Samsung MM-A900 has obviously been modeled after Motorola RAZR, with an effort to go one notch higher. Like the latter, it comes in a metal casing with a slim profile and has a flat keyboard with comfortably large buttons. Only, its thickness at 0.6 inches and weight at 3.9 ounces are a bit more than those of Motorola RAZR (0.5 inches and 3.4 ounces respectively), and the look a little more rectangular.
One likeable feature in Samsung MM-A900 is the variety of things you can do on it with the flip closed. You can use the speakerphone, play videos on the bright 96 by 96 outer screen, and operate the music player with the pause, rewind and fast-forward buttons. And as you open it, you come across a beautiful 320 by 240 inner screen displaying menu items with clear captions. Buttons, as already mentioned are big and comfortable to use.
In our tests, we found excellent reception quality in this phone. However, though the sound was loud, voice appeared somewhat scratchy as compared to our gold standard in Sprint phones category, Sanyo MM-9000. In fact, sometimes it appeared as if the people speaking on it had caught a cold. The battery life too isn’t great – our tests showed it to be just three hour forty five minutes of talk time.
Samsung’s much hyped noise-cutting technology didn’t work in this phone when we tested it on the street. It worked only when we used it inside a small room amidst loud music. The music was reduced to a mumble and the voice quality was unaffected.
Samsung MM-A900 offers the superb voice dialing and the voice mode speech-to-text system of Voice Signal. The system works with all the three – wired headset, Bluetooth headset, and the built-in mic. Bluetooth headsets of both Plantronics and Logitech connected to it without any trouble. File transfers over the USB cable using Bluetooth too worked with both PC and Mac. However, we faced some trouble while attempting it on our PC. First, the name of the phone itself didn’t show up, and then the pairing had to be initiated several times before it could work.
Samsung MM-A900 works excellently as a music player. The built-in speakers do tend to clip at top volumes, but using a headset you can enjoy music at its best. Songs can be downloaded from the Sprint’s online music store or MP3 or M4A/AAC format music can be uploaded from your PC on this phone. Using a text editor, you can even create playlists on your PC with Sprint’s music player. However, a memory of 50 MB is just not enough for a music phone and it has no removable memory – a major flaw of the phone.

Sprint’s music player even lets you design playlists on your PC using a text editor.

The 1.3 MP camera of the phone works excellently. We took photos real fast and found them to be admirably sharp and saturated. However, this phone too doesn’t overcome the common problem of camera phones – the background that tends to be blue in simulated daylight shots. In camcorder mode, it takes an unlimited length of the usual thumbnail sized 176 by 144 videos at 15 frames per second.
Samsung MM-A900 also did a good job as a modem on Sprint’s EV-DO network. With Sprint’s connection manager, which comes free, and with Samsung MM-A900 connected through the USB, we were able to get download speeds of 336 to 802 kbps – at par with dedicated laptop connection cards.
Samsung MM-A900 offers all the features of Sprint Power Vision though in a much smaller package as compared to Sanyo MM-9000 or even Samsung MM-A940. The video player in default appears as a very small window but can be expanded to take over almost the whole screen. JBenchmark test Java performance promises an absorbing game experience. If only it would allow syncing contacts and calendar from a PC, however that remains a wish list in almost all Samsung phones.
Yet, Samsung MM-A900 is a good choice for those who want Sprint Power Vision’s services in a high fashion phone. In fact, it could well have been our Editor’s Choice but for the lack of an expandable memory.