AT&T's simpler new touchscreen, full QWERTY slider offers a surprising range of social and fun features at a low price. Will this phone take off? Find out in our hands-on look at the Samsung Flight
The Samsung Flight on AT&T steps in where the Samsung Propel might have left off, but it's available for less cash at launch and comes with upgraded features in almost every way. It's a step down from the almost-smartphone aspirations of a more feature-rich phone like the Samsung Mythic, but the hardware is mostly solid and the Samsung Flight can be likeable in surprising ways, especially in terms of Web browsing and social networking.
In terms of features, the Samsung Flight might be a step up from the last generation of vertically-sliding QWERTY phones, but it's still decidedly low-end. The camera around back is a 2-megapixel shooter that's supposed to have auto focus, but we didn't find it. The touchscreen display is also a novelty on a device in this form.
The Good
One of the most underrated features on newer Samsung phones has been the great call control. It's easy to make calls with this phone, and the most popular calling features are right at your fingertips. Once you're in a call, you get a speakerphone button and a video share option for one-way video conferencing. It was very easy to make a conference call and join the three parties, and even easier to split up the call again at the end for a personal good-bye. Battery life could have been much better. We got under 4 hours of talk time out of this phone. We'd also like to see some contacts sync with online services. But call quality was pretty good, and it's nice to see a phone that makes calling easy and intuitive.
The Samsung Flight also gets a couple of pleasantly useful apps from AT&T, the Social Net application and the ATT.net Web browser. Both of these were simple, yet effective apps for their respective tasks. The Social Net app gives you a quick look at updates from services including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. You don't get many advanced features, but you can browse your friend lists, read updates and post your own status quickly, without logging into three separate apps.
We also found a powerful browser for such a decidedly non-smartphone. Our own page was a bit messy and imperfect, but the phone did a nice job with the New York Times page in full desktop mode, and it was easy to use with Google Reader. The browser has a smooth, accelerated finger scroll on the touchscreen that helped us navigate long pages quickly. This isn't in the same league as more advanced browsers on expensive smartphones, but compared to many other mobiles in this price range, the Samsung Flight did a much better job than we expected.
The keyboard on the Samsung Flight was pretty good. Keys had a soft touch, rubbery feel to them. They might have been a bit narrow though, which caused us plenty of typos, but with smaller fingers and some practice, you might have much better results. The touchscreen on this phone is also nice and responsive. There were few times when it did not respond properly, but in most tasks, like managing the menu screens, navigating Web pages and dialing numbers, the screen reacted quickly to our tapping. The phone hardware is mostly plastic, but it isn't too glossy and doesn't feel cheap. Less expensive, perhaps, but the brushed metal face is a nice touch, and Samsung always makes a slide that feels sturdy and reliable. It isn't the most gorgeous phone, but it's classy and modern without being ostentatious.
The Bad
Though the screen was always responsive, the system itself was sometimes sluggish to respond. The AT&T Navigator app was good about locking in our GPS location quickly, but it was slow to respond to menu commands and button presses. Plus, the app seemed poorly sized for the phone's QVGA resolution. The Navigator windows didn't take up the full length of the screen, when the maps could really use the extra room. Sometimes the system wouldn't respond when we pressed the shift key on the keyboard, and we'd have to keep striking it to get it to respond.
The Samsung Flight is not a good choice for multimedia fans. For music lovers, the phone has a fine music player with touch controls and even a homescreen widget so you can control your tunes from the standby screen. You can load up microSDHC cards and the phone will have no trouble finding your tunes, with album artwork besides. But the phone lacks a dedicated headphone jack, so you'll need to buy an adapter to fit the microUSB port. That's a hassle both for music and handsfree talking, though Bluetooth wireless audio is an option for both.
The video player on the flight was also quite limited, and our videos didn't look great on the somewhat low resolution screen. The phone couldn't downsize our videos to fit the screen's QVGA dimensions, so all videos had to be cropped to 320 by 240. Even then, videos looked more blocky and pixilated than they should have, compared to sharper photos and other elements on the device. We were disappointed that this was so underpowered.
Should you buy one?
There are actually some good features to be found on the Samsung Flight. Business users and serious messaging fans won't get everything they need here, but casual users with more basic e-mail and social networking needs will find the Samsung Flight packed with useful features that are simple, easy and effective. Even casual Web browsers will enjoy using the phone's features, but don't expect too much power out of this casual and inexpensive device. It's certainly not in a league with current smartphones of any flavor, but it's a well-built, understated form factor for buyers looking for something more simple. If you're just stepping up from your old flip phone and you want a taste of what an Internet connected phone can give you, without a dizzying array of hardcore features and options, the Samsung Mythic will be a satisfying choice.
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