AT&T's Mobile TV service makes its way into our hands on the Samsung Access. Were our eyes glued to the screen?
Review summary of the Samsung Access:
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 The Samsung Access is a good phone for watching AT&T's mobile TV service. It isn't great for making calls. There are better phones for messaging. Web browsing is better than average, but the camera is atrocious. Music is unremarkable, but present. Above all, though, if all you want is a phone that can help you watch "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader" on your train ride home, this is a good choice. We'd like some more programming, but the networks are fairly represented, with one exception, and the included movie and music hodge-podge channels have some fun programs in the lineup. There will be better phones to come, but this is still a nice start for mobile TV. Release: May 2008. Price: $150.
Pros: Mobile TV looks much better than streaming clips, more like real television. Phone is simply designed, like a small TV set.
Cons: Call quality lacking. Other features good, but seem like also-rans. TV quality wasn't perfect, and we're already missing advanced features, like DVR.
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Full Samsung Access Review:
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Design - Good
The Samsung Access looks like a phone made for watching television. In pictures it's a bit uglier than in person, but it's still boxy and square, with shiny accents reminiscent of a 70's-era boob tube. Thankfully, the phone doesn't need an antenna for TV reception, and you can easily jump right into programming by pressing the dedicated TV button. The screen is nice and wide, and it takes up plenty of space on the phone's candybar front. When the picture quality is good, colors can be bright and images crisp and clear.
The interface is standard Samsung, and we like the pop-up style hierarchical menus that give you access to multiple levels of menu options on one screen. The silver keys picked up fingerprints like a CSI team, but that was our only real problem with this phone's otherwise unremarkable design.
Calling - Good
Calls made from the Samsung Access didn't sound great, even though we had four bars of reception on AT&T's HSDPA network in lower Manhattan. Listeners reported a heavily digitized sound, with underlying static that seemed to get louder during pauses between speech. Otherwise, the phone packs most of the features we like to see, though it did come up a bit short. Bluetooth for handsfree calling worked fine with all our headsets. Conference calling was easy enough, but required a step into the menus, while we like to simply press the Call button to join calls. The speakerphone was loud, but not impressively so. Considering the stereo speakers the phone packs for TV watching, we expected it to be louder. The phone unfortunately lacks voice dialing options, a feature we find crucial while driving.
Messaging - Good
Again, no surprises in the messaging department, especially if you've been keeping up with recent AT&T multimedia phones, like the Motorola Z9. You get the standard set of tools, like SMS and MMS messaging, IM for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, as well as AT&T's e-mail client. Unfortunately, Google is left out of the IM and e-mail party, though Juno somehow gets a seat at the POP3 table. The keyboard is pretty average for typing. Keys were plenty wide, thanks to the phone's slab-like design, but they were also pretty slick. Still, we had no trouble multi-tapping messages.
Video - Very good
If you didn't come to this phone looking for great video, there's really no other reason to be interested. In terms of video, the Samsung Access with AT&T's Mobile TV service delivers. It looks much better than the older Cellular Video service, and handily defeats the streaming clips in terms of quality, responsiveness and programming. We had a great time keeping tabs on CNN and watching "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central. Best of all, at 9PM ESPN is showing the NBA Playoffs live.
The service isn't perfect. Some shows looked a bit blocky or blurry, and we definitely found compression artifacts. Still, the service is so much better than what current users are used to, it's surprising that this phone also includes the Cellular Video app. Perhaps this is so customers can compare and feel better about paying $15/month for the TV service.
We'd also like to see a few other improvements. Currently, AT&T offers 11 channels, including most of the major networks, though Disney-owned ABC is absent, so there's no General Hospital for us to watch. We'd also like DVR capabilities, and maybe dual tuners for PIP, like we saw on some Samsung phones in Korea. Also, more coverage would be nice, as the service conked out about 20 miles west of New York City on our commute home to Morristown, NJ.
Music - Good
Though the Samsung Access gets AT&T's best video service, for some reason the carrier has left out the new AT&T Music store. You still get AT&T Music capabilities, so Napster tracks will play nicely on the phone. But it's about time AT&T finally made their over-the-air download store ubiquitous and launched it on all their multimedia phones. Otherwise, the music player was very basic and lacked good onboard features for playlists and EQ settings. Stereo Bluetooth worked well, but the stereo speakers on the phone were a disappointment.
Web browsing - Good
The phone actually did a fine job of rendering pages, but we had other issues with Web browsing on the Samsung Access. Our homepage came through cleanly, with images and text nicely rendered. Still, the page loaded very slowly, even with plenty of bars of coverage on AT&T's 3G network. Navigating pages was a chore, as well, as the browser jumped link-to-link and scrolled very slowly down longer pages.
Camera - Medioce
The camera on the Samsung Access continues the unfortunate Samsung tradition of horrible lenses on otherwise fine devices. Pictures taken with the 1.3-megapixel camera came out looking blurry, washed out and noisy. Even on the small screen, pictures were almost entirely unusable. If you need proof that Bigfoot is in your house, grab something else, because these pictures won't fool anybody.
Value - Good
AT&T and Verizon have an interesting pricing game going for their mobile TV devices. The Access costs $200, which is pretty high for a phone that does very little well outside of Mobile TV. The Samsung u620 on Verizon Wireless, a comparable TV phone, costs half as much. For service, Verizon Wireless offers a TV plan for $25/monthly. AT&T offers a plan for $15/month, and another "TV Plus" plan for $30 that includes unlimited data and Cellular Video. We'd skip that one, and just avoid Web browsing and data usage on this phone. Over the course of your contract, the $10/month you save on AT&T's phone will make up for the difference in price between the carrier's phones. We also could see an early price drop in this phone's future, as $100 seems much more competitive, and both AT&T and Verizon Wireless also have higher-end multimedia phones from LG that use their respective TV services and fill in the top of the price range.
Price and availability
The Samsung Access is available now from AT&T for $150 with a contract agreement. A mail-in rebate of $50 is available, when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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