Samsung SYNC SGH-A707
Phone Scoop Review
Dec 28, 2006 by Eric Lin
Our in depth review of Cingular's slimmest 3G phone yet. read review ›
User Reviews
Average Ratings
Still the Best
This phone is still simply the best phone I've ever owned. I've regular everyday phones, PDAs, Blackberry but in reality none of them can match this phone. I went for 2 wks w/o my laptop. I was able to access the internet (Netfront & Opera), paid my bills, play music while excercising or just relaxing, acess youtube, chat, make grocery lists, used it overseas with full coverage, wow with so much more.
I got my laptop back and I can tether it with better than average speed with so much more. Once again it's simply the best. Check it out if you haven't. You'll like the way it works
descent phone
This is a pretty good basic phone. I liked it when it came out, but now it's cool-factor has gone down significantly. One nice thing was it's camera, which takes very nice pictures for being 2 megapixels. One not so nice feature about it is during video recording, it will not save your video if the phone is closed on accident. This is rather irritating. It plays music pretty well, and with a memory card you can hold a lot of it. I did not like the inability to assign a tone to replace the sound made when a message is received. That bothered me. My dad's A707's front screen broke at work. Now it just displays a weird orange crack pattern. One thing that bothered me a lot about this phone is the crappy reception it gets. Cingular: Lowering the bar.
A Little Dissapointing
My previous phone was a Motorola v635- i loved that phone and still consider it a very good one; the only reason I looked for a new phone was because the v635 had older bulky styling. This is my second a707- the first one was replaced by AT&T due to an earpiece failure on my first phone. Have current phone for about a year.
Menus- Going from the simple motorola UI, it was confusing going to this Samsung. The menus are deep with many options and it often takes time getting to where you want.
Calls- call quality is good but my earpiece volume is VERY LOW. I can barely hear people when I'm outside. Also, about 10 times since i've had it, it had no service while showing me several bars. The speaker is average volume and average quality.
Messages- Saves like 500 of them, but theres no option (as far as i can tell) to auto- delete texts. When the inbox is full the phone tells you to delete some texts. Deleting many at a time takes a long time. Like 3-4 minutes to delete 100 texts.
Camera- This was the most dissapointing part of the phone for me. I took over 400 pictures with my v635 and I loved the candid shots. With the a707 the camera is VERY SLOW to take a pic. So, despite the 2mp resolution (a major factor in buying the phone)- literally 70% of day-time photos are blurry because it takes 2-3 seconds to snap a shot. With less light it's even worse. Also, it takes way too long for the camera app. to load. For these reasons, the camera function has become useless.
Horrible!
I've live in the same part of NC my whole life and I've been with at&t for over 4 years now and had never had as much trouble with dropped calls as I have had with this phone. If I call someone, it drops the call on an average of 3 times before I am actually able to have a conversation with them. And the strangest part is that it doesnt seem to have anything to do with signal, because when ever a call drops I still have all of my bars.
But on the other hand..
- really big, clear LCD screen
- good for texting due to large keypad
- loud ringer
- awesome mp3 player (but you have to buy a memory card first)
short and sweet
I'll cut to the chase about this one.
The Sync is an pretty cool phone. All the gadgets and gizmos that most people would probably want from a phone. Bright screen, loud ringers, nice keypad, can't find anything wrong with the phone minus one small little problem.
It has terrible, inconsistent reception!
And that is why you should not buy this phone, because the purpose of having a phone is to be able to talk to people.
I've never understood why phone manufacturers would make a phone that doesn't have good reception!
Bad Signal , Awesome Phone!
I love this phone very nice and durable. So, the only bad thing about it is the signal and it goes out for no reason. But, the phone is awesome.
Good phone but one major problem
I have had this phone for about a year and I am finally so fed up with it that I am getting a new one.
Overall this phone has nice features such as good picture quality, easy navigation, and awesome display.
However, this phone has a known problem with dropped calls. Here is what happened in my situation:
Bought a brand new phone and within 6 months, the phone would sporadically not receive incoming calls, make outgoing calls, or would cut off my calls. I live in an area with great reception (Orlando, FL) but still experienced these problems so I got a replacement. Had the same problems with the new one within 3 months and got another replacement. Within 1 month, started having the same issues with an additional problem of voice distortion on the calls I did get. To top all of this off, the last 2 phones would not read the memory card unless I manually pushed it in the slot further than where it fits in place.
While this problem doesn't affect all of the SYNC phones, it affected every one that I received and was not apparent until I had been using the phone for more than a few weeks. It is extremely frustrating to deal with and basically stripped the basic functions of the phone and left me with a PDA instead of a cell phone.
I love Samsung products but this is one I wish I had never purchased. My recommendation is to look at another model or face the possibility of cut off conversations and uselessness.
Unearth phone
good reception of the signal
2.0 megapixel camera for good
good sound
excellent screen
good variety of colors red, blue and black
3g
and a bit big for terminal would be my complaint
amazing phone fall in love
This is a grate phone i love it no words to describe this phone it is grate the camera the video no problems so far
Great phone, MEH mp3 player
Dislikes:
#1. loading time between mp3's. There's no prefetching so there's a big ugly gap between songs.
#2. Listing feature is HORRIBLE. It defaults to an alphabetical by artist list, listed in REVERSE ORDER OF SONGS. If you have an album by Amorphis, it lists track 14 "Light my Fire" and will then proceed to play the list IN REVERSE. It also displays all songs... 309 of them in my case--in one giant folder. You can list by album manually, and this comes to my next gripe. Every single time you update the songs, you have to redo the list database, which takes about three minutes. Why it can't parse the files while letting you select through the results is beyond me. (After it accepts the memory card, click the enter key and arrow to list-->album and watch the wait time.) This is simply bad software design. You can have the phone run a search algorithm in the background and shut it down when the user hits "play."
#3 No multitasking. When you get a text message, you have to hit the app-switch key and arrow over to messaging. But as soon as you do this, the song pauses. I can actually live with this, we're not talking about mega processors in these things, and as a programmer I can forgive a software solution to decrease processor load.
Likes: Everything else.
Conclusion: This is an "excellent phone," but there are PLENTY of "excellent phones" on the market, and the BIG selling point--being an mp3 player as well as a phone--gets a mediocre grade of a "C." Which consequently means the phone only earns 3 stars. (The lack of analog audio jack earns a neg star on EVERY phone.) So it's a 4 star-phone dinged again by lack of audio jack.
