Samsung Flight A797 Review

Introduction:

Last year we saw Samsung target the budget conscious text messenger with the square shaped design and entry level cost of the Propel. It wasn’t too fancy in the features department, but managed to captivate users with its slide out QWERTY keyboard. Building upon some of those foundations, the Samsung Flight SGH-A797 takes off with some impressive new features that’ll hopefully keep fingers moving with its QWERTY and touchscreen. With so many devices emphasizing heavily on text messaging, the Samsung Flight may have what it takes to jet above the clouds.

The package contains:

•    Samsung Flight
•    Charger
•    User Manual CD
•    Quick Start Guide



Design:

Thankfully the Flight’s design takes the same rectangular approach to its form factor that was seen on the Propel with some more real estate reserved for the screen. The hefty size is fitting for its class and doesn’t seem too overbearing. Although its form factor isn’t something to boast about, we preferred its plastic casing that emulated a metallic finish. Sure it may not be constructed out of premium quality materials, but it gives off a solid feel all around – especially in the sliding mechanism of the QWERTY. You’ll easily notice the weight (4.8 oz) that’s accompanying its girth – fortunately it still doesn’t feel like a brick, but it’ll cause a bulge when trying to slip it into a pocket.



You can compare the Samsung Flight A797 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The Samsung Flight steps it a notch by offering a 2.8” resistive touchscreen for navigating through the phone with a modest resolution of 320 x 240 and support for 262k colors. It’s nothing breathtaking to say the least when compared to the Mythic’s display, but it gets the job done with good detail and viewing angles. There are no light or proximity sensors to be found which means you’ll need to manage the brightness levels to conserve battery. When using it in direct sunlight, you’ll need to place the screen’s brightness on the highest setting to be viewable.

Directly below the screen are the three primary hardware buttons – the send, end, and back keys. All are flush evenly with the surface, adequately sized, and are accompanied with a solid tactile feel. There’s nothing too much to say for the rest of the other plastic buttons scattered on the sides – they’re fairly well sized with a good push feel to them. Samsung continues to move forward in offering the standard microUSB port that’s hidden away by a plastic flap for charging and connecting to a computer. Turning the Flight onto its back reveals a 2-megapixel camera with the speaker phone placed closely to it. After pulling apart the rear cover, you’ll get access to the battery, SIM card slot, and microSD slot.





Sliding the phone up will show off the 4-row QWERTY keyboard with its close confine of buttons. Although they are tiny and with no spacing in between them, the soft plastic textured buttons had a good tactile response. Fortunately they are raised high enough to make out with a finger, but probably too small to really speed type for those with larger hands. We especially enjoyed the bright white backlighting for the keys while numbers were colored in light red – making it extremely easy to see in any lighting condition.

Software/Features:

Our first inclination in the software department with a Samsung handset offering a touchscreen was some kind of TouchWiz interface. Instead of being blessed with the flagship interface like what we saw in the Mythic, the Flight gets a super watered down version of fledging platform – so it’s not TouchWiz. You can see remnants of it in the home screen layout, main menu, and media players – but the only thing sorely missing is the plethora of widgets. Navigating through the phone is simple, responsive, and generally utilizes some nice transition effects. It doesn’t offer the depth in personalization though that TouchWiz is known to have like the multiple homescreens and placement of widgets, but it works fine for this kind of device.



Following the same fashion as other Samsung handsets before it, inputting contact information is a breeze with little effort required. All the traditional information can be associated with each contact – phone numbers, email addresses, ringtones, and screen names to name a few. Holding all that information will be a simple task for the Flight which holds up to 2,000 contact.




It may not be the best QWERTY keyboard around, but we were baffled with the typing experience when composing a text message. There are three input methods on the Flight – on-screen numeric pad, handwriting recognition, and the QWERTY itself. There’s no option for a landscape on-screen QWERTY, so using the physical one will be the only way to get a decent experience. The SMS application is the same we’ve seen before except that there’s a noticeable lag when you really start flying on the QWERTY. It felt as though the phone had a tough time catching up with our fingers mashing on the buttons – it was bad to the point that errors were being made and button presses weren’t being registered properly. This was a definite glaring issue in our books because of the nature of the phone.





