Samsung Eternity Cell Phone Review

The Hardware

The Eternity has a smooth candy bar design. The phone is encased in an attractive glossy black plastic. The chrome metallic surround give the phone a substantial look. At 4.3 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches (11 x 5.6 x 1.3 cm), the Eternity is slightly smaller than the iPhone. At 3.9 oz (110 g), it is also lighter than the iPhone.

Although only slightly smaller and lighter than many others, the Eternity is an excellent size. It feels a lot lighter in your pocket and fits quite comfortable in the hand. The Eternity’s 3.2” touch screen has a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels and 262k colors. It is clear and crisp and like many other phones of this type will rotate automatically when turned on its side to a landscape position.

The Eternity has a built-in light sensor that adjusts the brightness of the screen based on the amount of ambient light coming in. The screen was viewable in all light situations, even direct sunlight. This automatic adjustment is an excellent feature. In fact, it works so well that it may not even be noticed, but it adds to the functionality of the phone.

The touch screen is very responsive and emits a vibration to give a tactile confirmation that your input was received. Another nice feature.

As seen in Figure 3, there are 3 buttons below the vertical touch screen. The Talk/Send key allows you to make or answer a call and to access your call history. Press and hold this key to access voicemail not to add a new contact as stated in the interactive tutorial. The Back key goes back to the previous menu, screen, or webpage. The Power/end key – ends a call. It also returns the phone to the main menu. You can hold this key for three seconds to turn the phone off. You can also double press it to get to the background screen.

Figure 3: The Eternity has three main keys.

On the top of the phone is a hold button, as seen in Figure 4. This key is used to lock and unlock the touch screen. It is easier to use than the iPhone method of sliding your finger across the phone to unlock it because you can unlock the phone without having to look at the screen. It is easier to press a button than to put your finger on a certain spot on the screen when you are in a hurry.

Figure 4: The top of the Eternity.

The left side of the phone, as shown in Figure 5, has a volume key for ringer volume or voice volume during a call. When a call is coming in pressing this key mutes the ringtone, which is a useful feature. In Figure 5 you also see the interface connector that lets you connect a charger or other optional accessories.  Samsung uses its own proprietary port for this connection.

Figure 5: The left side of the phone.

The other side of the phone has a dedicated camera key that allows you to snap a picture quickly. The 3-megapixel camera has some nice options including continuous shooting, panorama, smile shot, mosaic, and frame. It also takes videos. The camcorder options include white balance adjustments and presets for daylight, incandescent light, fluorescent lighting, and cloudy day. You can change the quality of photo as well as settings such as brightness. The camera has a timer but lacks a flash. Pictures are useable, but not exceptional.

Above that camera key is the Quick Access Key that launches a mini menu that controls some of the phone main functions, as shown in Figure 7. The choices on the Quick Access menu are: Call, Music Player, Main Menu, MediaNet (Internet), Messaging, and Back. After using the phone for awhile, we really wished that we were able to customize this menu, but we could not. There is a standard earphone jack at the top of this side of the phone.

Figure 6: The right side of the phone.

 Figure 7: The Quick Access menu.

The back of the phone sports the camera, as shown in Figure 8. The back slides off very easily to allow access to the battery, SIM card, and microSD slot. In fact, the back slid off so easily that we worried that it would open inadvertently. However, in several weeks of testing, the back stayed in place with no problem. One thing to note is that the battery must be removed to insert or remove the SIM card and/or the SD card. This is not explicitly explained in the instructions. Also it is a great inconvenience if you like to transfer music and/or photos to your computer using the SD card.

Figure 8: The back of the Eternity.

The call quality of outgoing audio was excellent, however, occasionally incoming audio was very slightly garbled. We could not pinpoint whether this was caused by the people on the other end, poor connectivity, or the hardware itself. However, this happened only rarely. The sound quality of the speaker phone was adequate. Samsung says that the phone gives 5 hours of talk time. We felt that we got even more than that when using the slower AT&T Edge network, but got less when using the faster 3G network. The Eternity has a higher-capacity battery than the Samsung Behold, 1300 mAh vs. 1000 mAh, so battery life was good. This was, however, in part because the phone has no Wi-Fi connectivity, which is a feature that we would have liked to see included.