It lacks a speakerphone, however, and isn't the most comfortable thing to hold up to your ear. But the huge battery makes for excellent talk time: 5 hours 11 minutes on our tests, or about 2 and a half hours' worth of talk time and 500 photos.
Samsung's noise-cancellation technology is a feature we like for the most part (though we've discovered that this is a contentious subject among the phone-geek elite on Internet bulletin boards). In our experience, it works wonders if you're talking from a moderately noisy area. But your voice gets choppy as the noise escalates and the phone tries to separate your words from the background.
Let's face it: Talking is practically a frill on this phone. The 2MP camera is the real reason to buy the MM-A800. We liked it from the start when we previewed our first few photos on the gorgeous, if rather reflective, 320-by-240 LCD screen. With a 2MP CCD and an autofocus lens, the MM-A800 blows away other camera phones, and it even held its own as a "real" camera. It also performed very well under low-light conditions. You can save pictures to the 32MB of internal memory or to a tiny included 32MB TransFlash card. (You can purchase TransFlash cards with capacities up to 256MB and use them to transfer the images to your PC.)
The MM-A800's camera worked so well, in fact, that we subjected it to the full range of tests we give to dedicated digital cameras. Compared with standalone cameras, daylight shots were a little underexposed, with some softness and color noise, but colors generally looked true. Horizontal and vertical resolutions were decent for a 2MP camera, and the shot-to-shot-time was acceptable, though the shutter lag was longer than you'd expect from a standalone camera. The camera's 1,632-by-1,224 images are so impressive that we're willing to overlook the run-of-the-mill "camcorder," which takes only postage stamp–size, 176-by-112 videos, and the difficulty in sending images (you have to leave the camera mode and navigate through several menus to do so). We had an easier time simply downloading our pics to a PC using the TransFlash card.
Using the built-in PictBridge software and USB cable, we plugged our phone into a Canon ink jet printer. We were able to print sharp 4-by-6-inch prints (8-by-10s proved grainy, which is what you'd expect from a 2MP camera).
The high-res camera also lets the phone act as a business-card scanner, and yes, it works—mostly. You hold the phone over a business card, snap a shot, then highlight the name, three phone numbers, and e-mail address using the cursor pad. We tried it on two dozen cards and it got most of them, though you need sharp eyesight to notice when a "4" gets misrecognized as a "1" in a phone number. Still, it was fun to use and could be addictive for those who don't like to type.
As with most phones, addresses are always saved to the phone book in internal memory and, despite the included scanner, there's no way to sync the phone's contacts with your PC. One way around this is to purchase a third-party program such as Susteen DataPilot ($ direct, .com). This program lets you upload, download, and edit the MM-A800's phone book (or those of other phones) on a PC, but it's not included with the phone.
The MM-A800 has VoiceSignal with VoiceMode, the speech-recognition software we first saw on Cingular's Samsung SGH-p207. Voice dialing here is almost perfect without training, and speech recognition for text messages was even better than on the SGH-p207, with around 90 percent success. As with the business cards, that means you'll still have to go back and correct errors, of course. You might end up using VoiceMode more than you think, because the EziTap predictive text system on this phone is clumsier and requires more keypresses than the more common T9 system found in most phones. (In fact, you've probably used it many times without knowing what it is: EziTap works by picking the most common word based on the keys you've already pressed.)
The built-in MP3 player supports both MP3 and AAC files off the TransFlash card, and you can play them through the internal speaker, though sound quality isn't great—you'll surely want to use headphones. This phone also reportedly streams TV-style video and plays 3D games. The hardware is certainly ready for these functions, since the phone is based on the same Qualcomm MSM6500 chipset that's in the LG VX80001, which handles video and games with aplomb. Sprint's slow CDMA 1X network, on the other hand, is not ready: It makes a pathetic, pixilated mockery of TV, and the 3D billiards game we downloaded ran at a crawl. Considering the MM-A800's excellent score on Java gaming benchmark tests, we think that this is more a sign of a poorly programmed game than a poky phone.
Like most combo devices, the MM-A800 is a jack-of-all-trades and doesn't do anything as well as devices dedicated to a particular purpose do. Its camera isn't quite as good as a 2MP digital camera, its MP3 player isn't an iPod, its voice quality doesn't quite match that of the best simple voice- and SMS-focused phones, and its business card scanner isn't the cream of the crop. But you know what? To the folks who will buy this phone—the bleeding-edge techs who use Sprint—none of that will matter.
View this side-by-side table to get an idea of how the somewhat similar Samsung SGH-p777, Sony Ericsson S710a, and Sprint MM-5600 by Sanyo; compare with the Sprint PCS Vision Multimedia Phone MM-A800 by Samsung.
Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 11 minutes
JBenchmark 3D HQ: 66
JBenchmark 2: 129
JBenchmark .1: 3257
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