AT&T Samsung Sync (SGH-A707) - A poor man's iPhone

Okay, Okay I own a sync, and I'm a "loyal" AT&T wireless customer, now before you get all bent out of shape yes I work for the cable company. To a certain extent that makes me a hypocrite but because I am a AT&T wireless customer, that doesn't make me less of a cable man. First and foremost, the thing you have to understand is originally i subscribed to the service back when It was Cingular. Then AT&T came out and bought Cingular... well.. something like that; but at any rate it doesn't matter much to me cause the service works and I don't have to think about it.... and that's fine for me.

ehhem, with that said we can get down to brass tacks... I LOVE MY NEW PHONE! First off it's red, yeah i know it shouldn't matter but I haven't had a new phone in like FOREVER! so that being said it's great that finally I get a new phone. But that's not why your here I'm guessing you want to know a little bit about the phone before you buy one. Well first off; it's dirt cheep right now when you sign a contract... i picked mine up for $20.00 with a contract from AT&T, upgrade rate online deal... it was a steal (i thought) till i saw it at wall mart for free with a contract... sigh. Well all of that aside it's a nice little phone; that gets even better when you get yourself set up with Blue Tooth and a MicroSD card.

Everything I've read about this phone says that if you have head phones plugged into it it becomes bulky and the port cover is venerable; easily solved by investing in a set of blue tooth headphones; which the phone supports. I think this phone was originally conceived to take advantage of bluetooth; and it's highly miss rated by the community as bluetooth is not as hyped of a feature for phones. Because the phone supports so many bluetooth features you don't need to use the io port for anything but plugging in the power to charge the thing. Another drawback that's de-bunked by blue tooth is the SD port being fragile and hard to operate... both of these statements are true; however you can copy things to and from the SD card over Bluetooth as well as through the cable with no trouble. This eliminates the need to remove the SD card from the phone at all. I purchased a USB Bluetooth key for 20 at walmart, also the SD card was bought there but i don't remember how much that was... it was cheep though.

Video playback is tolerable and SUPER (TM) makes excellent quality files from most media formats; making watching video on the phone very easy to accomplish and low cost. The phone supports 3GP and MP4 container types. Limited to only Narrow Band AMR audio codec, but allowing mpeg4 Visual codec, as well as standard H.263 video (of the two the phone uses Mpeg4). I have successfully viewed videos up to 320x240 at 15 FPS with a Fixed bit rate of 350Kbps. the audio is monual 8000Hz 13Kbps (even though the unit has 2ch speakers). Minimal blockyness was seen on animated clips at this resolution but i haven't tried anything live action. Serial TV episodes (around 29-35 minutes) end up being around 54 MB. Recommended to accomplish this task is SUPER at a bare minimum but you may have to adjust the aspect of the Video in virtual dub so that video doesn't look so stretched out. One minor annoyance is the video playback bar stays peasant on the screen during playback. Long movies might be cumbersome to watch from the middle as there is no playback support for encoded chapters.

Audio playback supports (at least) WMA, and MP3. The phone Records in AMR format and play's it back. The unit was bought more or less as a video player so i don't know much more than this. it seams to play whatever I through at it in these 3 formats however.

The phone has quite Decent Internet Access, as I don't use it much, I have little to say about it. It supports bidirectional IM and that's all i need it for. Phone has 3G support so those of you buying the phone for streaming video or audio will be pleased as punch. It has built in SongID, from what I can tell from the 3 day trial it seams to work well.

The phone book is useful and intuitive, it integrates with the IM client to tell you if contacts are on line or not at a glance. I haven't tried integration with a calendar or outlook.

Over all The phone dose what I need it to. I couldn't be more happy with it, I hope this review sheds some light on a well thought out purchase. but feel free to leave comments here if you don't understand something or need additional information. I will gladly try to accommodate.

Fun with CCE or one of the things less fun than shooting yourself in the face.

This is just a quick slap up here, i've started to work with the MPEG output generated by my DVD player.... I am currently working on a project to convert some off air episodes to DVD (yeah i know i just recored them to DVD), with subtitles, and chapters... the easy part is pulling apart the commercials but when it comes to taking CCE (closed captions) thats where the fun begins. I have tools for riping them right out of the MPEG output generated by dvddcrypter... but; then i have to cut out the commercials leavening the subtitles badly out of sync... what's a boy to do? well currently i am trying a method involving a frame server and subrip. I want to eventually write a little app to cut the subtitles from one of the various output types that comskip generates; but as far as i can tell that's going to be a pain in the ass as well. well here's hopeing :)