Samsung's summer of sequel continues with the Samsung Flight II, a successor to the Samsung Flight messaging phone from last year. Like the original, the Flight II has a touch screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard; however, this time the keyboard slides out horizontally instead of vertically. Aside from that, the phone's features remain mostly the same as its predecessor--a 2.0-megapixel camera, GPS, a media player, and 3G supports--though it has a few extras like an HTML Web browser and social media apps. The Samsung Flight II is available for $49 with a new two-year service agreement with AT&T.
While the Samsung Flight looked distinctive with its rather broad footprint and vertical QWERTY keyboard, the Flight II is absolutely not unique. Measuring 4.4 inches long by 2.1 inches wide by 0.5 inch thick, the Flight II looks similar to other slender sliders we've seen from Samsung--the Seek and the Messager Touch spring to mind. We can't help but feel the design is rather uninteresting as a result, but we admit it does have a nice feel in the hand because of its bowed corners and oval shape.
The Flight II has a 2.8-inch touch screen, which makes it a hair bigger than the one on the Flight. Its display looks vivacious and colorful with crisp graphics and text; in fact, it looks much brighter and sharper than the display on the Eternity II. You can adjust the font type, the brightness, the backlight time, and the greeting message on the home screen. You can also tailor the menu layout as well as add and remove apps from the list.
Like a lot of Samsung's touch-screen characteristic phones, you can customize the Flight II with up to three home screens. Samsung dedicate one home screen to Favorite contacts, while you can modify the other two with shortcuts and widgets from the TouchWiz tray on the left. A few of the more attractive widgets are the ones for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Yahoo Search.
At the bottom row of the home screen are shortcuts to the phone dialer, the contacts list, and the main menu. The menu is alienated into dissimilar pages, which you have to navigate by swiping across the screen. On the main menu, the bottom row shortcuts change to the phone dialer, the contacts list, and a new text message.
The touch screen was receptive, and we're glad to see that it has a capacitive display instead of the more common resistive option. You can add vibration feedback if you want, and you can adjust its intensity. While we liked the touch screen's receptiveness, and the overall performance of the phone blemished it significantly. There was often a delay when swiping home screens, and when opening and closing the TouchWiz tray. Launching apps took a few more seconds than it should as well.
Features:
The Flight II has a generous 2,000-entry phone book with room in each entry for five phone numbers, an e-mail address, a Web URL, a nickname, a company and job title, a birthday, and notes. You can also add the contacts to caller groups and associate them with photos, vibration patterns, and one of 15 polyphonic ring tones. You can also use your own MP3s as ringtones if you like. The Flight II comes with AT&T's Address Book service that lets you store your contacts in the cloud as a backup.
As the phone is a messaging device, we're happy to see text and multimedia messaging, instant messaging, and AT&T's mobile e-mail. The latter has a restricted, clunky Web-based interface that lets you access POP3 e-mail services like Gmail, AT&T Mail, Hotmail, and others, but it takes too long to launch and load. The Flight II also includes a few social networking apps like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, that offers quicker access to their status update page. If you don't want the individual app, there's an AT&T Social Net app that combines them all into one interface with different tabs. The app has an RSS reader in it as well, though you're limited to the built-in news feeds.
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