Samsung SGH-A657 has sturdy and rugged design. The feature set includes 3G Support, push-to-talk and GPS.

Thumbs Down:

The rated talk time is short and there is no voice dialing. The streaming video quality is not good.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: quad-band of WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone Design: Candy Bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other Features: Bluetooth, GPS, 3G support, Push-To-Talk

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Samsung SGH-A657 is a rugged phone and works on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system. It has 16GB of user-accessible memory and a micro-SD expansion slot that supports up to 8GB cards.

2-inch LCD display has a resolution of 220×176 pixels and it indicates missed calls, signal strength, battery life and keypad lock. Samsung SGH-A657 is capable of 3-way conference calling. The supported wireless interface is Bluetooth 2.0. The pre-installed software includes Currency converter, alarm/world time, MP3 player, calculator, ActiveSync, Calendar, Games, Task and Notes.

Samsung SGH-A657 has inbuilt messengers such as Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. The other messaging features are mobile email, and multimedia and text messaging. The additional features are EDGE, HSDPA, GPRS and Intelligent Typing (T9).

Samsung SGH-A657 has 1420mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 240 minutes of talk time and 252 hours of idle stand by time. The accessories included inside the package are battery, travel charger, user manual and headphone.

Razzle Dazzle:

Samsung SGH-A657 is 4.53 inches tall, 2.05 inches wide and 0.77 inch thick and weighs around 4.34 ounces. The SGH-A657 has plastic shell covered with thin rubber material. This gives a weighty and sturdy feel while taking the phone in hand. For protection, there are rubber sidings all the sides. The left and right spines have ribbed pattern, so that you can grip the phone easily. It is worth mentioning that the SGH-A657 is a bit heavy with all protection around it.

Inside Dope:

There are not a lot of rugged phones out there. Sanyo models from Sprint and Motorola handsets from Nextel had captured this market until Samsung launched its Rugby with AT&T. Now, the company has launched another rugged model – Samsung SGH-A657 for AT&T. The SGH-A657 is built and shaped like a brick. The phone does not have fashionable smooth look, but its rubber sliding and hard shell are making the phone tough. The SGH-A657 does not have a camera but offers features including 3G support, GPS, Bluetooth and push-to-talk. Samsung SGH-A657 is available at AT&T business channel for $129. It means that you must have a business account with AT&T service to purchase this phone.

2-inch LCD display has 220×176 pixels resolution and 262,000 colors. The display is bright, sharp and easy on the eyes. It exhibits sharp graphics and vibrant colors. The menu interface is available in two styles – icon and list. You can adjust the backlight time, and dial font size, type and color.

Samsung SGH-A657 does not have a beautiful design. It is made to withstand the environment conditions and can protect its parts from any bruises and bumps. The SGH-A657 is certified by military specification for vibration, shock, dust, moisture and similar elements. Unlike Motorola i365, the Samsung phone has respectable showing on the front side. The phone is not fully waterproof, but it can survive a dunking. For testing, we dropped the SGH-A657 phone on floor but there was no scratch on the phone. Also, there was no effect when we splashed some water on the phone.

The navigation array has a silver-colored square toggle. The toggle is tactile and easy to use. Its central OK button has squishy feel and launches main menu, instead of Web browser in other Samsung phones. The other controls are Talk key, End/power button, back button, GPS shortcut and two-soft keys. The soft keys are little narrow in size. We did not face any problem while using the array for menu navigation. The keypad buttons of Samsung SGH-A657 are raised above the surface. The keypad has bright backlight. You will get an audible click sound while working with the keys.

A volume rocker and an orange-colored push-to-talk button sits on the left spine of Samsung SGH-A657. Whereas, the headset jack/charger port and flash light button are located on the right spine. Samsung continues to have its proprietary ports for charger and headset, so you have limited choices of peripherals. The small flashlight and looped antenna sits on the top. The flash light is bright enough to display the things in a dark room. The battery cover has a locking mechanism that makes it secure. The SD card slot is located behind the battery cover.

Samsung SGH-A657 can store 1000 contacts in its phonebook. Each contact can save six phone numbers, an instant messaging handle, an email address and notes. You can save callers to group and pair them with one of 10 polyphonic ring-tones and photo for caller ID.

The basic feature of Samsung SGH-A657 are stop watch, timer, world clock, tip calculator, currency and unit converter, calculator, task list, notepad, calendar, alarm clock, call timer, multimedia and text messaging, and vibrate mode. The additional features include instant messaging, voice recorder, USB sync and mass storage, and stereo Bluetooth. AT&T services like Navigator GPS and PTT network are also available.

Samsung SGH-A657 also supports AT&T Cellular Video service to show tons of streaming videos and AT&T Mobile Music for wireless song downloads from various partners. The music player also supports numerous audio formats and has features like play-lists, shuffle and repeat modes, and album art.

There is also a good selection of various features like support for music videos, Billboard Mobile channel, Music ID application, XM Radio Mobile and a community section for downloads and fan sites. The SGH-A657 also has an application to create the ring-tones and save them. You can personalize with various greeting message, wallpaper, background colors and themes. Additional ring-tones and options are available from AT&T via Web browser. The A657 phone has demo versions of three games: World Poker Tour Hold Em 2, Tetris and Midnight. You can purchase the complete version too.

We made some calls through quad-band based Samsung SGH-A657 using T-mobile service. The overall call quality was very good. We received natural and clear sound with strong signal strength at our end without any electronic interference. There was a very little static and a bit of background noise during our conversation. The callers also received good sound at their end, but could tell that we were using cell phone.

The speakerphone call quality was also good. We received loud and clear sound at our end. The callers also received good sound even when we were at a distance from the phone.

