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>> Hi, I'm Kent German, senior editor here at CNET.com. Today we take a first look at the Samsung Eternity. This is also called the SGHA867, and this is a new phone for AT and T. Samsung has gone really heavily into the smart touch screen phones lately. We saw the Omnia, we saw the Dell for Alltel, we saw the Behold for T-Mobile. So really Samsung is on a theme here, and of course we saw the Instinct earlier this year for Sprint. Of course unlike the Instinct, it has physical buttons below the display. But pretty thin here on the side, with the touch screen really dominating the front. It's glossy around the display, plastic covering here on the back, and then there's a silver rim around the side. So shows a few physical differences, but overall really the same sort of concept. It does have Samsung's touch wiz interface, that shortcut bar that comes out from the side, which give you one touch access to certain functions by dragging it out onto the main screen. There are three shortcut buttons down here at the bottom, takes you to the dialing menu, the contacts list, and the main menu. Main menu has a standard design, just a bunch of icons, you can choose a list view as well. Pretty user friendly, a lot of icons are surfaced here, which is nice, like the AT and T mobile TV, the navigator, the music. So you can really get to a lot, which is nice. And then there's another shortcut button that will call up another menu for the web browser, the music player, and the menu for making calls. Here on the back there's a camera lens, it's a three mega pixel camera. Disappointing there's no flash or self portrait mirror. Does have a virtual keyboard, it has three different keyboards for numbers and symbols, letters, and then also another one for emoticons, which is unique for this device. Keyboard's pretty easy to use, takes full advantage of the display. The only thing I didn't like though is that can't use that full QWERTY keyboard to type in your contact. You have to use the on screen alpha numeric keyboard, which uses that multi tap. Didn't understand why that was the case, I would really prefer to be able to enter like an email address on the QWERTY keyboard. You can use the QWERTY keyboard of course to type a message. As far as features goes, this phone is meant for not really a smart phone audience, it's more just below that, someone that wants multimedia features, and it's got a lot of that. It's got streaming video, the live TV and music player. Does not have Wi-Fi, even though it does have that full HTM browser. And on this phone I thought the 3G connection was just a little bit shaky, so really would like that Wi-Fi. Call quality was pretty good, speakerphone call, it was just a little iffy.
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But overall, decent multimedia phone, just not something you want for a business device. I'm Kent German, and this is the Samsung Eternity.
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