Or the VX 9800



Samsung SCH-a970 Review

The discerning gadget-lover will love the a970's brilliant 262K-color LCD screen and use it to view all the action at their fingertips. Customers can shoot videos, personalize their FLIX Messages with text or save personal videos and pictures as their phone's wallpaper. The a970 offers camera-happy Verizon Wireless customers the flexibility to either save their user-generated photos or videos using the phone's internal memory or store them on a removable TransFlash(TM) memory card.

It's all work and all play with the a970's built-in MP3 player that enables customers to take their favorite music on the road when they use their removable TransFlash memory card (sold separately) to load music from their computer directly onto their new a970. Opening up a whole new avenue for listening and managing music on wireless phones, music fans can select, change or delete individual songs or create their own playlists on the memory card -- each card can store a bunch of tunes to keep customers moving for hours.

With the a970's VoiceMode(TM) speech-to-text dictation technology, customers can give their thumbs a rest by speaking instead of typing their TXT Messages. This technology adapts to the user's voice and allows consumers to speak text messages directly into the handset. In addition, advanced speech recognition technology from VoiceSignal(TM) allows for one-step voice commands that make voice-enabled dialing and TXT Messaging a breeze. Even checking the phone's battery life or signal strength is as simple as giving one-step verbal commands to the phone.

Talk time: 210 minutes
Standby time: 330 hours
Size: 3.7H x 1.84W x 1.0D inches
Weight: 5.07 oz

Basic Features

All Digital Phone
2.0 Mega Pixel Digital Camera with Flash
Color Screen
Speakerphone
Speech to Text capable
Voice Dialing
TTY Compatible
Bluetooth Capable
Connect with Bluetooth (using certain profiles)*
Meets FCC SAR limit. Manufacturer's highest FCC reported SAR 1.45 at ear, 1.03 on body. Actual SAR may vary.

LG VX9800


At first glance, it appears to be merely a chubby, businesslike, candy bar-style phone (4.6 by 2 by 1 inches, 5.2 oz), with well-spaced keys and a very sharp 160-by-128 pixel color screen, but the VX9800 is something of a quick-change artist. Flip it open horizontally and you see a very usable thumb keyboard and dual stereo speakers flanking a downright gorgeous 320-by-256 pixel color internal screen. With its wide range of movement, the phone's hinge allows the two halves of the device to lie flat for the best possible two-handed messaging, or into a laptop-like position for sitting on a desk.

As a phone, the VX9800 does pretty well; reception quality fell between the LG VX8000's good and the Motorola E815' excellent. During testing, the VX9800 would occasionally connect when the VX8000 couldn't. Sound through the earpiece and through both a Logitech and Plantronics Bluetooth headset was loud enough, if a touch blustery, and transmission quality was excellent—our voice always sounded very sharp on the other end. The speakerphone activates by flipping the phone open and is good enough for indoor or car use, though it doesn't work with the phone closed. Speaker-independent voice commands, which can be activated from a Bluetooth headset or by pressing a button on the phone, worked like a charm, and battery life, at 5 hours and 31 minutes of continuous talk time, was excellent for a Verizon phone.

Although the QWERTY keyboard screams SMS and e-mail, the keyboard comes in handy even if you don't do much messaging. Unlike LG's F9100, the keyboard actually works in every phone application, including the address book.

The VX9800's 1.3-megapixel CCD camera is excellent, the best we've seen on a phone so far. Images are sharp and colors are true. We were pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the video-recording mode, as well, which takes 320-by-240 videos up to 15 seconds long at 13.75 frames per second. The camera also sort of works as a business-card scanner. The onboard application captures names and phone numbers on the card, but ignores addresses, company names, and Web sites, and doesn't save the image. Aside from that problem, this feature works reasonably well as long as the card's text is darker than the background. Syncing these names and numbers over to your PC requires using Verizon's $19.99 Wireless Sync software or third-party software such as Susteen's Datapilot; future releases of the freeware Bitpim may be able to do that too. Photos are stored in the phone's 64MB of RAM or on a mini-SD card.

