What I like: Nice design; colorful touchscreen.
What I don't like: Yet another touchscreen device; reception spotty at times; battery life somewhat less than desirable.
Though it could be viewed as another touchscreen feature phone from Samsung and AT&T, the Mythic (and TouchWiz 2.0) improves upon other devices on the market. Complete with tabs and rearrangeable menus, the Mythic offers a good level of customization. Like past iterations of TouchWiz, the widget bar can be found on the left, and widgets can be placed on the desktop. The device offers a 3.3-inch resistive touchscreen with 262,000 colors.
The on-screen keyboard that ships with the Mythic can be used in portrait or landscape mode, and I came out with a mixed impression of it. The touchscreen is resistive, so it requires a certain level of pressure to use effectively. Though the device showed a bit of lag when migrating from menu to menu (or while typing), it's not a deal breaker.
The Samsung Mythic sports a 3.2-megapixel camera, and in my testing, image quality was good (see above). It offers a self-timer, flash, auto focus, three quality settings, five color effects, six scene presets plus six shooting modes, five white balance presets, three exposure meters, macro focus, and three shutter sounds, along with a silent option.
I've been testing the Mythic in the Charlotte area, and call quality is decent. Like other phones I've tested in the past, the traditional "bar" metric doesn't apply in this situation (while the Mythic had zero "bars," the Bold 9700 had two). Despite that, when testing in an AT&T fringe area, the phone did drop a few calls. The speakerphone, on the other hand, worked well - when testing in a busy store, my callers could hear me well. I connected my Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset to the Mythic without a problem, and Bluetooth calling was great.
The Mythic offers 3G connectivity, and as such, I was pleased with data speeds. The full PhoneDog homepage loaded in 24 seconds, and other data-intensive tasks like WikiMobile and My-Cast Weather loaded well throughout the testing. The Mythic offers features such as AT&T TV, AT&T Social Net, AT&T Music, and e-mail functionality. The battery life was on par with devices in its class. I'm still working with battery numbers, but I can say this: it's not terrible for a feature phone. Estimated talk time is 3 hours, whereas standby time is just over 10 days. In real-time testing, the device lasted just over a day. If you're going to be able to charge on a daily basis, you should be fine, but battery warriors should look elsewhere.
Check out the pictures below, view the unboxing, and stay tuned for my full review!
