Samsung Mythic A897 Review

Introduction:

Samsung has been working closely with AT&T in offering the most abundant TouchWiz powered phones. It started way back with the Eternity and now we’ve finally come close to a year with their latest touchscreen handset, the Samsung Mythic SGH-A897, making its way to an already crowded TouchWiz lineup. Unlike the Samsung Solstice which was released not too long ago, the Mythic has a lot of new updated features to really make it a stand out model. We’ll see if it has what it takes to be compelling enough to become a truly mythic handset worthy enough to live up to its own name.

The package contains:

Samsung Mythic
Charger
USB Cable
User Manual CD
Quick Start Guide

Design:

When you look at the evolution of the slate form factors that each Samsung TouchWiz handset on AT&T follows, you’ll notice that the Samsung Mythic is a bit more stretched out. Being much narrower (2.06”) than both the Eternity and Solstice, it is visually the tallest (4.49”) out of the bunch all the while retaining a slim form (0.5”). The chrome outer bezel mixes well with the finger print prone plastic housing that dominates the phone. It clearly feels good in the hand with its glossy plastic exterior and radiates a construction that’s noticeably better than the one of Solstice. Depending on what angle you hold the phone, the rear cover has a nice looking patterned design almost similar to what the Samsung Jet displays – regrettably it’s lost because of its attraction for finger prints. Not being too overbearing in the hand, we found it’s extremely lightweight (3.8 oz) and fits snug into a pocket.



You can compare the Samsung Mythic A897 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Feature phones like the Samsung Mythic don’t get treated to an AMOLED display that Samsung tends to reserve for their top of the line handsets. Luckily the resistive 3.3” TFT display is a sight to see thanks to its reproduction of vibrant colors and detailed looking images. It trumps both the Solstice and Eternity with a native resolution of 360 x 640 pixels with support for 262k colors – so there’s no denying its clear and highly detailed display being a sight for sore eyes. Even in direct sunlight, we were still able to clearly see the screen without much obstruction. The light and proximity sensors are located above the screen; the first will adjust brightness levels, while the second will turn off the display while on a call.

Button placement follows the same suit that previous TouchWiz featurephones on AT&T have done in the past. Below the screen are the traditional send and end buttons that sharply contour downwards; all the while having a solid tactile feel. The middle button is used as the back/clear function and is prominently placed squarely in the middle. There’s the volume rocker located on the left edge while the lock, quick menu, and camera keys are all found on the right side. No complaints with the feel and placement of buttons – they’re all fairly sized and decent feeling. We’re beginning to see more handsets pack on a standard microUSB port and a 3.5mm jack. Here, both are found on the top edge. The rear houses the 3.2-megapixel auto-focusing camera with LED flash – which is a step up from the Solstice’s 2-megapixel and Eternity’s 3-megapixel sensors. Towards the lower portion of the rear sits the speaker phone. Removing the back cover will give you access to the battery, SIM card slot, and the microSD slot.

Software and Features:

The version of TouchWiz found on the Mythic takes some of its cues from the newer editions that are mostly reserved for most of Samsung’s high- end handsets. All the friendly looking widgets are back to fill up your homescreens with useful information. Instead of having a single homescreen, you can now move between the three that’s featured on the Mythic.The Samsung Mythic runs the well-known TouchWiz interface that we’ve been accustomed to be see on most of Samsung’s handsets. Speed is consistent in almost whatever you are doing – from placing or moving widgets on-screen to the transition effects used for in-menu navigation. It’s not to say that it isn’t mind boggling smooth or intuitive, but it’s more than tolerable to withstand. In addition, the main menu also gets revamped with three menus that utilize a grid-like format for its icons – you can move them around to your liking. There’s a lot of to like about the Mythic’s the Mythic’s new interface because TouchWiz interface and its – it  has good depth when it comes to personalization options.



Creating contacts is a simple procedure that follows the same pattern on previous TouchWiz handsets we’ve reviewed. It offers more information to be inputted than other basic handsets – phone numbers, email addresses, home address, ringtones, and screen names can all be saved. Memory won't be an issue because the Mythic will retain up to 2,000 contacts.



Depending on the user, touch screen phones can be just as swift when it comes to text messaging. The virtual QWERTY is responsive with vibrations accompanying each press – by far the best input method. There's also a handwriting tool that we found quite frustrating because it does not accurately register what is written on screen. Finally, you can use the dialing pad with T9 for a more traditional way. The SMS application is simple and allows for images, sounds, and videos to be sent.



The Instant messaging client allows for AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger to be used. For the longest of times, we knew that the Mobile Email app on AT&T phones did not allow you to manually setup specific email providers. So it was shocking pretty nice to see that the Mythic get treated to a suitable application that’ll allow you to use just about any provider. We had no problem setting up our PhoneArena email on the phone by providing the specific mail server addresses.
 


