At first glance, the Samsung Sunburst for AT&T looks like a compelling feature phone: it's small, pocketable, and has a chic, youthful look to it. While I appreciated the phone's industrial design and good call quality, its quirky touchscreen keyboard, and mediocre multimedia performance left me feeling a bit sour. Best for kids and teens, the Sunburst shouldn't be picked up by anyone that wants to surf the web or use their phone for serious texting.
Physical Aspects
The 109.9mm x 53.8mm x 12.9mm (4.33in x 2.08in x .51in) Samsung Sunburst is sleek in shape and it feels like a pebble in the hand. The device is black with chrome colored accents running down both sides that taper at the bottom of the phone. I thought the overall design was attractive, and felt that it had a bit of a feminine flare to it. The device has a 3-inch 400 x 240
The Sunburst weighs 87.5g (3.1oz) and felt light in my hand. There are three buttons below the screen, send, end, and a return button. There's a proprietary charging port on the right side of the device that doubles as a headphone jack, but headphones aren't included. These days I prefer to see a micro-USB charging port since that's the best supported standard. The camera quick-launch button is conveniently placed below the charging port, and it was easy to press while holding the phone in landscape mode. The volume toggle keys are on the right edge of the phone, and were in easy reach of my thumb during phone calls. A microSD card slot is placed below it, and thankfully not hidden behind the battery, as is too often the case with feature phones. I was a bit shocked that there wasn't an indicator light for new messages or missed phone calls. It may seem trivial, but notifications from a blinking LED light or other visible indication are a valued luxury.
While in landscape orientation, the on-screen virtual keypad takes on the standard QWERTY form and the keys felt adequately spaced, though oftentimes unresponsive with the first touch (the response was drastically improved when using a small object to type, rather than the flat pad of a fingertip). In portrait mode the keyboard morphs into a standard alphanumeric phone keypad with a T9 option. I wasn't able to type as quickly in this mode and found myself gravitating to the landscape QWERTY most of the time.
Core Functions
Calls on AT&T's network in New York City were clear and coherent, with the caller on the other end coming through without static or distortion. I didn't experience any dropped calls and was generally pleased with the device's phone call performance. The phone typically reported a full signal, although it only supports AT&T's EDGE network and doesn't offer 3G data speeds. That said, it's probably best served by those that don't plan on surfing the web much.
Storing contact information was a breeze. The Contacts icon is conveniently placed at the bottom of the homescreen, so quickly calling someone was a two-tap process. Adding a contact took just one extra step, and I was able to fully customize each contact with all of the standard identification categories, along with picture, nickname, birthday, group, and individual vibration and ring tone choices.
The Sunburst has four profile settings: normal, silent, driving, and outdoor. I appreciated the ease of which I was able to toggle the level of volume by pressing the volume keys down.
The Sunburst's speakerphone worked well and my caller's voice came through loud and clear when I left the phone on my desk. I found the voice recognition performance to be mediocre at best, though. While speaking a number, I was given three separate options for possible sound-alikes. When trying to call using a contact name, the phone fumbled to pick up the name "Colin," and couldn't direct my call.
The Sunburst supports SMS and well as MMS text messages, and both worked well during my testing period, although I wish the text message conversation was threaded. Beyond just standard SMS and MMS, the Sunburst also comes preloaded with AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger instant messaging clients found in the "IM" folder. I signed into my AIM account easily and appreciated being able to leave it running in the background. The Mobile Email client was rather basic, but provided support for AOL Mail, AIM Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, AT&T Mail, Gmail, as well as POP/IMAP3 accounts. I logged into my Gmail account and thought the interface was easy to navigate, but attachments, such as embedded images, weren't fully supported.
The Sunburst offers stereo Bluetooth support, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity (although a USB cable isn't included.) As I noted earlier, it doesn't offer 3G data speeds. The device's 1000mAh battery is rated for 5 hours of talk time and up to 10.4 days of standby. During my testing I was able to get through two days of standard use before I had to plug it in again.
Multimedia / Applications
The Sunburst's multimedia performance was sub-par. The device comes with 189MB of internal memory that's shared between the mp3 player and your photo gallery. That won't allow you to hold many songs, so you'll need to take advantage of the microSD card slot which supports up to 32GB of additional storage.
