| Samsung SCH-A990 Expert Reviews |
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Samsung SCH-A990 -- by Joni Blecher Follow me on Twitter--November 7th 2006 |
| Full Review |
| The Samsung A990 has something most other camera phones lack, a 3.2-megapixel camera stocked with a plethora of digital camera features. While you might think that including a 3.2-megapixel camera might bulk up this cell phone, it’s hardly the case. But perhaps what’s more impressive about the Samsung A990 is that it works splendidly as a cell phone first and digital camera second. Trying to decide if you should take the plunge on a low-end digital camera? Consider the Samsung A990, you don’t just get a digital camera and video recorder, but a solid cell phone too. |
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| Call Quality |
| Calls and speakerphone: We’re happy to report that the call quality during receiving and placing calls using the Samsung A990 was quite impressive. Callers said we were loud and clear. Of special note is that this cell phone tends to drown external noises for people on the other end of the line. For example, we stood maybe 20 feet from drilling taking place on the street and callers were none the wiser. Occasionally, we would hear a slight echo; however, it would disappear as quickly as it appeared. Additionally, speakerphone quality was great. There was no break-up on the line or the far away sound that can occur when using a cell phone’s speakerphone. Finally, making the switch from speakerphone to handset mode was seamless.
Audio playback: We found playback of songs to be decent through the cell phone’s speakers. Songs come through loud but slightly tinny and the cell phone lacks audio-centric user controls, so you can’t adjust it. Unfortunately, the cell phone lacks a headset jack, though it does come with an adapter that you can plug into the Samsung A990 and then plug in a standard cell phone headset. |
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| Ease of Use |
Menu/Phonebook: This is one of the more straightforward menu interfaces you’ll find on a cell phone. We particularly like how easy it is to use the phonebook. You can store 500 contacts in the phonebook, each with five phone numbers and two e-mail addresses for each contact – sorry, no slots for address info. Our favorite feature is the Business Card Scan, which is buried under Get Pix and Flix. You can use this feature to take pictures of business cards and then automatically save them to Contacts. But if you want to find your phone number you’ll need to dig through the menu system. 
Camera/Video: The real head turner of this cell phone is its 3.2-megapixel camera. Whenever you hit the camera button or swivel the cell phone’s screen the display automatically transforms into horizontal mode resembling the viewfinder on a digital camera. There’s also a plethora of digital camera features including a self timer, multi-shot, brightness, white balance, and metering (this measures the average amount of light in the picture you’re about to take and calculates the best exposure). In this cell phone, the flash is actually helpful for snapping pictures at night or indoors. As expected, image quality was also good, providing plenty of detail. Once you’ve taken a picture, you can save it to the cell phone’s 55MB of available internal memory (That’s plenty of memory to store high-end photos, video and even music), or to an expandable memory TransFlash card, send the picture or print them using PictBridge (a way to send pictures from a camera directly to a PictBridge-enabled printer).
We found recorded videos were a bit blurry when moving the cell phone around pretty quickly, though when focusing on a specific scene there was plenty of detail. Additionally, sound quality was pretty good. The cell phone comes with a video cable so you can playback videos on your cell phone on a TV.
Music: The Samsung A990 cell phone includes an MP3 player that does a decent job at playing back music. Though this cell phone lacks the ability to adjust audio-centric controls such as bass and treble, it’s a snap to use basic playback functions. We particularly like that once the MP3 player is in use (Note: You need to turn the music on from the cell phone’s Get Tones and Tunes menu first) you can use the buttons on the side of the Samsung A990 to control the features.
However, unless you’re downloading music from Verizon’s VCast service getting music onto the cell phone is an entirely different story. You can’t use Bluetooth to transfer music from a PC to the Samsung cell phone. However, if you purchase an optional cable and software you’ll be able to transfer WMA (Windows music file format) files to the cell phone using Windows Media Player. You can also purchase a MiniSD/TransFlash storage card, to store more tunes from your PC and then slip it into the MiniSD card slot on the side of the cell phone.
Connectivity/Bluetooth: We were able to pair the cell phone with a Motorola Bluetooth H500 headset, however, we needed to consult the manual to set it up correctly. While call quality was perfectly acceptable using a Bluetooth headset there was little else we could do with this feature. |
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| Design |
| Look and Feel:For a cell phone with as many features as the Samsung SCH-A990, it’s surprisingly compact. It’s only slightly larger than the LG Fusic and has the same slick styling as the Samsung Blade. The most notable design feature is the cell phone’s swiveling display. Many times with cell phones where you can turn the screen it typically doesn’t fit comfortably against the ear. You turn your head and the screen turns too – making for a decidedly uncomfortable talking experience. That’s not the case here, when you don’t swivel the screen it stays exactly in place.
One of the nicest features on this Samsung cell phone can probably be attributed to the integrated 3.2-megapixel camera. The screen is beautiful; letters and images are amazingly crisp and both the external and internal displays are visible in most lighting conditions. We don’t even mind the rather large camera lens situated on the back of the cell phone (clearly, it’s there to make the back of the phone look like a camera). You can quickly cover the lens using the sliding mechanism located next to it. The big problem, however, comes from the plethora of buttons found on the cell phone’s spine. Even though when you’re on a call and you accidentally press one of the buttons nothing happens, it’s still not the most intuitive design.
Keypad: Numbers are fairly large on the white backlit keypad. Although, the top portion of the keypad where many of the cell phone’s application launch buttons are located appears a little crowded, it’s actually highly usable. We were particularly impressed with the Samsung’s four-way navi-key. It seems as if each time you press one of those buttons or even the OK key it might inadvertently press a different key instead. This is not the case at all. Our only real quibble with the keypad is the dedicated voice-activation key. We would have preferred that to be a dedicated speakerphone button, but there’s one on the side of the cell phone. The mere inclusion of a dedicated speakerphone button is enough for us. |
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| Battery Life |
| For a cell phone with such an array of high-end features, the battery life is actually really good. Heavy cell phone users who make a ton of calls and send/receive loads of text messages daily will need to recharge it every four days. More moderate users will be able to make the Samsung cell phone last over a week before needing a charge. If you are a light user, making just two to three 10-minute calls a day and light texting, the Samsung A990 cell phone will last about 10 days. We should note that if you plan on using more power-intensive features such as the camera and music player or leave the Bluetooth activated the battery will drain quicker. |
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Samsung SCH-A990 Expert Rating
