Reviews
Samsung
VM-A680 Video Phone
This tiny phone can take VGA pictures and 15 second movie
clips with sound!
I
swear, if Captain James T. Kirk of the original starship Enterprise
could see some of today's phones, he would feel like a total fool
with his gigantamundo communicator. Sure, it did some cool stuff
and last I checked the subspace communication band wasn't included
in any current service plan, but by and large this is a clear
case of reality far exceeding anything sci-fi writers of the 1960s
could even dream of.
Take the brand
spanking new Samsung VM-A680 fliphone, for example. The thing
is absolutely tiny, just 3.3 by 1.8 inches, which means it makes
my Sony Ericsson T616 look like a giant brick. And I thought that
was tiny. But since it's a fliphone and the T616 isn't, the speaker
is actually by your ear and the microphone in front of your mouth
(a big advantage of fliphones). So what, you say. You've seen
one fliphone you've seen them all. Not quite. Apart from being
smaller and lighter (3.4 ounces) than pretty much anything else
on the market, the A680 is full of tricks. It has, for example,
not one but two color LCD displays. A small one sits outside and
tells you what time and date it is, and there are a bunch of useful
status icons. The one inside is bigger and it's a beauty. You're
greeted with this wonderful National Geographics picture with
a butterfly flying around. That's actually a preview of coming
attractions as the A680 so happens to be not just a phone with
a camera, but an actual video phone.
Yes, this
is a video phone. You can not only take 640 x 480 VGA pictures
with the camera, but also 15-second video clips with sound. Pretty
darn amazing. And you can attach text and voice memos to pictures
and video clips. Then you can send them off, or even use them
as a screen saver. Those of us used to PDAs often have a hard
time figuring out the allure of those new, ultra-advanced phones.
Unlike PDAs, the phones come with hardly any techie data, so you
have no clue what processor they have, how much RAM, what video
subsystem, or how the file structure works. That's all incidental
with phones. They are meant to be used, in conjunction with a
service. Everything, in fact, centers around the service. While
you can use a PDA without any service at all, a phone is just
a useless little pile of circuits without its service, and the
more elaborate the service offerings are, the more you can do
with the phone. And the more the service will cost you. Which
is why PDAs cost a bundle whereas even the coolest phones are
usually all but given away.
And
don't expect the usual extras that come with a PDA. No CD-ROM
for all sorts of ancillary device and PC software. No cradle.
No cable to connect to the PC. Nada of that sort. A phone connects
to that great PC in the sky, and that's where the service sits.
You can get all sorts of accessories, but they are extra: A bigger
battery (4.4 talk hours and 288 hours standby instead of 3.2 and
216), car and desktop chargers, handsfree headsets, a gamepad
yo pop the phone in, a leather case, a holster. No PC cable.
Using the
A680 is a joy. The thing is so small that it slips into any pocket
and you barely know it's there. In fact, a couple of times I thought
I'd lost the little phone because my hands were looking for something
bigger. The color display is vibrant and eminently readable even
in direct sunlight. The buttons are large and nicely placed (though
it's easy to overshoot the four-way disc and press one of the
adjacent buttons when trying to navigate. The menu systems, likewise,
are simple and self-explanatory.
Due to their
abominable image quality, picture taking is just a novelty that
quickly wears off with most cameraphones. Not so with the A680.
Pictures are classes better than those of most other cameraphones
and they are large enough to be useful. And the video function
is a total winner. It's just too much fun to take those 15-second
clips, with rather good audio. Uploading pictures and videos couldn't
be simpler and it doesn't even take a lot of time. A 15-second
clip takes perhaps that long to upload. 
The
first time you do that the service will ask you to set up a password
(which is different from your account password). You can then
log into your account at picturemail.sprintpcs.com, peruse your
pictures and videos, annotate them, or send them to friends and
family. From what I can tell, emailed videos can't really be saved;
they are viewed in a browser. That's because, like all picture
phones, the A680 is primarily a phone that is tied to a service
rather than a computer peripheral. As a PDA and digital camera
guy I find myself wishing for a USB cable or dock, or at least
a SD card slot so that I can easily move the pictures and videos
from the A680 to a PC. But that is not what these phones are about.
It's really a different universe. And in that universe the A680
excels with its tiny size, great functionality, and cool features.
ö Kirk
Linsky
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