The camera on the Sunburst wasn't able to take very good pictures. Landscape photos of buildings and the blooming white trees outside showed up nicely on the small screen of the device, but on a computer, the images were very blurry and the colors were washed out. Shots indoors of a wine glass in low lighting also came out poorly due to a lack of flash. The camera has fun and easy to access features such as panorama mode and mosaic mode that teenagers will appreciate. I was able to send messages as MMS texts, or up to HP's Snapfish website, with the tap of a button, but I wish there was an option to send them as an email attachment, too. Pictures are stored just three clicks away from the home screen, in the MyStuff folder available from the main menu.
Web browsing on the Sunburst felt archaic, to say the least. The experience recalled bygone days of cell phone web browsing, and didn't at all mimic the feel of a smartphone's capabilities. Web sites like nymag.com showed up incorrectly formatted. Surfing through pages and navigating from one site to the next was sluggish, too. The zoom feature was fickle and unresponsive at times. The process was also unintuitive and complicated to use: first I had to press down in one spot for a few seconds until the zoom feature popped up (no two finger pinching and stretching on this touch screen) and then slide my finger either up or down to zoom in and out, but one slip to the side or remotely in the wrong direction foiled all progress made in the zooming department.
The preloaded social networking TouchWiz widgets, such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, are the smoothest running web-based applications on the device by far. Their browser counterparts, however, are drastically slower, grainier, and much less well-developed.
The music player was also a disappointing. Since the device uses a Samsung proprietary headphone jack, and not a standard 3.5mm one, I wasn't able to use the phone as a personal media player with my own headphones. I also found that the speakers weren't very good; Lady Gaga's Alejandro sounded fuzzy, as though the song was playing through a pair of blown out speakers. Should you still want to listen to music, creating playlists is easy. The AT&T Music player was intuitive and allowed me to create, delete, or edit a current playlist. I had to download an outside application, mSpot Music Sync, in order to sync the device with songs already loaded on my computer, however, the software is only compatible with a PC, not a Mac.
The Sunburst comes with a few personal information management (PIM) tools that include an alarm clock, a calendar, a sketchpad, a memo app, world clock, converter, tip calculator, timer, and a stopwatch. The alarm clock on the Samsung Sunburst is piercing, annoying, and effective. I've slept through many an alarm, be it set on my phone or on a standard clock, and nothing has roused me out of bed quicker than Club Mix at level 7 combined with vibrate mode.
User Interface
When I first turned the phone on, the homescreen was bare except for a TouchWiz tab and three icons at the bottom of the screen: Dial, Contacts, and Menu. TouchWiz provides a small widget tray on the homescreen to quickly get to your most commonly used apps. TouchWiz sounds better than it works; it was a bit sluggish - likely due to the phone's measly 200MHz processor - and the widgets are really just icon shortcuts. I found that there are three customizable home screens, and while the experience was also sluggish, I liked that I could easily switch between them by swiping my finger across the display.
The main menu is very intuitive and on a par with most other feature phone menus. There are 12 icons in a 3 x 4 grid consisting of Mobile Web, Messaging, AT&T GPS, Games & Apps, AppCenter, AT&T Music, IM, Address Book, Yellow Pages Mobile, My Stuff, Tools, and Settings. I was able to get the hang of the navigation right off of the bat, and appreciated that I didn't have to dig through a file system to find what I was looking for. Most, if not all users, should find the experience just as intuitive.
Aside from tweaking the homescreen with widgets and wallpapers, there isn't much in the way of theme customization. I was only able to change the font type used throughout the phone, and there were only three fonts to choose from.
Conclusion
The Samsung Sunburst's poor web browsing experience, lack of 3G connectivity, sluggish user interface, and mediocre camera all make it a tough recommendation. Still, the good battery life, call quality, and pocket friendly form factor make it a compelling and attractive phone, and for that reason, it just manages to earn a "Recommended" rating. For $39.99 with a 2-year contract, I don't expect it to be a robust multimedia phone with a killer camera and a solid music player, but I still felt a bit let down. Before purchasing the Sunburst, you should check out the Samsung a877 Impression, which offers a full hardware QWERTY keyboard, an AMOLED display, 3G connectivity, and a better 3.2 megapixel camera, for just a few dollars more.
No comments:
Post a Comment