Samsung Strive SGH-A687 – A decent messaging phone

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Comfortable and user friendly design, decent performance, lots of features

Thumbs Down:

Low internal memory, camera doesn’t have flash

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM

Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900

Phone design: Slider

Caller ID: Yes

Other features: EDGE, GPRS, AT&T Navigator

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

2.6 inches display with 240 x 320 pixels resolution. Organizer features include alarm clock, calendar, reminder, and calculator. The 2 megapixel camera supports video storage in formats of AMR audio, H.263 video, MPEG-4, and WMV. Supported audio format is MP3. Messaging and data features includes Voice mail, HTML Browser, E-Mail, Instant messages, Multimedia messages (MMS), Text messages. The phone is 2.14 inches wide, 0.58 inch deep, 4.17 inches high and weighs 3.99 oz. The 1000 mAh battery has rated talk time of 180 minutes and standby time is 250 hours.

Razzle Dazzle:

Samsung Strive SGH-A687 is an attractive looking phone and we liked the fact that that real estate has been used quite well. The exteriors are made of plastic and though it doesn’t look too cheap, the plastic body makes the phone quite light. Color options for this phone are purple and black.

Inside Dope:

Samsung Strive SGH-A687 has a 2.6 inches display with resolution of 320×240 pixels. The screen has support for 262,000 colors and seems both vibrant and bright. You can change the display theme, wallpaper, background color, backlighting theme and the dialing font’s color, size and type. The menu can be adjusted in grid or list style and both ways, it is user friendly.

Navigation array of the Samsung Strive SGH-A687 is well designed with tactile and spacious controls. It houses back button, four way navigation button with confirmation key in the center, two soft keys, pop up shortcut menu button, and Talk and End/Power keys. The toggle can be programmed for four shortcuts. Our only complaint here was that the OK button opens up Web browser in the standy mode. We would have liked if it brought up the menu.

You might say that the QWERTY keyboard is too small, we too were skeptical about it. But after some 30 odd minutes of usage, we were quite comfortable with it. There are four rows for the keys and symbols and numbers are put together. We liked the discrete shortcut button for messaging feature and also the location of space bar. We also liked that the top row of the keys isn’t too close to the slider.

On the Samsung Strive SGH-A687’s left, you have the volume rocker and on the right, there is the camera button and microUSB port for USB cable and charger. On the back there is a camera without self portrait mirror or flash. The phone has a spacious 1000 entry limit phone book and a single entry can take 6 phone numbers, nickname, two e-mail addresses, company name and job title, birthday, notes and two postal addresses. You can make groups of your friends and assign a discrete ringtone to them. There are 11 polyphonic ringtones to choose from. New feature for this phone is the inclusion of AT&T Address Book which lets you back up the contacts of the handset online. You can also import contacts and send messages from there.

Basic features on the Samsung Strive SGH-A687 include task list, calendar, alarm clock, notepad, currency and unit converter, calculator, world clock, stopwatch, tip calculator, and timer. There are a few advanced features too like voice recorder, USB mass storage, PC syncing, and Bluetooth. The phone comes with instant messaging and multimedia and text messaging. AT&T Mobile E-mail service is also included through this, you can connect to Gmail, Yahoo and other such service providers but you are stuck with the Web based interface which is quite clunky.

The Samsung Strive SGH-A687 has a two mega pixel camera which gives you options for three settings for quality and four resolutions. Other settings include 3 color effects, night mode, brightness tool (which can be adjusted), four modes for white balance, self timer, 20 fun frames, geo-tagging, and modes for mosaics, panoramas and multishots. The camera also has digital zoom but it cannot be used at the highest resolution. Photo quality is strictly ok, nothing spectacular.

The camera also lets you shoot videos, there is just one resolution of 176×144 pixels and the editing options are similar to that of the camera. Multimedia clips are capped at thirty seconds but you can shoot for longer in the camcorder mode. The handset also has Video Share feature courtesy of AT&T but your friends need to have a compatible phone. For storing photos, there is 90 MB onboard memory but you can put more memory through external cards.

The Samsung Strive SGH-A687 gives direct access to AT&T’s AppCenter and also has lots of applications integrated like Where 2.1, My-Cast Weather, WikiMobile, Mobile IMDb, MobiVJ, MobiTV, Yellowpages Mobile, AllSport GPS, Mobile Baking, Loopt, AT&T Social Net, AT&T Navigator, etc. For gaming enthusiasts, there is five demo gaming titles like Bubble Bash 2, Tetris, Diner Dash 2, and Ms. Pac-Man.

We tested the Samsung Strive SGH-A687 for call quality and it was relatively good. Our friends sounded a bit robotic but signal was clear for most part. The voices sounded natural and volume too was loud enough. There was a bit of ‘GSM buzz’ but it didn’t irritate us much. Rated talk time of this device is about three hours and stand by time is 19 days. When tested in our labs, the phone battery lasted for almost six hours which is really impressive.

Nitty Gritty:

Samsung Strive SGH-A687 is one of the better messaging phones from Samsung’s stables. We will recommend it for its good feature set.