Samsung Impression SGH-A877 – smart multimedia and messaging phone

Thumbs Up:

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 has spacious keyboard, attractive design and excellent touch screen. It offers good call quality, impressive multimedia capabilities and basic features.

Thumbs Down:

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 has proprietary headset jack instead of standard 3.5mm one. The camera does not have a flash and its keyboard shortcuts are very less. The phone also has short battery life and no voice dialing feature.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: GSM/3G
Band: Quad-band of GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and dual-band of 3G (UMTS) 850/1900
Phone Design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other Features: 3G support, 3-megapixel camera

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 is a slider phone. It has 190MB user accessible memory and micro-SD expansion slot that supports up to 16GB cards.

3.2 inches diagonal touch-screen OLED display has a resolution of 240×400 pixels that supports 18-bit (262,144) colors. It also has 3-megapixel camera.

Call management services of Samsung Impression SGH-A877 includes voice mail, pause dialing, automatic dialing, three-way calling, 1+5 conference calling, emergency call without and with SIM card, call timer and call list. In addition, the phone can store the logs for last 30 missed, 30 incoming and 30 outgoing calls.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 has standard 1000mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 3 hours of talk time and 250 hours of idle standby time. Accessories supplied inside the standard package are handset, battery, travel charger, USB cable, quick start Guide, Parental Controls insert, JuiceCaster Insert and driver disc.

Razzle Dazzle:

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 resembles LG Xenon from outside due to same shape. However, it is the recycled design of Samsung Rant. The SGH-A877 is 4.48 inches tall, 2.28 inches wide and 0.61 inch thick and it weighs around 5.3 ounces. It feels ergonomic and tough while taking in the hand. The Impression SGH-A877 has dark blue color scheme and curved edges.

Inside Dope:

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 is one of the famous messaging cell phones in CTIA 2009. It certainly was the most talked handsets at that show. The SGH-A877 offers excellent display, spacious keyboard, impressive call quality, multimedia capabilities and excellent messaging features. It costs around $199 with service contract from AT&T and with mail-in rebate.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 has 3.25 inches touch-screen display that has 240×400 pixels resolution. The display exhibits sharp animations, bright graphics and excellent colors. Touch screen is quick responsive and provides a haptic feedback. We liked the option to change intensity and calibration of this feedback.

Three touch-sensitive controls including main menu, contacts menu and phone dial are located on the bottom row of display. The phone dialer screen shows large numbers and shortcut for contacts. Moreover, you can use the standard 10 buttons keypad for dial and text.

The menu interface of Samsung Impression SGH-A877 is icon-based. It is very easy to use and intuitive. You will also get a power search option to search through contacts by typing only first letter. You can change the backlight time, font type, brightness and wallpaper for the display.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 continuous to have traditional Samsung TouchWiz interface. It provides the navigation bar and shortcut widgets. You can more the position of widgets, but cannot create new one.

Clear key, End/power button and Talk key are located beneath the display. All these physical keys are tactile, spacious and flat. Camera shutter and display lock keys are located on right spine. You will find the shortcut control and volume rocker on the left spine. The shortcut control will show onscreen shortcuts for games menu, music player, Web browser, messaging menu and phone dialer.

Combined charger/headset port sits on the top of Samsung Impression SGH-A877. Despite of its convenient location, the combined port is not a 3.5mm standard jack and you have to use one peripheral at a time. As usual, speaker and camera lens sits on the back. Memory card slot is located behind battery cover, but you do not have to remove the battery for accessing it.

You can slide the display panel of Samsung Impression SGH-A877 to access the physical QWERTY keyboard. It is the most spacious one that we have ever seen. The keys are flush, still easy to find, press and remains tactile. We did not like the small space bar and less shortcut keys. As a result, we will advise manufacture to add more shortcuts. However, we typed the messages quickly and accurately. You will get one shortcut key for messaging application, navigation arrows, shift keys and function keys. Symbols and numbers are also located on the alphabetic keys. The keyboard is excellently backlit for typing in dark.

In addition, Samsung Impression SGH-A877 also offers handwriting recognition application and onscreen virtual keyboard. Both of the input methods are fine, but limited for occasional usage. We will recommend you to use physical keyboard for regular typing conditions. What’s more, you can use T9 predictive input application with virtual keyboard.

