Samsung Flight SGH-A797 – not a smartphone
Thumbs Up:
Functional feature set: 2-megapixel camera, GPS, 3G support, Bluetooth, and touch-screen display; sturdy and unique design.
Thumbs Down:
Sluggish performance; average call quality; poor streaming video quality
Inside the Trunk:
Technology: GSM
Band: Quad-band of GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone Design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other Features: Bluetooth, GPS, 2-megapixel camera, touch-screen
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
Samsung Flight SGH-A797 has 80MB user-accessible memory and micro-SD card slot that accepts up to 16GB.
2.8 inches touch-screen has 320×240 pixels resolution that supports 18bit (262000) colors. The cell phone has 2-megapixel camera that features 3x digital zoom, multi-shot, smile shot, night mode, and video recording.
The battery life is 180 minutes talk time and 360 hours standby time.
Razzle Dazzle:
Samsung Flight SGH-A797 is 4.17 inches tall, 2.2 inches wide, and 0.5 inch deep and weighs 4.8 ounces. The cell phone has tough built and sturdy sliding mechanism. It comes in both gray and red colors. Our test model had red color.
Inside Dope:
The Flight SGH-A797 is a unique cell phone by the Samsung. It has full QWERTY keyboard and touch-screen even it is not a smartphone. It features 3G support, GPS, 2-megapixel camera, and Bluetooth. Samsung Flight SGH-A797 costs $99 with two-year AT&T contract after a mail-in-rebate of $50. The A797 may not attract the professional smartphone users; still casual users will like its unique sturdy design and functional feature set. However, the call quality and performance of the Flight SGH-A797 is average. Moreover, its minor display size does not give much benefit of the touch capability. What’s more – the SGH-A797 lacks Samsung TouchWiz interface and onscreen virtual QWERTY keyboard. It has Opera Mini browser instead of full HTML based one.
2.8 inches touch-screen has 320×240 pixels resolution that supports 262000 colors. However, the display of Samsung Flight SGH-A797 shows sharp graphics and bright colors. You can customize the font type, backlight time, brightness, display calibration, and vibrating feedback intensity. Touch-screen interface is quick responsive for both scrolling via list and selecting icons.
On the bottom of display, you will get the three touch icons – shortcut menu, favorite contacts list, and messaging folder. You can customize the shortcut menu with menu options. Recent calls, main contacts list, and main menu touch controls are located beneath above buttons.
Talk button, squared back button, and Power/End key are located beneath the display. All these controls are flush inside surface, but remain easy to use due to their large size. Camera shutter button and lock switch are on the right spine. You will find the combined micro-USB port for charging/USB cable, another shortcut menu key, and volume rocker on the left spine. The small speakers and camera lens are located on rear side, while micro-SD is behind the battery cover.
You can slide down the Samsung Flight SGH-A797 to access the physical QWERTY keyboard. It has four rows of keys and there is a gap between the bottom of slider and top row. The numbers are highlighted with red circles. The keyboard also has dedicated “.com” button, messaging shortcut, and directional rows. The small spacebar is located in the middle of bottom row. You can also use the handwriting recognition and onscreen numeric keypad. However, there is no virtual QWERTY keyboard and small display does not give complete benefit of handwriting software.
The Samsung Flight SGH-A797 can store 2000 contacts in its phonebook and SIM card and hold additional 250 contacts. Each contact can save five numbers, one email address, notes, birthday, job title, company address, nickname, and a URL. You can categorize the contacts into caller groups and pair them with alert tone, ring tone, and photo for caller ID.
The basic feature set includes a tip calculator, unit and currency converter, a task list, a calculator, a world clock, a timer, a stopwatch, a memo pad, a calendar, text and multimedia messages, and an alarm clock. The additional highlights are USB mass storage, voice recorder, PC synchronization, stereo Bluetooth, voice dialing, a file manager, and sketchpad. The email features include AT&T Mobile Email application that can access POP3 accounts such as Yahoo!, AOL, Windows Live, Gmail, and more.
2-megapixel camera of the Samsung Flight SGH-A797 features multi-shot mode, night mode, smile shot, and video recording. The image settings include three shutter sounds with silent option, mosaic and panoramic shot mode, 20 fun frames, self timer, four white balance presets, brightness tool, four color effects, exposure metering, three quality settings, and four resolutions. You can record videos in two different resolutions for two modes: 50 seconds for MMS and longer in normal. The overall photo quality was good while testing. The images looked little dark, still had natural colors.
AT&T has also provided its services with the Samsung Flight SGH-A797 such as AT&T Mobile Music for on-the-air songs download via AT&T partners, AT&T Cellular Video for streaming video, and AT&T Video Share to share one-side live video clips and recordings. There is also AT&T Navigator for GPS.
The inbuilt music player supports WMA, eAAC+, AAC, and MP3 formats. It features airplane mode, repeat and shuffle modes, play-lists, and album art. The Samsung Flight SGH-A797 has similar music player interface like other AT&T phones. It also has other music features including community section to access fan Web sites and download, music videos, ring-tone creating application, Billboard Mobile channel, Music ID application, and XM Radio Mobile.
You can also use other subscription based applications such as Where 2.1, My-Cast Weather, WikiMobile, MobiVJ, AT&T Social Net, MobiTV, Yellowpages Mobile, and Mobile Banking. The Flight SGH-A797 comes with four demo games: Uno, Tetris, Diner Dash 2, and Ms. Pack Man. The phone can be personalized with available greeting messages, clock formats, and wallpapers. More options and titles can download from Opera Mini browser.
We made few calls through dual-band based Samsung Flight SGH-A797 via AT&T for testing. The overall call quality was average. We received loud sound at our end with different voice pitch and some noise. The callers received natural sound with little background noise. They could tell that we were calling via cell phone. The speakerphone call quality was good. Both of us received loud volume with some distortion, but able to carry out the conversation.
The streaming video quality was not so good with pixilation, while the music quality is satisfactory on both headsets and phone speakers.
The battery life of Samsung SGH-A797 is 3 hours of talk time and 15 days of idle stand by time. Its digital SAR is 0.5 watts per kg in accordance with FCC radiation tests.
Nitty Gritty:
If you need an affordable handset with touch-screen and functional feature set and do not mind sluggish performance, then go for – Samsung Flight SGH-A797.
