The thin 3G flip on AT&T's fast HSDPA network has all the right moves for a feature phone, including a 2-megapixel camera and stereo Bluetooth. So, why did it fail to impress?
Review summary of the Samsung SGH-a717:
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 Welcome to the bottom of the line of the future. The SGH-A717 has all the bare minimum features to reach the summit of what we can call a 3G phone. It has streaming video, advanced music options, stereo Bluetooth and a camera. Still, all of these features come up short. Way short, compared to some of the recent entrants into the multimedia phone market. At $80, it may be an affordable way into the feature phone club, but only users who will appreciate the novelty of the 3G functions will want to sign up. For the rest of us, the experience may wear thin. Release: June 2007. Price: $60.
Pros: Not much. A few basic features, better keys than many flat phones. Good contact list. Long list of preset e-mail accounts.
Cons: Overall very average phone. Poor video experience, below-average music features. Unusable Web browser. No GPS. No music accessories.
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Full review of the Samsung SGH-a717:
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Design - Very good
The Samsung SGH-A717 is a very slim clamshell, and Samsung has produced a few similar flips in recent memory, including the more recent Helio Fin. Released at the same time as the candy bar SGH-A727, the two phones strike the same pose in the recent Samsung line, thin with sharp angles. We're growing less fond of the dim, blue OLED screen on the exterior of the shell, especially having seen the luxurious external display on the recent Motorola RAZR2. The internal display is rich and bright, though not superlative. Keys were better than on many thin phones, especially the thin candy bars and sliders that Samsung has been pumping out, mainly because they were larger, with a nice tactile ridge between the rows. The menu is the clean, black Samsung design that we've come to like in their slim Ultra line of phones. A dedicated button activates the AT&T Music menu, and another brings up the application switcher, but there are no dedicated buttons beyond these for the camera (a blessing) or other features.
Calling - Good
The A717 is an average phone for making calls, in terms of call quality and features. Voice calls sound good, but could benefit from more aural feedback for the caller. Voices were a bit warm, and the scooped microphone intensified our breathing noises. The speakerphone could have been louder, but Bluetooth and conference calling were both easy to set up. We lamented the lack of voice dialing of any sort, a necessity on a good 3G phone, in our opinion. The contact list was pretty good. It included plenty of extra fields, including spaces for addresses and URL pages. Finally, though our SIM card wasn't set for video sharing, the SGH-A717 is a video share phone on AT&T's one-way video calling service. You'll need to have friends with active plans and capable phones, but if you want to give it a try, this phone should work with the feature.
Messaging - Good
Again, the SGH-A717 comes up simply average in a basic category. The phone can handle SMS and MMS messaging, and displays plenty of legible characters on scree, though the font can look a bit goofy in long messages. IM is available for Yahoo, AIM and MSN members, and an even longer list of e-mail services are supported. Unfortunately, our preferred Gmail is not one of them, and the phone doesn't have any obvious way to set up a POP3 or IMAP4 account. Instant messaging was a bit on the slow side, though e-mail worked fine, and the menu brags support for "Push" e-mail, though we're not sure for which service this applies. Yahoo perhaps? Typing was okay, better than typing on most keypads this flat. We would have liked a dedicated messaging button, but you can certainly customize soft keys to get to the messaging app quicker, if that's your bag.
Camera - Good
Don't be fooled by our scoring leniency. Images from the camera on the SGH-A717 were not good. Images were blocky, with some strange highlighting. Colors were nicely saturated, and details were okay, but we were disappointed with the 2-megapixel pics overall. We were impressed with the extensive on-camera editing capabilities, which included tweaks such as red-eye reduction, sharpening and oil paint filters. We would have preferred a better lens, and perhaps some auto focus, but this may be asking too much at this price point.
Video - Poor
AT&T's Cellular Video offering on the SGH-A717 comes just to the line of acceptable, and fails to cross it. Though the aging Cingular Video library remains in tact, these are mostly made up of short clips. And, beyond the unlimited data fee for the Media Max bundle, AT&T charges an extra fee for some premium content, like HBO's clips. Though the phone can support a landscape mode for supposedly full-screen videos, in fact these videos look just as small as they do in portrait mode. Smaller, in fact, thanks to the empty black space surrounding them. News clips were too small and blurry to read subheads, and facial details were often obscured. The player often had to rebuffer, a few times per video, and took about 10 seconds for each break in the playback. To top it off, though the music player supports stereo Bluetooth, the video player does not, so everyone around you will get to hear your Shakira video.
Music - Mediocre
There was a time when we excused AT&T's lack of robust music services. Instead of over-the-air downloads or an advanced software suite, AT&T lets you use your Napster and Yahoo music PlaysForSure tracks on your phone. It's a nice solution, and certainly you can synchronize and manage your music with the software from the respective services, but we've seen much better options recently, especially the Walkman phones from Sony Ericsson and the Apple iPhone. We liked the content from XM radio, and that could have been a killer app for this phone and for AT&T's music service, but stereo Bluetooth headphones don't work with the streaming music, which is a huge disappointment, especially since the phone doesn't come with headphones and uses a proprietary connector. We liked the ability to rate tracks in the music player, a feature we actually use, and would like to see a more feature-rich player finds its way onto Samsung's 3G phones.
Web browser - Poor
There isn't much to say about the SGH-A717's Web browser, because there wasn't much it could do. On our homepage, the phone downloaded some text and background art, then choked and stopped. Then, we tried to load Slashdot, then the New York Times mobile page, and couldn't get either to load. We were a bit surprised, so we restarted the phone and tried again, starting with the NYTimes mobile page. It came up, but the others did not. Text on Web pages was blocky looking, and scrolling through long, converted pages was a pain with the simple click-scrolling. Images were also a bit grainy. A very disappointing experience from a phone surfing the fastest 3G network.
Odds and ends
Not to beat a dead horse, but the phone also lacks a few amenities we usually find on 3G multimedia phones. GPS is sorely missing. Also, with all the multimedia features, the phone lacks accessories, like a memory card for music transfers or any sort of handsfree headphones. All you get is the charger.
Price and availability
The Samsung SGH-a717 will start selling for $60 to $180 () in June 2007.
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