.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE The Sprint A920 phone: should you buy it, or a PDA smartphone?
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY We continue our battle of the phones with a review of a multimedia-equipped cellular phone, the Samsung A920 from Sprint. Over the past few months, we’ve reviewed the newest and hottest smartphones: the Palm Treo 700w, the Sprint PPC-6700, Verizon’s variation on the theme, the XV6700, and compared them all to the venerable Treo 650. This month, we’ll be looking at a few new devices, starting with the Samsung A920 phone profiled in this article, graciously provided to us by Sprint.
.FEATURE
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware of the convergence between cellular phones and PDAs. Coming from the computer side, the PDA makers are adding phone features. Coming from the telecommunications industry, the phone makers have been adding PDA features. And everyone’s adding digital camera features.
Given all these choices, what should you buy? Should you buy a PDA and a cell phone? Or a PDA-based smartphone, or a cellular phone with a pile of features? As you might imagine, there’s no absolute answer for everyone, but we can help you make that choice.
Over the past few months, we’ve reviewed the newest and hottest smartphones: the Palm Treo 700w, the Sprint PPC-6700, and Verizon’s XV6700 variation on the theme, and compared them all to the venerable Treo 650. This month, we’ll be looking at a few new devices, starting with the Samsung A920 phone profiled in this article.
As Figure A shows, the A920 is slightly smaller than the Treo 650 and the PPC-6700, but not by as much as you might expect.
.FIGPAIR A The A920 is smaller than the smartphones.
.TEASER Let’s look inside the A920 and see what it’s got. Tap here for the rest of the article.
.H1 Inside the A920
Let’s be clear. The A920 is a phone first, and a gadget-lover’s dream second. It is, however, a heck of a phone. It’s got two displays. Inside, there’s a 176×220 pixel, 262K TFT color LCD. On the outside, there’s a 128×96 status display, capable of displaying 16-bit color images. The internal display is about half the resolution of the PDA phones we profiled, but it’s still got more pixels than the original Palm PDAs.
Sprint’s press releases claim the phone is compatible with its higher-speed EV-DO network. And while there’s some streaming video available (more on that later), we found most network access with the 920 to be far slower than when using either the Treo 700w or the PPC-6700. In fact, were we not to have read the specs, we wouldn’t have been able to verify EV-DO performance on the phone itself.
The phone is considered a multimedia phone, meaning it’s got the ability to play MP3s, videos, and bad 1980s video games. Seriously. The phone comes with Ms. Pacman and a horrid cell phone interpretation of the 2 Fast 2 Furious movie in cell phone form. A PSP, this ain’t.
The device has a slot for microSD cards (what Sprint calls TransFLASH). These cards are tiny, as you can see in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B The company ships a 32MB card with the phone.
I honestly believe we’ve reached the point of too small with these cards. It’s almost necessary to use a tweazer to handle them, and the potential for data loss is huge. It’s impressive that memory gets that small, but scary as well.
Rounding out the big features, the phone has Bluetooth and a 1.3 megapixel camera. It’s not great, but you can certainly take fair pictures using the phone.
.H1 The service
Technologically, the phone is very impressive. I still find it astounding that so much can be crammed into such a small device. Unfortunately, the phone’s Java-based software was often cranky. For example, it took three resets of the phone before I could get the video feed to work. Instead, I regularly got the blank "Attention" screen you can see in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR C The phone wants to tell me something, I know it does.
Admittedly, the battery was low, but it would have been nice if the phone said "The battery is low" and not just a blank "Attention" box. It also took a number of tries to get into the Sprint Music Store. First, I had to download an update, which failed. Then I had to download it again, and it failed. And then I gave up.
A few weeks later, I decided to pick the phone up out of the reviews rack and try again, and after two more download attempts, the music store upgrade finally worked.
While much of the raw technology of the phone is nothing short of amazing, the implementation of the Java-based user experience was, frankly, what you’d expect from a phone. In other words, it could have been better and more reliable.
The biggest issue with the various Sprint Power Vision features is that everything’s got a price. Want a song? It’ll cost you $2.50 (a whole lot more than it does, say, on the Apple Music Store). But then, here, you’re a captive user. Want to watch CNN or Adult Swim on your video phone? You can, but Adult Swim will cost you $3.99 a month.
Sending an email, getting a message, sending a photo, posting a photo, downloading a game, downloading a song, watching video — everything’s nickel and dime, except each nickel is about $2.50 and each dime about $3.99. It can add up quickly and, honestly, most of it’s crap.
