Samsung SGH-A717 review (AT&T)

The SGH-A717's 2-megapixel camera takes pictures in six resolutions, from 1,600x1200 down to 240x180. Other camera features include five quality settings, brightness and white balance controls, a night mode, a self-timer, three color effects, mosaic and multishot modes, 20 fun frames, and a digital zoom (though it's unusable at the highest resolution). Camera function sounds are available as well, but you can't silence the shutter completely. The camcorder records clips in two resolutions (176x144 and 128x96) with sound and a number of editing options; clips meant for multimedia messages are capped at 30 seconds or you can shoot for as long as the available memory will permit. Speaking of which, internal memory is limited to just 26MB. That's not extensive for a multimedia phone, so a MicroSD card slot is recommended. Photo quality was decent, better than both the SGH-A727 and SPH-M610. Oranges and reds were too bright, however.

You can personalize the SGH-A717 with a variety of wallpaper, menu styles, background colors, alert tones, and a greeting. If you want more options or more ringtones you can download them from AT&T with the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. The phone also comes with four games: Asphalt Urban GT 3D, Diner Dash, Ms. Pac-Man, Tetris, and World Poker Tour. You'll have to buy the full versions for extended play.

Performance
We tested the quadband (GSM 850/900/1900/1900) SGH-A717 world phone in San Francisco. Call quality was better than that of the SGH-A727. We encountered none of the static or fading audio that we heard on the other phone, though voices tended to sound a tad raspy on occasion. The volume level was fine, however, and the SGH-A717 didn't pick up much wind noise. It's worth noting that the SGH-A717's speaker is slightly off-center, so the sweet spot is somewhat sensitive. Callers didn't report significant problems, and automated answering systems could understand us.

The SGH-A717's 3G connection was mostly dependable. When activating the Internet browser, the phone took about five seconds to connect, with individual Web pages loading even faster. The change from a 2.5G phone is noticeable and it makes for a pleasant mobile surfing experience, even with the limited WAP pages. Application downloads were almost instant and we were glad to see that unlike the Motorola Razr V3xx, the SGH-A717 didn't burden us with restrictions on third-party apps like Google Maps Mobile.

AT&T Video took about 10 seconds to start up, while the time needed to access individual channels varied widely. The video wasn't the best we've seen from the carrier; most clips had a fair amount of pixilation, and we had to stop more than once to rebuffer. MobiTV clips fared a bit better, but on the whole the SGH-A717 ranks behind the Razr V3xx in streaming-video quality.

Audio quality was mostly good. When viewing streaming video the voices matched the speakers' mouths and we enjoyed enough volume. Music from the media players was also decent, but we were unable to test the XM streaming music. With the Music ID service, our SGH-A717 was able to identify most any song we threw at it. Just keep in mind that each ID costs $0.99.

AT&T Music differs from Sprint and Verizon's music services in that it doesn't offer wireless downloads. Rather, you buy music over the air from Napster Mobile or Yahoo Music and the tracks are delivered to your PC for just $0.99. Even without the wireless downloads, it's a decent service, as the Napster and Yahoo partnerships offer a wide selection at an affordable price. Also, the connection speed to those music services was reliably speedy. Yet we can't stand that you need to shell out extra cash to sync music between your computer and your phone. Neither a USB cable nor a memory card is included with the SGH-A717. Is that customer-friendly? No.

The Samsung SGH-A717 has a rated battery life of 4 hours talk time and 10 days standby time. Our tests revealed a talk time of 3 hours and 57 minutes. According to the FCC, the SGH-A717 has a digital SAR rating of 0.58 watts per kilogram.