We get our hands on the latest Samsung touchscreen phone in our Samsung Eternity review. Did Mobile TV make this the best TouchWIZ of the bunch?
Review summary of the Samsung Eternity:
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 The Samsung Eternity is a phone that zigs nicely, but we really wanted it to zag. Features for which we didn't have high hopes, like the onscreen keyboard or the GPS navigation, actually performed much better than we expected, while some of the key features for this device, like the AT&T Mobile TV service or the Web browser, fell flat. The phone was nice and responsive, whether we were moving widgets around on the screen or switching the screen orientation as we rotated the phone, and though we think Samsung needs to take the TouchWIZ interface back to the drawing board, once we dug past the standby screen to reach the real features on this phone, it was easy to come away pleased, if not impressed. Release: November 2008. Price: $150.
Pros: Responsive touchscreen. Good music player. Menus and interface are all polished, ready for touch.
Cons: TouchWIZ interface is nearly useless thanks to lack of screen real estate, cramped widgets. Lacks some necessary calling and messaging features. Mobile TV a letdown on this device.
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Full review of the Samsung Eternity:
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Design - Good
Samsung has a whole family of phones in this same design vein, including the Samsung Behold on T-Mobile and the Samsung Omnia. The Samsung Eternity, like the Behold, doesn't offer all the advanced features of Windows Mobile that the Samsung Omnia has, but Samsung has gone far beyond the standard AT&T multimedia phone interface. The media player gets a much-needed update, and most apps are polished and in-line with the TouchWIZ theme.
TouchWIZ is the widgets-based interface that Samsung has been laying on top of their recent all-touch phones. The home screen has a slide-out drawer with widget icons, and you can drag the icons onto the desktop space to enlarge them and add functionality. You can drag out a picture viewer widget to display a slideshow on the desktop, or you can drag out a media player to control music. There are shortcut buttons as well, for the Mobile TV app or the contact list, for instance.
Widgets are a popular idea, but they don't really work on this phone. The 3.2-inch display is long and narrow, and it didn't take more than a couple of widgets to fill our screen. If you have the photo viewer open, for instance, you'll definitely block the analog clock widget and the music controls. This would be a great interface for a much larger device, something in the 5-inch range or larger, but it just isn't practical on this screen. Because of the lack of screen real estate, we were forced to constantly drag widgets in and out of the drawer to use them.
Calling - Good
Call quality on the Samsung Eternity was very good, with calls that sounded loud and clear. There was a slightly metallic tinge to voices on our caller's end, but things sounded very good on our side. The phone used a nice, large keypad for dialing, and the in-call screen was polished and useful. It was easy to manage multiple calls for a conference or call-waiting, and the phone lays out multiple calls in tabs and offers a "Join" button right on the calling screen. For reception, we couldn't count the tiny bars in the status bar, but it looked like we were getting a nearly full signal whether we were in New York City or our suburban New Jersey homefront. The Samsung Eternity gets a higher-capacity battery than the Samsung Behold, 1300 mAh vs. 1000 mAh. Strangely, this didn't equate to more talking time in our tests, though the Samsung Eternity was more often under AT&T's 3G network umbrella, a notorious battery hog.
The Samsung Eternity gets a nice-looking contact list, with plenty of available fields to create a robust entry, including fields for up to 5 phone numbers, as well as fields for job title and addresses. We wish there was an easy synchronization and backup option for the contact list, but AT&T and Samsung haven't included any easy way to get contacts off our desktops. Voice dialing is also left off this phone, which is a serious omission. We rely on voice dialing while we're driving, and on an all-touch phone, dialing by touch is completely out of the question on the road. We were at least happy with the speakerphone, which was acceptably loud, and Bluetooth pairing worked fine with all our test headsets.
Messaging - Good
The messaging options on the Samsung Eternity were surprisingly limited in scope, but we were equally surprised with how well the keyboard performed in our typing tests. For messaging, SMS and MMS worked well, with a clean-looking messaging app. It was easy to add contacts as recipients for our messages. E-mail and IM were much more limiting. For instant messaging, the app looks good, consistent with the SMS client, but we were limited to AOL, MSN or Yahoo, when Google Talk is really our preferred messaging service (or Facebook, perhaps). For e-mail, we could choose from a list of preset e-mail services, but our non-corporate service of choice, Gmail, was nowhere to be found, nor could we add our own settings.
Whether by luck or by design, we had great success typing on the Samsung Eternity's keyboard. It isn't especially large or accommodating, as there are few symbols on the main QWERTY screen, but in our rapid-fire typing tests, our results were much more accurate than we expected. We were more accurate on this phone than on most touchscreen phones, including the BlackBerry Storm, though the Apple iPhone 3G, with its top-notch auto-correction features, easily trumped the Samsung Eternity's XT9 intuitive text completion.
Music - Very good
The Samsung Eternity includes a simple, polished music player with large buttons that responded well to our touch input. The music library presented lists that scrolled easily with a swipe of our finger. They may have been a bit jerky, but we liked the haptic feedback that vibrated a bit as the songs scrolled past, and the lists were still responsive and quick. Aside from our other problems with widgets, we liked the music player widget on the home screen that let us control music without firing up the Music Player app.