The display screen of Samsung Impression SGH-A877 will be rotated landscape-wise in main menu and on opening the physical keyboard. As the length and width dimensions are different, so the wallpaper does not rotate. Still, the widgets on the vertical bar will also rotate their position. We liked the display view in the landscape mode. It is worth to mention that inbuilt accelerometer works only in few applications. You can switch between keyboard and virtual keypad by tilting the phone. Moreover, you can change the orientation of Web browser and photo gallery.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 can store 2000 contacts in its phonebook. SIM card can store more 250 contacts. Each phonebook entry can save four numbers, one email address, notes, street address, nickname, birthday, company name, job title and one URL. You can divide the callers into groups and pair them with one ring-tone, message and photo for caller ID.

The essential features of Samsung Impression SGH-A877 include 11 (72 chord) polyphonic ring-tones, stopwatch, speakerphone, unit and currency converter, timer, world clock, calculator, memo pad, task list, calendar and alarm clock. The additional features are GPS support, file manager, USB mass storage, PC synchronization, stereo Bluetooth and voice recorder. We disappointed that phone does not have voice dialing feature.

The messaging features of Samsung Impression SGH-A877 are multimedia and text messaging, and inbuilt instant messengers. It also has AT&T Mobile Email that offers support for Bell South, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and AIM accounts. We will prefer Samsung to include dedicated email application and true synchronization feature like its Instinct and Apple iPhone. We did not like that the SGH-A877 does not support IMAP4 accounts.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 has 3-megapixel camera that features video recording. The still camera can capture photographs in five resolutions from 400×220 pixels to 3-megapixel. Its editing options include mosaic shot mode, smile shot feature, multi-shot mode, 20 fun frames, self timer delay, white balance presets, brightness adjusting options, four color effects, exposure metering, five scene selections and four quality settings.

The camcorder can record videos in two resolutions: 176×144 and 320×240 pixels with same editing options. The multimedia message clips are limited to one minute, but offers longer clips in normal mode. You can save the video clips and photographs on internal memory and external card slot.

The photo quality was good by offering bright colors with a bit noise. Despite of missing flash, the light was enough to produce good pictures. The video quality was good as per the cell phone camera. You can swipe your finger to change to cycle between the photos in inbuilt photo gallery.

AT&T has also provided its services such as AT&T Navigator for GPS, AT&T Mobile Email, AT&T Mobile Music for downloading songs and Cellular video for streaming video content. Both AT&T Mobile Music and Cellular Video provide similar user-experience. The inbuilt music player supports WMA, eAAC+, AAC and MP3 formats. It features airplane mode, repeat and shuffle modes, play-lists and album art.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 has several features like music videos, Billboard Mobile channel, Music ID application, XM Radio Mobile and community section to access fan downloads and Web-sites. AT&T provides some other subscription based applications like Where 2.1, The Weather Channel, MobiDJ, MobiTV, Yellowpages Mobile and Mobile Banking. You can download these applications from AT&T store via Web browser.

You will also find full HTML browser in Samsung Impression SGH-A877. We agree that it cannot beat Apple Safari browser of iPhone, still it exceeds our satisfaction and expectations. You can smoothly scroll all around a Web page using touch-screen. We did not face choppy motion problem while dragging our finger. The accelerometer rotates the browser on tilting the phone. The browser has magnifier glass to zoom in and out, but we liked the pinching motion offered in Apple iPhone.

You can change the greeting message, sound and wallpaper from a good selection. In addition, you can purchase and download through AT&T store via Web browser. Samsung Impression SGH-A877 comes with demo versions of five games: Monopoly, Midnight Pool2, Juice Caster, Diner Dash 2, Ms. Pac-man. It also has Tumbling Dice, which excites you if you forget real dice.

We made few calls through Samsung Impression SGH-A877 via AT&T service for testing. The overall call quality was good. We received natural, loud and clear sound without static and electronic interference. However, we received background noise occasionally. The callers also received good sound quality at their end, but they could tell that we were talking through cell phone. They also faced trouble hearing us when we were in noisy environment. The speakerphone call quality was good. Both of us received loud sound even we were at a distance from the phone.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 performed good in data tests. The Microsoft Web site loaded in 30 seconds and Google search had taken 10 seconds to complete. The streaming video quality from Cellular Video was good, quick and free from high pixilation. In addition, the sound was also in synchronization with the movements. We had to pause for buffering; still the videos did not seem to freeze. The sound quality on speakers was good, still the audio was warm and sounded tinny. The included headphones provided better experience.

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 has battery life of three hours of talk time and 10.4 idle standby time. The digital SAR is 0.27 watts per kg as per FCC radiation tests.

Nitty Gritty:

Samsung Impression SGH-A877 is a high rank multimedia and messaging phone, still not perfect. If you need a multimedia cell phone and does not need Apple’s iPhone, then you can purchase this Samsung SGH-A877.