As noted earlier, much of the functionality of the phone is controlled by the physical keys on the front, top, and sides of the phone. The Main Menu, as shown in Figure 9, consists of a commonplace screen of icons.
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Figure 9: The main menu.
In addition to the Quick Access menu, this phone has the Samsung TouchWiz interface that gives you widgets that you can move around the screen. The TouchWiz is accessed from the phones main background screen. It is hidden until you place your finger on the small tab on the left side of the screen and drag it to the right. The TouchWiz screen is shown in Figure 10. You can drag any icon from the TouchWiz bar to the main screen. It is a great idea, but unfortunately it is not terribly useful in its current state. First, the icons expand into small widgets when you drag them to the main screen. While this is a great idea, two or three widgets fill up the whole screen, making it impossible to put as many widgets as you might like on the main screen. Also, icons on the TouchWiz bar did not include many that we would have liked to see and you can’t customize or add widgets. Perhaps, Samsung will add more functionality and customizability in the future.
The Eternity has a few features not found in many other phones. First, the telephone-type keypad in the vertical mode changes to a QWERTY keypad when in landscape mode. There is also handwriting recognition available. So if you take the time to learn it, you can actually print the letters with your fingers. There is a dedicated screen of punctuation keys as well as a screen of emoticoms. It is easy to deactivate the predictive text and also easy to change to French and Spanish menus.
The Eternity is really a not a smart phone, strictly speaking, in that it does not have an operating system like the iPhone or the G1 or the Blackberry. Instead, it relies on the AT&T services, which make it strong in the multi-media area. It has the Cingular Video, AT&T Navigator service, and the AT&T music player. Most of these are useful, but not overly impressive. For instance, the music player is easy to use, but has no advanced features. With an optional microSD card you can add quite a bit of music, but you have to manage it yourself.
Also, in many cases, you must pay AT&T extra fees for additional services. For instance, the Eternity has AT&T Mobile TV service. If you subscribe to the service at an additional cost, and if you live in one of the large cities that currently has the service, you will find that the television picture is wonderful. The Eternity also does Pandora Internet radio and XM radio, but each requires their own additional monthly subscription.
Email will work on the Eternity only if you use certain email services. It supports AOL, AIM, Windows Live Hotmail, AT&T Yahoo!, Bell South, Comcast, EarthLink, Juno, MindSpring, and NetZero. While this covers a large number of people, business users and those who use other services like Gmail will not find this phone useful.
The Eternity has the usual address book, calendar, calculator, notepad, task list, alarm clock, world clock, timer, stopwatch, and currency and unit converter. It cannot, however, sync with Outlook. The Instant Messaging works well, but you are limited to AOL, MSN or Yahoo. The Bluetooth has a stereo profile that works quite well. It also has a voice recorder, but unfortunately has no voice calling.
Surfing the Internet on the Eternity is an okay experience, but not all web pages are rendered properly. You can zoom in and out using the volume control, but this is not as easy as it is on some other phones.
