AT&T gets a mid-range tablet phone all its own from Samsung. What it lacks in high-end features, can it make up in style? Find out in our Samsung Solstice review.
Review summary of the Samsung Solstice:
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 The Samsung Solstice, like the Samsung Highlight on T-Mobile, skips out on some advanced smartphone features like Wi-Fi and a high-megapixel camera and tries to keep things simple. In some ways, this works nicely. The phone did a great job making calls, with some cool address book and in-call interface designs. It's also the first AT&T phone we've tried that can use the new AT&T Social Net app, which let us keep tabs on our Facebook, MySpace and Twitter updates all at once, albeit rather slowly. For the most part we liked the hardware. The screen was colorful and bright, and streaming videos from AT&T's Cellular Video service looked surprisingly good. We were disappointed that so many features were just plain mediocre, like the Web browser, the 2-megapixel camera and the rest of the messaging apps. Regardless, buyers looking for a simpler, smaller device will find a healthy, though not very exciting, feature phone in the Solstice. Release: July 2009. Price: $100.
Pros: Top-notch call management. Great-looking screen, even with streaming vids. Slim and light design.
Cons: TouchWiz is a clunky interface. Besides Social Net, messaging features are way behind the competition. Lacks good multimedia hardware ports and accessories.
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Full Samsung Solstice Review:
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Design – Good
The Samsung Solstice resembles the rest of the large and growing family of Samsung tablet phones on the market (to compare Samsung's tablet phones, click here). But unlike the more playful, colorful Samsung Highlight on T-Mobile, the Solstice has a more classy look, thanks to the brushed metal "Back" button on the face and the faux leather treatment around back. Among tablet phones, it's one of the smallest and lightest we've seen.
Turn on the Samsung Solstice and you'll find a dazzling, 3-inch display. Though the phone technically has less color depth than the Highlight, we didn't notice the difference, and some nice wallpaper choices by AT&T, along with Samsung's polished, if problematic, TouchWiz interface made the phone look dashing and modern. Photos and text looked very good and, at their best, videos looked TV-quality. We're not fans of the Samsung TouchWiz interface design, which tends to clutter the screen with widgets, but if you take a minimalist approach and only use one or two widgets at a time, the interface can look clean and is very touch friendly.
The screen itself was also very responsive, until we started to load up third party applications. The interface on the Samsung Solstice leapt to action at our touch, with a solid vibrating ping to let us know we had been heard . . . er, felt. But when we opened up extra apps, like the AT&T Social Net app from iSkoot, the phone became much less responsive, and that vibrating, haptic feedback would sometimes disappear.
Calling – Very Good
We might not be huge fans of the main screen on Samsung's TouchWiz interface, but when it comes to calling, TouchWiz phones do a great job with call management and in-call screens. Managing extra features like the speakerphone, conference calling and the address book were all simple and easy on the Samsung Solstice's touchscreen. The interface was effective and looked great.
Call quality on the Samsung Solstice was good, but not great. Calls sounded mostly clear, but on our end we heard a bit of static and a crackling during some calls. Our callers reported a slightly distant sound, like we were talking from the end of a short, metallic hallway. We had no trouble hearing and being heard, but call quality could be a bit better. Reception was usually good, hovering a bar or two below a full load. Battery life was also pretty good, but didn't quite match the Samsung Highlight. The Samsung Solstice uses a slightly smaller battery than that phone, which could account for the minor weight loss, but also cut talk time down to a still-respectable 5.5 hours.
Otherwise, we liked AT&T's picture-based contacts list, which presented our friends as a fanned-out deck of cards we could swipe through. It didn't respond to our touch as quickly as other apps on the phone, but it was more graphically intense. The Solstice also gets speaker-independent voice dialing, and Samsung includes a TouchWiz widget to add a voice dialing button to your homescreen. Finally, the phone is one of AT&T's growing number of video share phones, so you can connect a 1-way video conference with the Samsung Solstice.
Messaging and keyboard - Good
The keyboard on the Samsung Solstice wasn't very intelligent, but it was plenty responsive, and the haptic feedback made the keyboard even more manageable. We prefer when touchscreen keyboard adapt to their situation, adding keys like a ".com" or "@" symbol to the main keyboard, but the software QWERTY on the Samsung Solstice kept things more simple, except in the Web browser, which was more adaptable. On the one hand, we would often have to tap on a text entry field a few times to get the keyboard to come up, but on the other hand the keyboard was very responsive in switching from a traditional 12-key pad in portrait mode to a wide, full QWERTY in landscape.
