The Samsung Eternity II SGH-A597 is the successor for the two-years-ago-released Samsung Eternety, and it serves for a complete fun station, all at the reach of your fingertips. It features a 3.0 inch touchscreen, 2.0 MP camera capable of video recording, 512 MB of internal memory as well as expandable memory up to 32 GB, and a world of apps.

Carriers: Samsung	Retail Price: $
Manufactured by:	Contact Price: $

Pros: With it’s sleek design and light weight, along comes a full arsenal of features in this attractive handheld.

Cons: The screen seems to suffer from a bit of lag, and it is not 100% responsive, needing a firm touch to register the command.

Without a doubt, the Eternity II is intended to be an entry-level touchscreen phone. It has improved over its predecessor by overcoming the sturdy feel it had. The rounded corners make for a natural feel while being held and its average size and very light weight (3.2 oz) turn it into a device that will not bother when it is put away in a pocket. The Eternity II presents a 3.0 Inch TFT touchscreen with a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels that supports 262k colors with somewhat average and common display, however, it does offer some good viewing angles. The touchscreen itself is not as responsive as expected, and requires a solid and firm press to register the desired action. But, beyond the screen we have the actual set of buttons on the device. In the lower front, under the screen three buttons are shown, the send, back, and end keys, from left to right respectively. Volume keys with a chrome accent on the left side, USB port, along with lock/unlock, quick menu, and camera designated keys on the right side. All the physical buttons are fully responsive. Access to the SIM and micro sd card slots can by gained by removing the back cover.

It’s vibrant blue color and optical illusion design in the back, make the Eternity II very appealing and eye catching, probably towards a young market of consumers. The Eternity II’s interface pretty much resembles that of previous Samsung handhelds and it offers three homescreens and a host of widgets which is also similar to those of older handhelds. Navigating the interface is acceptable, but nothing impressive compared to other smartphone interfaces. All in all, not much to say about this TouchWiz interface. One cool thing about the Eternity II is the amount of contacts that can be saved to the device, up to 2000! Along come of course the associated picture and ringtone ID features for each individual contact. Usual for the AT&T touchscreen line up, the AT&T Navigator, AT&T Radio, AT&T Social Net, and AT&T Mobile Tv apps are available for the Eternity II. Messaging and PIM functions have not progressed but rather stayed the exact same. Messaging still presents three options, virtual keypad, landscape QWERTY keyboard, and handwriting recognition, while PIM function are found under the tools icon, and are basically the calendar, tip calculator, tasks app, and so forth. For some weird reason, Samsung decided to downgrade from the original 3.0 MP camera sponsored by the Eternety, to a 2.0 MP in the new Eternity II. Picture quality is average and video recording is poor. Well, not much more can be expected from a 2MP. Audio player did not improve either, faithful to the previous fully functional one. Video player is acceptable, as long as the resolution for the videos played stays with specified factory pixelation, do not expect to watch high resolution videos.

With its quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and tri-band UMTS (850/1900/2100 MHz), the Eternity II is a good option to surf the web. Running Opera Mini just like most of the other feature phones, and support for flash lite, there isn’t really much to complain about as far as web browsing goes, with relatively smooth scrolling after a slightly slow loading of a web page, the Eternity II seems to provide with a very fair performance.

With a talk time of 6hours and 45 minutes (which exceeds manufacturer’s rating of 5 hours) and many other features mentioned throughout the review, there is no denying that the Eternity II is a good phone over all. Considering it is a later version of an older Eternity, mostly directed to a younger crowd, and although it is not as crisp and as hight quality as other samsung phones, it still provides what is needed from a feature phone, and priced at $69 with a two-year-contract on AT&T, not a bad choice after all.