By David Gewirtz
Unless you've been living under a rock, you're aware of the convergence between cellular phones and PDAs. Coming from the computer side, the PDA makers are adding phone features. Coming from the telecommunications industry, the phone makers have been adding PDA features. And everyone's adding digital camera features.
Given all these choices, what should you buy? Should you buy a PDA and a cell phone? Or a PDA-based smartphone, or a cellular phone with a pile of features? As you might imagine, there's no absolute answer for everyone, but we can help you make that choice.
Over the past few months, we've reviewed the newest and hottest smartphones: the Palm Treo 700w, the Sprint PPC-6700, and Verizon's XV6700 variation on the theme, and compared them all to the venerable Treo 650. This month, we'll be looking at a few new devices, starting with the Samsung A920 phone profiled in this article.
As Figure A shows, the A920 is slightly smaller than the Treo 650 and the PPC-6700, but not by as much as you might expect.
FIGURE A
The A920 is smaller than the smartphones. (click for larger image)
Inside the A920
Let's be clear. The A920 is a phone first, and a gadget-lover's dream second. It is, however, a heck of a phone. It's got two displays. Inside, there's a 176x220 pixel, 262K TFT color LCD. On the outside, there's a 128x96 status display, capable of displaying 16-bit color images. The internal display is about half the resolution of the PDA phones we profiled, but it's still got more pixels than the original Palm PDAs.
Sprint's press releases claim the phone is compatible with its higher-speed EV-DO network. And while there's some streaming video available (more on that later), we found most network access with the 920 to be far slower than when using either the Treo 700w or the PPC-6700. In fact, were we not to have read the specs, we wouldn't have been able to verify EV-DO performance on the phone itself.
The phone is considered a multimedia phone, meaning it's got the ability to play MP3s, videos, and bad 1980s video games. Seriously. The phone comes with Ms. Pacman and a horrid cell phone interpretation of the 2 Fast 2 Furious movie in cell phone form. A PSP, this ain't.
The device has a slot for microSD cards (what Sprint calls TransFLASH). These cards are tiny, as you can see in Figure B.