Samsung's official documentation pegs this phone as a dedicated messaging device, but the messaging apps are rather disappointing, with a new and notable exception. The simple text messaging app couldn't display messages in a threaded conversation, and instead presented only one message at a time. For instant messaging, AT&T only offers support for AOL, MSN and Yahoo, with no help for Gtalk fans or buyers who want to IM over their favorite social network.
Speaking of social networking, the new AT&T Social Net app was available for download from the AppCenter on the Samsung Solstice. The new app from iSkoot lets you log onto Facebook, Twitter and MySpace all at the same time. New updates to your Twitter feed or your Facebook wall are displayed in separate tabbed panes in the Social Net app. You can update your status or send out a new tweet, too. The app was fairly simple and limited in scope, but it is helpful for keeping tabs on your various social networks. Plus, if you want to do more, like view someone's entire profile or check out some pictures, the Social Net app will simply open up a Web page in the Samsung Solstice's Web browser to give you more options. Overall, the Social Net app might be simple, but it's a great start and just the sort of thing we've been asking for.
Multimedia - Good
For multimedia fans, the Samsung Solstice does a fine job, whether it was playing music or streaming video clips from AT&T's Cellular Video service. The music player was nice looking and very touch friendly, even for scrubbing through music tracks to find our favorite moments. The Samsung Solstice also has access to the AT&T music store. AT&T's store lags behind a more advanced offering, like Verizon's V Cast Music Store, in every way except price. Tracks cost $2 each, but the interface was so clumsy through the Web browser that we didn't bother buying more than a couple tracks over the air.
For video playback, the Samsung Solstice had trouble playing our sideloaded movie files. Videos that were sized to a QVGA resolution would play properly, with black bars on the side, but the Solstice would refuse to scale down a video at any larger screen size, even videos cropped to fit the 400 by 240 pixel screen. We did enjoy watching some clips from Cellular Video, including an episode of the Colbert Report that streamed smoothly and looked as good on the phone's screen as it did on our television set.
We sideloaded music onto our own 8GB microSD card, and the Highlight can handle cards up to 16GB, though it doesn't come with any memory cards in the box. The phone had no trouble finding our media files with no prompting from us. That microSD card slides in behind the battery, so you'll have to shut down the phone every time you swap out the card. Also, there are no headphones included in the Samsung Solstice retail package, which is a real pain because Samsung insists on sticking with its silly proprietary headphone jack. We hope Samsung gives up this proprietary nonsense soon, because a standard 3.5mm headphone jack would be a great addition to this classy, lightweight tablet phone.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Web browser on the Samsung Solstice was better than a simple mobile WAP browser, able to load full HTML pages, and for the most part our favorite sites came through looking okay, but they weren't accurate compared to their desktop counterparts. Our own homepage had images that were poorly sized and some extraneous, inexplicable red lines on the screen between frames. Many sites refused to load their full desktop versions, like CNN or the NYTimes. Still, pages loaded very quickly on the Samsung Solstice, thanks to its fast, 3G networking. The phone has some limited streaming video support. Though Flash seems to be an option in the browser's preferences, YouTube and other Flash-enabled sites wouldn't recognize the browser's capabilities, but Flash videos from YouTube would open in a separate player window. Our biggest complaint is that it was difficult to navigate pages on the Solstice's screen. You have to flick over and over again, as the pages won't coast by after a single, strong flicking motion.
Camera - Mediocre
The camera on the Samsung Solstice is fine for a low-end, 2-megapixel shooter. Of course, it suffered from problems that would make a true photographer cringe, like blurry images and plenty of purple fringing around bright spots. But for simpler shots and mobile Facebook and MySpace posts, the camera will get the job done. Colors looked pretty good, especially under the best conditions. Best of all, the camera has a nice selection of shooting features. The panorama mode worked pretty well on this camera, and there's even a smile shot mode, though it wasn't quite fast enough to capture a quick grin. Check out our sample images below.
Tree near the lake
Yellow Light Cycle
Dallas NorthPark Mall Sculpture
NorthPark Mall Panorama
Self Portrait
GPS - Good
The Samsung Solstice came loaded with both AT&T Navigator for turn-by-turn directions, as well as Where, an app that handles points of interest and other location based services with a sort of widget-based model. AT&T Navigator did a fine job tracking us and following us through our trip in and out of the city. The Samsung Solstice had pretty good GPS reception, though it still took some time to get a first fix on us when we initially fired up the GPS apps. The Where app adds more location-based features with a Starbucks finder, a gas price locator, a widget for the Buddy Beacon location-based social network service and more. We were put off by the shady "cancel within 7 days or we'll start charging you" pricing on the Where app, so we'd probably skip it, unless you're a real Starbucks fiend or you happen to have friends who use Buddy Beacon.
Price and availability
The Samsung Solstice is available now from AT&T for $100.
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