The streaming video quality was poor and the display size was too small. The images are suffered from choppy notion and pixilation. The audio was not being sync and we had to pause the videos to buffer. The videos loaded quickly due to strong 3G connection. The music quality was good. The external speaker and headphones provided the good output.

Samsung SGH-A657 has lithium ion battery that has a life of 3 hours of talk time and 10.5 days of idle standby time.

Nitty Gritty:

Samsung SGH-A657 has rugged design with good features. The overall call quality is perfect, but streaming-video quality is not good.

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.

Thumbs Up:

Good call quality, nice innovative 20 key QWERTY keyboard.

Thumbs Down:

Bad camera and music quality.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: GSM
Band: GSM 850/1800/1900 (Tri-Band)
Phone design: Candy bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: EDGE, GPRS, camera, stereo Bluetooth, music player.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

The display of the SGH-T349 is 2.2 inch big, has a resolution of 176X220 pixels, music player can read formats of MIDI, AAC/AAC+,  and MP3 and the video player can play 3GP, H.263 and MPEG-4. The 1.3 mega pixel camera photos of 220×165, 320×240, 640×480, 800×600, 1,024×768 and 1,280×1024. The video resolutions are 128×96, 160×120 and 176×144.

The phone has 50 MB of internal memory which can be further expanded to 4 GB through microSD cards. The handset has 1000 entry memory for contacts and there is 90 entry memory each for missed calls, dialed numbers and call received. Downloadable content on the phone includes screen savers, ringtones, video files, wall papers and games.

Razzle Dazzle:

The phone has pretty standard candy bar phone design. It is 4.49 inches long, 0.53 inches thick, 1.97 inches wide and weighs about 3.2 ounces. We really liked the attractive lime green and pearl gray color scheme. The phone is 2 inches wide, 4.5 inches high, 0.5 inches deep and weighs 3.2 oz.

Inside Dope:

Samsung SGH-T349 is a messaging phone, which sports the latest in-style 20 key QWERTY keyboard layout. Having a full QWERTY keyboard makes the phone quite big so it has been shrunk but still has great ergonomics while typing. We have seen this keyboard on BlackBerry Pearl’s SureType and we loved it. This is a message centric phone, although great on messaging is low on other features. It has been made for business men who need messaging applications while on the move. There is no GPS or 3G however; there is a music player, Bluetooth and 1.3 MP camera. The handset is extremely cheap at just $15 with a two year contract. It is also available for $99.99 with T-Mobile’s Prepaid service.

The display of the screen is 2.2 inch big and has support for 262,000 colors with resolution of 176X220 pixels. Although a bit small, it serves its purpose. The display is vibrant and bright with colorful animated icons on the interface of the menu. In the display, you can change the size and color of the font, backlight time, background color of the dialing display and the wallpaper can be set up to show the calendar on the home screen.

Below the display there is the navigation array which has 2 soft buttons, talk and end keys, four way square navigation toggle button with OK button in the center. There is also messaging and back key in there. The navigation toggle, back and messaging keys are raised more above the surface as compared to the other keys for easy use. The messaging key is user programmable and can be used for going to your message in-box, audio postcard, instant messaging, e-mail and text messaging. The navigation buttons have shortcuts on each side.

The semi-QWERTY keyboard is a mixed bag with 2 letters per key. It is definitely better than a standard numeric keypad but not as good as full QWERTY keyboard. This keyboard has taken best of both worlds to enhance user experience. The full QWERTY keyboard has been avoided to keep the phone size small.

The hardware on the sides of the phone include a volume rocker, microSD card slot, charger jack and camera key. We thank Samsung for giving us the memory card slot on sides so that we don’t have to go digging behind the battery cover.

The SGH-T340 has a 1000 entry phone book and a single entry can take an email ID and five numbers. There are 19 polyphonic ringtones however you can use your MP3 tracks as ringtones. Photo caller ID and grouping of contacts is also supported.

Other basic features on the stopwatch, timer, unit conversion app, world time clock, tip calculator, notepad, to-do list, alarm clock, calendar, voice recorder, multimedia and text messaging, vibrate mode and speakerphone. For messaging the phone comes preloaded with messengers like Yahoo, Windows Live and AIM, the mobile Web e-mail has support for Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, AIM, etc.

The handset has a built in music player which can play formats like MIDI, AAC/AAC+ and MP3. The player has all the music features that you would want in a phone like repeat and shuffle of tracks, album art, etc. The video player can play formats like 3GP, H.263 and MPEG-4. For storing videos and tracks, the phone has 50 MB of internal memory which can be further expanded to 4 GB through memory cards.

Don’t expect great photos from the below average 1.3 MP camera at the back of the phone. It lacks flash and self portrait mirror. It has nine effects for color and five settings for white balance. There is also a mosaic shot mode, multi shot, 4x zoom and self timer. The camera can also take video clips, with the maximum resolution of 160X120 and the options are similar to that of the camera.

The handset comes with two games – Midnight Pool 2 and Block Breaker Deluxe 2. The wireless Web browser on the phone lets you download games, sound and graphics. There is no 3G on the phone, all you get is GPRS and EDGE.

We had nothing to complain about when we tested the phone for call quality. Both parties had a good experience with the calls. Speakerphone calls were better than what you see on other phones. The inclusion of Bluetooth lets you pair up wireless headsets for music or phone calls.

The battery of the SGH-T349 has a rated seven hours of talk time and standby time is of 12.5 days. We were impressed with the battery which lasted about over an hour for rated talk time.

Nitty Gritty:

Samsung SGH-T349 is good messaging phone; it has all the features that you need for messaging. However, it is pretty average for music and camera quality. Don’t buy this phone if you use the latter two features a lot.