It gets worse. Want to buy a ringtone? It’ll cost you $2.50. Do you really like it? Want to use it after 90 days? Pay another $2.50. That’s right, you buy these things for way more than they’re worth, and then you buy them again and again and again.
Want to buy a game? How about Wheel of Fortune? Seriously. You can buy the Wheel of Fortune game for $2.99 (plus tax) a month. That’s right, each month you have to re-buy your Wheel of Fortune game.
I’ll admit I’m a bit of a gaming snob, but if you download and pay for Wheel of Fortune each month for $2.99, someone needs to use the cellular phone locator service to find you and slap you. There ought to be some kind of Wheel of Fortune rapid-response, slappin’ upside the head service your ever-lovin’ friends can subscribe to so you don’t go and download the Wheel of Fortune game.
The idea of it is actually giving me chills. And not the good chills. You are smarter than this, right?
.BEGIN_KEEP
Most phone buyers, apparently, are not. Want proof? There’s an eBay application on the phone, subject to (you guessed it) another surcharge. The phone comes pre-configured with the top eBay searches you might want to run: Dragon Ball Z, Atkins Diet, Neopets, and Britney Spears.
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
.END_KEEP
For parents considering giving these phones to kids, it could be a real problem. There doesn’t appear to be a way to turn off the giant sucking sound, so if you give your kid this nice new phone, expect to see your phone bills clogged with lots of little items adding up to a big, unexpected payout.
I know this is the business model for cellular companies in the new millenium, but it’s unpleasant and, in some cases, clearly over-priced.
.H1 Should you buy?
Should you buy an A920 phone, which Sprint’s store lists at $119, or a smartphone, which will cost you $300 more? You can certainly buy a lot of ringtones, rinky-dink backgrounds, and Rickie Lee MP3s with the $300 you’ll be saving.
There are three key differences between a cellular phone and a smartphone. First, most smartphones come with HotSync or ActiveSync software that lets you manage your personal information on the PC, but synchronize that information with the phone. I find this invaluable, since typing in all those numbers on the phone is enough to send you over the edge. It is true that there are some programs that do make phone-sync products, but not all phones are supported and those that are supported are often not supported well.
Second, if you want to install some new piece of software on your Treo or Pocket PC phone, you can do so easily. For example, I recently received Workout Tracker in for review and since we’ve got an office gym, I’m going to evaluate how well it works tracking my weight lifting sessions. I could never install that on the A920, but it’s a breeze to put it on the Treo. There are thousands of add-on programs for Pocket PCs and Palm PDAs (and, by extension, their smartphones). There are far less for the A920 — and all of them must be purchased from Sprint.
And this brings us to the question of freedom. Everything I tried to do using the A920 involved signing up for a new Sprint service. If I wanted to send an email message, I couldn’t use my own server, I had to use theirs. Ditto for pictures, uploads, downloads, and so forth. If you use a Smartphone, you get to determine what you can and can’t do. If you use a regular phone like the A920, it’s either Sprint’s way or the highway.
So there’s your choice. The A920 is a heck of a lot of phone for $119. And that’s not even counting the potential of an EV-DO link for your laptop (which we didn’t have time to test). But you’ve got limited control over your phone’s environment and you’re getting a new charge for everything you do. On the other hand, the smartphones are far more expensive out of the gate, but there are very few incremental charges. You know what you’re spending and you spend on it once.
.BEGIN_KEEP
The phone itself is definitely a four-star device. But the software on the phone was cranky and each new feature required another trip to your wallet. We can certainly recommend the A920, but we think Sprint can do better with the easy things: interface and fees.
Make no mistake. We do not condone Sprint’s constant moneygrubbing. Given the phone’s price of only $119, we can forgive it some of its blemishes. We give the A920 four message units out of five. If the phone were $199, there’s no doubt it wouldn’t rate more than three.
.RATING 4
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on the Sprint A920, visit http://www1.sprintpcs.com/explore/PhonesAccessories/PhoneDetails.jsp?selectSkuId=samsungmma920.
To read "PDA phone wars: the Treo 700w vs. the Treo 650 vs. the PPC-6700", visit http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200603/00001742001.html.
To read "The XV6700, viva la Verizon", visit http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200603/00001731001.html.
For more information on Workout Tracker, visit http://standalone.com/palmos/workout_tracker.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.END_KEEP