The phone has some good streaming music options as well, though these were expensive extras. Like most AT&T Music phones, the Samsung Eternity has access to a selection of stations from XM's radio service. More interesting, the Eternity also comes with a Pandora music app. We love Pandora's service on our Apple iPhone, and we were pleased to find it worked even better, quicker and more responsive, on the Samsung Eternity. Unfortuately, while the service is still free on our iPhone, both the Pandora app and the XM service require their own $9 monthly subscription on this device. We'll stick with our own music instead. Plus, since the Samsung Eternity uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, we'll happily stick with our own headphones as well.
Video - Good
We usually proselytize the virtues of MediaFLO's mobile TV service to the unconverted, who are used to blocky, stuttering streaming video clips. Unfortunately, on the Samsung Eternity, the AT&T Mobile TV service doesn't look much better than streaming video. When we had strong Mobile TV reception in New York City, the video was still blocky-looking with plenty of compression artifacts. Out in the New Jersey 'burbs, we had little-to-no Mobile TV reception. Of course, Mobile TV has some nice, though not great, programming options, and these are much more like real television than the short clips you can expect on the Cellular Video service. But the video quality was bad enough that we wouldn't bother subscribing to either service.
Camera - Good
While the Samsung Behold and the Samsung Omnia both featured an impressive 5-megapixel sensor with an auto focus lens, the camera on the Samsung Eternity is more basic in its hardware. Still, we weren't impressed with the results we got from the Behold, and the Samsung Eternity fares no better in our tests. Details were hazy or noisy, especially in dark spots. Color was all over the place, with some bright reds and oranges popping our of their boundaries, and other drab colors completely washing out the pics. We had trouble getting the camera to focus properly on the subject at hand, and often the background would be clear while the subject would be blurry.
Steel, glass and sky
Church
Townhouse apartments
In the first two of these shots around town, the colors are all over the map. The sky seems purple in spots, dark grey in others. In the picture of the church, the camera completely darkens the bottom half. Though the day was only partly cloudy, it looks overcast here. And don't try to find any fine details in that shot, they left the scene long ago. In the third pic, even at half zoom its easy to see that the edges on the building are all blurry. Strangest of all is the decidedly yellow cast this shot has taken, since it didn't match the mid-afternoon sunlight we saw in person.
Night shot
This night-time image, taken while the camera was stabilized on a level surface, looks like a scanned photo from a newspaper. Color is absent entirely, and noise is so bad it's creating vertical lines down the image.
Times Square
Reds and oranges pop in this picture, but zoom in and you wouldn't be able to identify a single face in a lineup. Lots of fringing, as well, where the buildings meet the sky. Somehow, this camera must like green, because the banner for "Wicked" seems the clearest moment in this otherwise chaotic image.
Times Square panorama
The Samsung Eternity takes panorama shots automatically while you simply pan the camera in any direction. This sounds great on paper, but in practice the panorama shots turned into a mess. Even in a more static environment, we got similar results from the panorama mode.
Berries and blur
In this shot, clearly the berries in the foreground were the subject, but the camera focused on the branches behind instead .The reds are quite exaggerated, but otherwise this pic isn't a total disaster.
Self portrait
Perhaps thanks to the intense lighting, this self portrait was one of the more clear shots we took with the Eternity. There is no mirror on the camera, but lining up a shot wasn't too difficult, nonetheless.
eBay shot
A completely unusable shot. Details are fuzzy, and the most important parts, the asst. numbers up top, are illegible.
Close-up figurine
Even in this pic, the hot pink is posterized and rendered a bit too hot for reality. We tried this shot five times from various focal lengths but could never get a usable, clear close-up image.
GPS navigation - Very good
The Samsung Eternity found us quickly, and used AT&T Navigator for turn-by-turn directions. Navigation worked well, and the phone kept up with us on our commute home, even suggesting new routes around traffic problems ahead. We would have liked more responsive maps, as the phone was somewhat unresponsive when we tried to drag them around, if it worked at all. But for spoken directions, the Eternity worked well.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser on the Samsung Eternity isn't as competent as the Opera browser we saw on the Samsung Omnia, but for a basic, non-smartphone browser, it did an acceptable job. Pages loaded quickly and looked fairly accurate, at least better than we've seen on Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile phones. Some graphics came through looking blocky and jagged, especially our site's name on our masthead. The browser responded quickly to our touch, but didn't keep moving once we lifted our finger. There was no acceleration, so scrolling was a long and laborious chore on large pages. The phone did perform well switching screen orientation from landscape to portrait. Still, if Web browsing is your thing, perhaps it would be better to wait and see if a U.S. carrier picks up the Omnia, which is a more advanced smartphone.
Price and availability
The Samsung Eternity is available now from AT&T for $150 with a contract agreement and available rebates.
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We'll start off 2009 with live coverage of Macworld and CES:
Macworld 2009, Jan 5 - 6
CES 2009, Jan 7 - 11
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