Bluetooth usage is twofold; it works with headsets and as a means of connecting the phone to your laptop for use as a modem (hurrah!). Unfortunately, you can't use Bluetooth to transfer files to your PC. Instead you have to transfer pictures and videos onto the mini-SD card, which is also used to store MP3 files (although you can't use your own MP3s as ringtones).

Having Verizon's high-speed EV-DO network available to mobile professionals via their phone could potentially prove very popular. Verizon subscribers will no longer have to carry two devices (a phone for voice and a PC Card for laptop connectivity) to make dual use of the network; this phone will do it all. This is the first instance that a Verizon non-PDA phone has been equipped with Bluetooth for laptop connectivity with the intention of using the phone as a modem. Yes, other phones can be hacked to work as modems, but you're violating Verizon's terms of service to do so. Lest you Verizon subscribers find yourself getting overly excited, it takes some knowledge to get your laptop online with the VX9800—inexplicably, Verizon provides no instructions. Nonetheless, we were successful in getting our Dell and IBM laptops connected to the VX9800's Dial-Up Networking profile. That was as far as we got, though, because at press time Verizon wouldn't tell us when the dial-up networking service would become available or how much it would cost.

In a variety of ways, though, Verizon falls short of the mark at providing the corporate integration, additional software, and available content that would match the true potential of this otherwise excellent piece of hardware.

For instance, Verizon's Wireless Sync e-mail software is fine for personal POP3/IMAP e-mail use and lets you manage your calendar and contacts from the Web, but it doesn't connect directly to corporate servers, it doesn't support attachments, and it costs a hideous $19.99 a month. For Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes users to synch remotely, they must run a redirector program on a desktop machine that they must always keep powered on. Once they do, they'll get excellent integration between the phone's contact list and an Outlook or Web-based contact set, letting them sync over specific groups of contacts from Outlook (as long as they're running the redirector). The software also handles Outlook calendar data, but though Verizon advertises "push" e-mail, we couldn't get that feature to work. Fortunately for subscribers, Verizon says they'll make cheaper e-mail clients, such as Eudora2go available for this phone later this year. If you don't need Outlook access or contact syncing, Email Executive's $4.99/month goes down much easier than $19.99. (You can also get e-mail through WAP, but that's a truly miserable experience.)

Another disappointment here is the lack of a Web browser; all you get is a WAP browser. The SMS-based IM client supports AIM, MSN, and Yahoo!, but not all at once, and it has the usual problem we've noticed again and again; it only shows AIM buddies in the "Mobile Device" sub-group.

The beautiful 320-by-256 pixel screen and powerful Qualcomm MSM6550 chipset just beg to gobble up and play video, but Verizon's pathetic V CAST entertainment service continues to keep the carrier's phones starved for multimedia. The $15/month service brings you a thin gruel of short TV clips, some short clips of children's content, and, when we checked, 12 music videos and three movie trailers. Last we checked, there were more than three movies playing at our local multiplex, and The Daily Show is supposed to be more than four minutes long, isn't it?

Gaming on the VX9800 can be tricky, requiring you to configure your own controls to get the proper two-handed balance when the phone is open. Games run beautifully on it, though.

The MP3 player looks and sounds good, but it's inexplicably buried two levels down under the "Get It Now" menu. It only plays MP3s, not AAC or WMA files, but it does play high-quality MP3s recorded at 320 kbps.

Talk time: 250 minutes
Standby time: 199 hours
Size: 4.57H x 1.97W x 1.0D inches
Weight: 5.19 oz

Basic Features

All Digital Phone 
1.3 Megapixel Camera with Flash and Business Card Reader 
Bluetooth Capable* 
QWERTY Keyboard 
V CAST Capable 
Email via Wireless Sync 
Embedded MP3 Player 
Color Screen 
Speakerphone 
Text to Speech (English) 
Voice Dialing 
MiniSD External Memory Port 
TTY Compatible 
Hearing Aid Compatibility = M3


PLEASE HELP ME DECIDE!