Samsung SGH-A167 – a basic entry level phone

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Good call quality, nothing else.

Thumbs Down:

Bad keypad quality, poor exteriors.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: GSM
Band: GSM 850/1900 (Dual Band)
Phone design: Clamshell
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: Web browser, speakerphone, games

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Monochrome external display of the SGH-A167 has 96X96 pixel resolution, internal screen has resolution of 128 x 160 pixels, 62000 colors. The phone has a 0.3 MP (VGA) camera with three quality setting and 4 resolutions. Editing options for the phone include three shutter sounds, spot metering, night mode, 8 effects for color, 4 settings for white balance and a self-timer. The phone has 4 MB of internal memory for storing photos.

The handset comes with three demo games Super Jewel Quest, Ms. Pac Man and Platinum Sudoku and Tetris. PIM applications include Currency Converter, World Clock, Tip Calculator, Calculator, Calendar and Alarm. Display languages are French, English and Spanish. 800 mAh lithium ion battery of the phone has talk time of 180 min and 252 hours of standby time.

Razzle Dazzle:

There is nothing attractive about the A167, it is a typical clamshell designed phone. Being a basic phone, Samsung makes this phone for people who are not gadget crazy and want a device just to make calls so not much effort has been made to make the phone look attractive. The phone is 0.78 inches thick, 3.54 inches long, 1.83 inches wide and weighs 3.1 ounces. The hinge of the phone is sturdy but the cheap plastic exterior of the phone doesn’t feel good in the hand.

Inside Dope:

Though the world has moved on to high end smart phones which sport lots of multimedia and messaging capabilities, there are still people who are not so enthusiastic about mobile phones. All they want is a device which can make call and send messages. A167 is a phone for such people. You can talk to people, text messages and take some photos with the low end camera on the handset.

Being a clamshell phone, it has two displays, one on the lid and other one inside. The monochrome display on the lid gives a resolution of 96×96 pixels and it also gives you caller ID, signal strength, time battery life and date. The low end display doesn’t give a photo caller ID and neither does it work as a camera viewfinder.

On the exterior of the phone, there is a volume rocker and a proprietary jack for putting headset and adapter. A single jack means that you get to use only one peripheral at a time. Asking for a 3.5 mm jack on an entry level phone like this is crazy.

The display on the inside has a resolution of 160X128 pixels with 64000 colors. The resolution is quite low, graphics and colors don’t look that great on the screen. Fortunately text can be clearly red from the screen because it is very bright. You can change the backlight time, color and size of the dialing font, menu font style and color.

Below the display is the navigation array and numeric keypad on the bottom half of the phone. The keypad is pretty cheap and pressing the buttons isn’t a smooth experience. The navigation array has the traditional four way navigation button with OK button in the center, 2 soft keys, talk and end button and back button. In the standby mode, the middle OK button is used to start the browser. We would have liked if one of the soft keys were used to start the browser and the OK button could have been used for menu.

The phone book can take 200 entries for storing your contacts; a single entry can take multiple phone numbers, notes and e-mail ID. You might run out of space with the tiny memory so you can use the SIM card which can take 250 more contacts.

Other features on the phone include tip calculator, world clock, stopwatch, timer, unit and currency converter, calculator, alarm clock, vibrate mode and multimedia and text messaging. The phone has WAP browser for POP3 email accounts and instant messaging.

The handset has VGA camera on the lid which has three settings for quality and is capable of shooting in four resolutions. Options for editing include three shutter sounds, spot metering, night mode, 8 effects for color, 4 settings for white balance and a self-timer. You get 4 MB of memory to store your photos. The camera cannot record video and we were disappointed with the quality of the photos. Samsung could have put 2 or at least 1.3 megapixel camera on the phone.

You can personalize the handset with variety of greetings, background colors and wallpapers. You can get more from AT&T’s Media Mall service by accessing it through the browser. Games include Tetris, Super Jewel Quest, Ms. Pac Man, Platinum Sudoku. The last three are demo versions, you will have to pay a fee for full versions. Apart from this, you get trial version for three applications The Weather Channel, Mobile Banking and WikiMobile.

The phone has rated talk time of three hours and standby time is 10.5 hours. The phone lasted a little more than the rated talk time in our tests.

Call quality on the phone was excellent. It would have been a disaster if this phone, which is made just for calling, had got a bad call quality. However it would have been better if the volume was louder because it gets difficult to talk when in noisy environments. Other than that, we had no problems when in calls, we didn’t experience any dropped calls and our friends could hear what we were saying quite clearly. Speaker phone calls were loud but the volume got distorted when we pushed it to the limit.

Nitty Gritty:

Samsung SGH-A167 is for basic users who need a phone just for calling. But we will recommend you to look elsewhere even if you are an entry level user because the keypad is awful and volume level is too low for phone calls in noisy environments.