Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Samsung SGH A867 Eternity

The Eternity is available only in Black, with a chrome lining covering all its sides. The Eternity has a large 3.2" touchscreen. While good for visual delight, the touchscreen calls for careful protection of the front side. The glossy screen is also good at catching fingerprints easily. The Eternity's design is simplified in that it has a large screen and below it three hardware keys: 'Call', 'End', and 'Back' buttons. However, these three keys are to the extreme bottom that most users trying to operate them single-handedly will eventually flip the costly device over. On the left side of the device are a 3.5 mm audio port, a multitasking key, and the camera key. The A867 Eternity weighs heavier than similar Samsung phones, at 110 grams. The Eternity has a textured back plate made of good plastic; however, the overall feel of the Eternity reminds us of the Apple iPhone. Measurements of the device are also a tad bigger, at 109 x 56 x 12.7 mm.

The first thing that comes to our mind about the Eternity is its large 3-inch touch capable screen. It is capable of a resolution of 240x400 at 262K colors. To promote the Samsung A867 Eternity as a multimedia handset, AT&T has bundled AT&T Mobile Music and AT&T Mobile TV services with the phone. The built-in GPS receiver in conjunction with the large screen and AT&T Navigator service makes the Eternity a useful GPS Navigator device. This phone is also TouchWiz enabled like its Samsung siblings: Behold or Omnia. There's a 200 MB of onboard memory and support for most video and audio formats. The available microSD slot supports SDHC cards of capacities up to 16 GB. We're however disappointed to see the slot below the battery. The camera present on the Eternity can take decent shots with a maximum resolution of 2048x1536 pixels. Video recording is supported at QVGA resolution. The Eternity lacks a secondary video calling camera despite being a 3G HSDPA device. The widgets on the homescreen are customisable to an extent but not fully. There's also limited application support and settings available to the user.

The Samsung A867 Eternity is a Quadband GSM that works anywhere on five continents. Add to it UMTS and HSDPA support on two US bands, i.e., 850/1900 MHz. The device supports HSDPA 3.6 Mbps, UMTS (384 kbps), EDGE Class 10 (236 kbps), GPRS (48 kbps) as data connections. Local connectivity is through Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP, and USB 2.0 Hi-speed. There's no hint of Wi-Fi. The Eternity features limited POP3 support for E-mail but no IMAP. IM and HTML browsing are supported on a smaller level.

Powered by a 1350 mAh Li-ion, the Samsung Eternity is definitely an improvement over the Behold or other slimmer Samsungs with smaller batteries. Samsung notes a maximum 5 hour talk time with this device, which is fair enough. There's also the standby time of 250 hours. Multimedia users can expect the Eternity to stand up two days before needing a charge.

The Samsung SGH A867 Eternity with a intuitive touch-screen interface throws some pleasant surprises, but it is an immature device that needs to be polished in many areas. The perception may get changed if Samsung does something with Firmware updates to satisfy existing users.