaFLO should work in about 60 cities (with more to come), as long as you can get UHF TV channel 55. Even right by a window in midtown Manhattan, we got poor reception on the Eternity. The problem seems to be the Eternity's lack of extendable antenna; we got much better reception on an LG Vu.

The camera on the Eternity also one-ups the one on the iPhone: It offers higher resolution (3MP) than the iPhone's 2-megapixel shooter and can shoot video. Nevertheless the Eternity's camera isn't very good; it took dark pictures outdoors and very soft photos in low light. The videos it recorded, meanwhile, wouldn't play on our Mac and PC with QuickTime. You can store files on a microSD card (up to 16GB) or in the device's 207MB of internal memory.

The Samsung Eternity SGH-A867 (AT&T) has a lot going for it, but ultimately it's clobbered by the competition. If the price were $100 less, we could consider the Eternity a "poor man's iPhone." But at the same price, pretty much anyone who's interested in (and is willing to pay for) the Eternity would be happier with Apple's more powerful, more attractive, more flexible smartphone.