Third party software is in abundance on the Highlight – 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 and 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.




One area where we saw performance take a step back was in the quality of photos that the Samsung Mythic produced. Sure it has an auto-focusing 3.2-megapixel camera with LED flash, but images lacked fine details and looked almost muddy. Colors had a softer tone in almost every lighting condition – it definitely looked more washed out than anything. We noticed that the phone had a difficult time attempting to focus in dark conditions with the aid of the LED flash – photos were extremely blurry when taking them from more than 4 feet away. The interface is what we expected with similar TouchWiz enabled phones – there’s a good mix of options you can modify to your preference. There’s really not much to like about the photo quality performance on the Mythic and we feel it’s best suited for picture messaging.





No surprise with video quality on this one as well – it was extremely pixelated and blurry at times when moving the camera to pan on something. Two resolutions are available with 320 x 240 being the maximum; so detail will be at a minimum. Audio from the captured video sounded muffled with a static background noise being audible throughout the recording. The Mythic is also a video share enabled device, but we were unable to test out that feature. In the end, it's best to take videos for MMS use.

Visually there is no difference in the music player found on the Mythic – it clearly takes the same interface that we’ve seen on the Solstice. All the useful information are is there as well common functions such as reverse, play/pause, forward, repeat, and shuffle. Exiting back to the homescreen will load up the music player widget so you’ll have continuous playback if you accidentally press the end button. At least there was an improvement in audio quality from the speaker phone – it didn’t crackle at the highest volume and had just enough power behind it to make tunes sound decent.



When watching videos on the Mythic we experienced similar results to previous TouchWiz devices.  Movie trailers we used in MPEG-4 at 320 x 240 and H.264 at 320 x 136 played smoothly without any noticeable lag. Thanks to the vivid screen, there was plenty of detail and lush colors to make the speedy video look nice.Unfortunately it doesn’t support DivX and Xvid in addition to not being able to handle a video in H.264 at 640 x 272. Sound from the videos produced similar results to what we experienced with playing music. It still had a decent tone allowing us to easily distinguish voices – all the while not being too loud or losing clarity.



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 tri-band UMTS device support (850/1900/2100 Mhz) is a slight step up from what we witnessed on the Solstice and Eternity. Unfortunately, the Mythic doesn’t sport Wi-Fi.

We’re just a bit mesmerized at how well the web browsing experience was on the Samsung Mythic – it rivals even some of the premier browsers out there. There’s no problem loading up web pages on the handset – our site took less than 30 seconds to completely load. Initially you are greeted to a page overview, with tiny text, that allows for a quick overall view of the site. You can simply double tap the touchscreen to zoom into a specific location. It had no problems scrolling in any direction with both text and pictures popping up almost instantaneously. This is definitely a great device to use if you plan on doing some heavy web surfing.



There is roughly 250MB of shared memory available if you plan on saving media directly on the device. To support that, it can accept microSD cards up to 32GB in capacity.

Performance:

When talking on the phone, we were thoroughly surprised that call quality was almost superb. Other than the faint echo we heard when volume was placed on the highest level, voices on both ends sounded clear with neutral tones. We were able to fully comprehend our conversations without any problems. Callers stated that our voice had a strong tone to it – making it very easy for them to hear us. Switching to the speaker phone, we were also pleased with the level it performed at. There was no instance of crackling or muffled sounds; we found using it to be a pleasant experience. On the other end, our callers were able to pick up on our words without any niche in quality.

During our testing, the Samsung Mythic A897 held up well in retaining signal strength with solid bars at any given
time in the greater Philadelphia area. The Mythic was not plagued by any service issues or dropped calls.

With so many improvements in the hardware department from previous incarnations, the Samsung Mythic was able to pull out a respectable 4 days of normal use before requiring a recharge. We had the phone set to automatic brightness to really get out some optimal performance out of the battery. During another round of testing, we “suspended” the web browser so it was still running in the background.  Unfortunately suspending applications will eat up more battery life – causing it to drain faster. Samsung has it rated for 3 hours of talk and 252 hours of standby.

Conclusion:

Samsung manages to showcase its nifty own updated TouchWiz interface on the Mythic – it’s nice that AT&T has finally got the updated treatment. There’s plenty to like about the Mythic with its dynamic looking screen which makes viewing videos or browsing web sites pleasurable. Samsung clearly keeps on fine tuning their TouchWiz handsets for AT&T – and the Mythic is sure to continue all the successes previous devices had. This is a well-balanced phone that can cater to a lot of people with its diverse mix of business and fun applications. To an extent, it does live up to its mythical name.

Samsung Mythic A897 Video review: