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 Samsung MM-A920The MM-A920 offers fast EV-DO service and comes ready for serious multimedia fun-with just a few quirks along the way. Stewart Wolpin 
 With the Sprint Power Vision-compatible MM-A920, Samsung proves that a cell phone does not require a Frank Geary-inspired industrial design to stand out from the crowd. Not only is the otherwise me-too-looking MM-A920 a fun flip phone, but its external media controls and TransFlash card slot make it a useful multimedia package as well. At $149 with a two-year contract, this cell is a far better value than the much ballyhooed RAZR.
The MM-A920 eschews the colorful palette of its kissing clamshell cousin, Verizon's SPH-a950, for an austere deep metallic navy blue. Out front is a bright 1.2-inch external LCD for displaying self portraits, monitoring music playback, and watching videos or TV. Below the screen is a four-way media navigation toggle that skips backward and forward. You'll also find List and Shuffle controls, with a center play/pause button. Oddly, the play/pause works only for music; hitting it during TV playback does nothing. Above the screen are the camera lens and flash, which doubles as a handy battery charge alert. On either side of the clamshell hinge are twin egg-shaped stereo speakers. Inside, the two-inch screen is bright and crisp. The keys of the U-shaped control array uncomfortably envelop the central menu navigation, which could result in accidental button presses. The shining white fluorescent-like key backlight is among the brightest we've seen. Sprint's EV-DO network was fast, although a hair slower on this phone than on the Sanyo Power Vision models. Access to the Web averaged less than 10 seconds; Web pages filled in less than 5; access to the Sprint media player and live Sprint TV channels loaded in less than 15; and the $2.50 music tracks from Sprint's music store required 25 to 50 seconds to download, depending on length. Once the phone formatted the TransFlash card, we easily copied tracks to it from our own music collection with an external memory card reader. You will suffer a range of modulation differences, however, among these varying sourced files, necessitating some extreme volume adjustments. We ran into a couple of weird glitches when viewing video with the phone closed. Every five minutes or so, the phone asks you to hit any key to continue viewing Sprint's live TV in order to preserve battery life. Hitting a key on the front merely muted the sound. Nothing we tried, including opening up the phone to watch, brought the audio back. To start playing music, you have to open the phone even though a List option is on the front. You can pause, but not stop, music from the outside; we had to open the phone to end music playback. We also could not master the "Press volume and camera" keyguard unlock combo. The MM-A920 has volume to spare for all purposes through the stereo speakers (conversations, ringtones, music and video playback, and voice calls). We especially liked the bundled stereo earphones, which were surprisingly good for music playback. Cell connections were crisp and clear through both the headset and the phone's earpiece with no noticeable Sprint echo, but we did hear some warble on cell-to-cell calls. Too bad the MM-A920 offers only three hours of talk time, which will be further impacted by multimedia use. These shortcomings are mere quibbles compared with the MM-A920's many strengths. It's the best of Sprint's Power Vision phone lineup yet. Compare Prices | Samsung MM-A920 Specifications
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