The instant messaging client allows for AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger to be used. Setting up email on the Flight was a breeze now that just about any provider could be used. We had no problem setting up our PhoneArena email on the phone by providing the specific mail server addresses. There’s a list of common providers that make the setup procedure a bit easier by just placing the address and password. We like the simple nature of the email application that manages to be passable for the everyday user that just wants to check messages.
Third party software support is the same on the Samsung Flight when compared to similar AT&T phones – some useful while others you may never use. Some of these include Mobile Banking, MobiTV, MobiVJ, My-Cast Weather, Where, and XM Radio to name a few. For people on the go, AT&T Navigator is loaded for location based services to get you to a destination in a timely manner. As usual, standard tools like the calculator, world clock, timer, stopwatch, and alarms are all available for your disposal.




You can throw the camera taking quality of the Flight straight out of the window with its bland colors and lack of fine detail. For a 2-megapixel camera, we wouldn’t even suggest trying to even print out a 4” x 6” shot because of its dismal quality. We’re treated to the same interface we’ve seen on previous TouchWiz handsets with a little bit less features for the photo enthusiast in you. Even with that, we were sorely disappointed with its quality.





With only a maximum shooting resolution of 320 x 240, the Samsung Flight’s video capture of 15 fps looked very pixelated. Colors were more on the drab side with no detail in sight in any of the videos we took. Voices turned out to be muffled sounding – making it really difficult to make out what was being said. This is just another example of a device being best suited for MMS use and not to capture all the spontaneous moments you want for the memories. The Flight is a video share enabled device.

Both the music and video players are facsimiles to ones we’ve seen on previous Samsung handsets. The simple layout of the music player will be familiar with its touch friendly sized icons, useful music information, and use of the mini player when exiting back to the homescreen. Sound emanating from the speaker phone was loud enough to listen, but crackling sounds were apparent on the highest volume setting. Regrettably we were a bit taken back by the Flight’s inability to play certain videos despite having a QVGA display. We were unable to play a 320 x 136 movie trailer in H.264 codec, but managed to load one in 220 x 96. It was able to play fine with no indication of lag or choppiness – of course it’d run smooth on a low quality video and played in landscape only. We had no luck in attempting to play a video in MPEG-4 format. Sound from the videos was audible and in sync – no complaints with its decent sounding tones.



There is roughly 90MB of shared memory available if you plan on saving media directly on the device. To support that, it can accept microSD cards up to 16GB in capacity.

Taking the handset to other countries for voice calls won't be an issue with it's quad-band GSM capability (850/900/18000/1900 Mhz). For data use, the dual-band UMTS support (850/1900 Mhz) is sufficient enough to get good connections here domestically.

Thanks to the Opera Mini powered browser on the Samsung Flight, web browsing experience is taken up a notch with its peppy speeds and proper rendering. Complex sites like ours loaded up speedily on the handset with almost everything in proper place. Scrolling isn’t the smoothest out there, but works well for a feature phone like the Flight. It’s definitely quite usable and found surfing the web an enjoyable experience.

Performance:

At times we had difficulty in hearing our conversations on the Flight because it sounded too low on our end. Even when setting it to the highest volume setting, sounds from the main speaker were on the weak side. Voices sounded natural for the most part, but our callers did state hearing a lot of background noise on their end whenever we spoke. Listening with the speaker phone proved to be no problem except that it became distorted on the highest volume setting. On the receiving end, our callers did say that our voice did sound distant and that we had to speak up more in order to be heard. With its mix bag of calling quality, we were content with its overall performance – conversations were completed without too much hassle.

During our testing, the Flight held up well in retaining signal strength with solid bars at any given time in the greater Philadelphia area. The Flight was not plagued by any service issues or dropped calls.

For a touchscreen handset, the Samsung Flight produced a stellar 5 days of normal use before completely depleting the battery – this included voice calls, heavy text messaging, and the occasional web browsing. We placed the brightness of the screen to the middle setting and assume it could’ve lasted longer if it were set on the lowest and included a proximity sensor to turn off the display automatically during calls. Still, we were pleased by the amount of usage time we got out of the battery between charges.

Conclusion:

Devices that are catered to the text messaging demographic should capitalize heavily in that one particular area, but its inconsistent performance makes the Samsung Flight grounded – indefinitely. The combination of the touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard looks good on paper, but it doesn’t find a solid foundation in which direction to follow. Throw in the laggy typing experience on the QWERTY and it totally misses on an area where its focus should be placed. We’d recommend devices with a slide out portrait QWERTY like the Motorola Karma QA1 for a better messaging experience. Ultimately, the Samsung Flight’s wings have been clipped, left behind to slowly walk on its legs, and play catch up to the rest.

Samsung Flight A797 Video Review: