Samsung's big, black 3G clamshell has the look – and the heft – of an old-school MP3 player, albeit one armed with Bluetooth, memory expansion and V Cast Music access. Ben Patterson cranks up the A930's volume.
Review summary of the Samsung SCH-A930:
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 While this jet-black, nearly four-ounce 3G clamshell is a little bulkier than we'd like, it makes up plenty of ground with its rock-solid music capabilities, ability to sync tunes with a PC, vivid display, Bluetooth and built-in GPS. Meanwhile, road warriors will appreciate the phone's speedy data and dial-up networking abilities. Release: June 2006. Price: $50.
Pros: Scrolling OLED external display; gorgeous internal LED; solid music player; good sound quality; PC music syncing; up to 1GB of memory expansion; Bluetooth with dial-up networking; GPS; good battery life
Cons: Bulky and relatively heavy; can't play music in the background; MP3s must be converted to WMA format for playback on the phone; WAP browser can't handle long Web pages
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Full review of the Samsung SCH-A930:
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The latest handset in Samsung’s line of A9xx phones is certainly a departure from the thin-and-sleek A900 flip-phone and the eye-catching red-and-sliver A950 music clamshell. But while the chunky, all-black A930 doesn't score any points for elegance, its external OLED display with scrolling song info will appeal to music lovers who owned old-school, pre-iPod MP3 players. Add in memory expansion, PC music syncing, EV-DO support, Bluetooth (including dial-up networking support), and GPS, and this ugly ducklng suddenly becomes much more attractive, if not quite a swan.
Back in black
While we've admired the sleek styling of many Samsung's high-profile phones, the SCH-A930 sticks out like a sore thumb – it's big, black and bulky. Measuring 3.6 by 1.9 by 1 inches, the A930 doesn't quite make for a comfortable fit in a jeans pocket, and at 4 ounces it feels a bit heavy. Then again, if you're looking for a cell phone that could be easily mistaken for an MP3 player, this is the one.
On the outside flip of the phone you'll find the vertically oriented, two-line OLED display, which gives you all the basic phone info (time, battery life, signal strength, etc.) along with a scrolling, marquee-style line for artist and song name when you're playing music – not unlike an MP3 player display. Just to the right of the OLED are a trio of buttons for skipping, pausing, and playing your tunes; click and hold one of the skip/back buttons to scan within a song (a progress bar appears to let you know your position within the tune). Flip open the phone and you'll find a gorgeous, 262,000-color LCD, perfect for viewing images or album art. Just beneath is a A930's generous keypad, with wide, flat keys and a four-way navigational keypad; our fingers had no trouble dialing numbers or scrolling through the various menus (which use the now-familiar Verizon Wireless interface).
Hear the music play
The A930 uses the standard V Cast Music player, which includes all the essential controls (play/pause, skip/back, scan within a song) and displays album art, which is a nice touch, although you can't play music in the background while checking your calendar or composing a text message. Ready to fill the phone up with songs? You can download music over the air from the V Cast Music service (for $2 a pop, 20-second previews available) or use the included USB cable to sync music from your PC using Windows Media Player. While we like the ability to sync our music collection and playlists with the phone (including protected WMA files), the A930 (as with other V Cast phones) won't play MP3s – you'll have to convert them to WMA format first, a time-consuming step that will slightly degrade audio quality.
Sound quality on the A930 was good; our music sounded crisp and clear, with little in the way of obvious digital compression artifacts. Unfortunately, you can't exactly crank your music to ear-splitting levels, and you'll need an adapter if you want to connect your own earbuds into the phone’s 2.5-mm headset plug. That said, you can store up to 1GB of music in the phone's microSD expansion slot – not bad for a clamshell-style phone.
Speedy downloads and dial-up networking
The A930's 3G performance was up to snuff; we downloaded a 1.7MB song in less than a minute, and we experienced rapid surfing on the phone's WAP browser. However, while we had no trouble pulling down Web pages optimized for mobile surfing, the browser crashed while trying to download the lengthy New York Times home page. Back on the plus side, video quality over the A930's V Cast media player, although we noticed the same jerkiness and lips-sync problems that we’ve seen on other V Cast phones. Meanwhile, the phone's Bluetooth connection supports dial-up networking, good for lending a high-speed Net connection to your laptop while you're on the road; just make sure to get a BroadbandAccess Connect plan from Verizon, or you might get a nasty surprise when you open your phone bill.
Our test snapshots with the 1.3-megapixel camera looked bright and relatively sharp, although colors looked a tad blotchy, while the clips we shot with the camcorder were juttery and blocky, as expected. We liked the rotating camera lens embedded in the phone's hinge, and the camera also boasts an LED flash, an auto timer, a mult-shot mode, and a series of white-balance and color settings.
The A930 also comes with built-in GPS (you can download the VZ Navigator app for point-to-point directions), a speakerphone, voice memos, and voice commands; however, conference calling is missing in action. Besides dial-up networking, the phone's Bluetooth connection supports wireless headset (mono only, unfortunately) and hands-free profiles, but there's no object-push profile for contact synching.
Call quality on the A930 was quite good, and we wrung more than four hours of talk time out of the battery, which is also rated for about eight days of standby time.
Price and availability
The Samsung SCH-A930 will start selling for $50 to $150 ((Verizon Wireless)) in June 2006.
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