Menu/Phonebook: The menu on the Samsung Sync is a little deceiving. It looks pretty straightforward, but it’s hardly intuitive. This is probably because the cell phone has so many features. However, once you get the hang of the layout, navigation becomes much simpler. For example, sending a message appears to be easy but changing the entry mode isn’t exactly obvious.  On the plus side, we do like the graphical interface and the slight animation that appears whenever highlighting an application in the Menu.
There are two main ways to navigate through the Sync: the Menu, which takes you to a high-level of applications and Options, which is where you’ll find more popular features such as Alarm, IM, Bluetooth, and Mobile E-mail. Entering and accessing phone numbers in Contacts is simple. We particularly like the first prompt about where to store the numbers – either the phone or SIM. That’s a nice touch. You can include 5 phone numbers, an e-mail address, photo, ringtone, IM address and notes for each contact. There are no slots for address information, if you want that capability, consider adding it to the notes section. Also, there’s a separate field for first and last name. This is good if you want more ways to access and sort contacts.
Camera/Video: The Samsung Sync sports a 2-megapixel camera and while you shouldn’t expect stellar picture quality it is better than many of the VGA camera phones available. There are a few fun settings such as the ability to change the shooting settings to sepia, black and white, and negative. You can take pics as single shots, multi-shots, and a mosaic style. We particularly appreciated that you don’t have to stop snapping pics even though you are in the process of sending one from the cell phone. The Sync lets you know once it’s sent.
Overall, we found this camera does a much better job with outdoor shots than those taken indoors. Color accuracy is impressive when viewed on the cell phone although when we transferred pics from the Sync to the PC the colors weren’t nearly as vibrant. The pictures tended to be extremely noisy, so much so, you could see the actual pixels on the screen. As expected, photos snapped outdoors didn’t have nearly as much noise. We were impressed at how well the camera handled shadows. We wish it could have done as good a job with highlights (read: too much light and the image lacks details).
Music: As mentioned earlier the MP3 playback quality is impressive. The cell phone supports most music file types (as is the case with most music-enabled cell phones this is possible as long as the files don’t have DRM – digital rights management, a feature on purchased online music that only allows you to play it back on a limited amount of devices): WMA (Windows media format), MP3 and AAC (one of the iTunes music formats). This is impressive since most cell phones barely support one or two formats. Although the player does support Shuffle, Repeat, Playlists and ID Tags (automatically download info about the song); it doesn’t have any audio-centric features.
We particularly like that we were able to send songs to the Samsung cell phone using Bluetooth. You can also add songs to the Samsung Sync directly from a computer by using an optional miniUSB-to-USB cable or by adding them to an optional TransFlash memory card and then inserting the card into the side of the cell phone. How many songs you can save on the cell phone will depend on what else is stored on the Samsung Sync (Note: If you only store music, you’ll only get about 5 songs.).
Connectivity/Bluetooth: Connectivity is really the big story with this Samsung cell phone and likely a big reason why you’d buy it in the first place. But let’s cover Bluetooth first. We easily made connections with other Bluetooth enabled cell phones and computers. We were able to send a MP3 file from the Samsung T629 to the Samsung Sync. We also connected it with the Motorola H700 and found call quality to be sufficient when using this Bluetooth headset.
The real connectivity revolves around a new technology called UMTS/HSDPA. All you really need know to about it is that with the right cell phone and local coverage you can stream content over the Internet at super high speeds and watch and/or listen to it on your cell phone. The Samsung Sync has this capability. For the most part, we could always get a good connection, which made accessing and streaming content a breeze. For example, in the same time it took to watch a one minute video on YouTube over a DSL connection, we were able to select, load, watch a 20 second ESPN clip, and choose another clip to watch on the Samsung A707 Sync. That’s not too shabby.
We should mention, however, that the video quality isn’t fabulous, but it’s not that it’s in slow motion where you hear the words before you see the action – all of that is in perfect sync. It’s more that while watching an episode of Entourage on the cell phone, we had a hard time making out the features of some characters unless they were scheduled for a close-up. That has more to do with the cell phone screen size and type and not the service. |
Look and Feel: Bathed in black, the Samsung A707 exudes an understated elegance. While it’s not as thin as the Samsung Blade, it still appears slender. That is, until you put it in a hand. The A707 is a bit large, making it better suited for people with larger hands and decidedly longer faces. When open and held against the face it is longer than most cordless phones. But the real beauty here is the cell phone’s internal display – it is sharp and prone toward larger letters and numbers. We have no idea what happened to the external display, which appears fuzzy.
On the face of the Sync cell phone you’ll also find three touch-sensitive play/fast forward and rewind buttons, for playing music once the application is launched, similar to the LG Chocolate. You can also activate the camera by touching a button on the side of the phone.
Keypad:
The good thing about larger cell phones is that they tend to have large keys, as is the case with the Samsung Sync. It sports a spacious white backlit display, which keeps misdials to a minimum. The four-way nav-key is easy to use as are the soft keys and dedicated music and menu key, which takes you directly to the menu if you open the cell phone at the Welcome screen or pops up a tabbed interface of popular applications that you can access instead. Plus, you can change any of the shortcuts created on the four-way nav-key to applications you use most. |
Samsung SGH-A707 Expert Rating
