Samsung's Access is a basic way to tune into AT&T's Mobile TV and high-speed Internet. This handset sits in the shadow of the much more glamorous LG Vu and it is costly considering its other features, but it's worth a look if you want Mobile TV without all the frills of a high-end touch-screen device.

A wide, flat candy bar–style phone, the Access has a relatively large, high-resolution 320-by-240-pixel display. Below the screen are flat keys that I found relatively easy to press, though there isn't much separation between them. The phone weighs 3.5 ounces, and, at 4.49 by 2.28 by 0.47 inches (HWD), fits into a wide pocket. On the side are volume, camera, and application switching buttons, the last of which makes multitasking easy.

The quad-band GSM, dual-band HSDPA Access is a good voice phone. Phone reception was strong, and the handset did a good job of grabbing and holding onto 3G signal. Sound transmission is loud, but there's no in-ear feedback of your own voice. The speakerphone is on the quiet side. Background noise is easily picked up by both the handset and the speakerphone, so you may need to speak up in noisy situations. I was able to pair the phone with Plantronics 520 and 590 Bluetooth headsets without a problem; if you want to use a wired headset, you'll need to find one that fits Samsung's proprietary jack design. There's no voice dialing. The phone works with AT&T's Video Share service, which lets you beam live video to other AT&T subscribers with compatible phones.

The Access's flagship feature is AT&T's Mobile TV with ten channels of true mobile television from top networks, shown 24 hours a day. You trigger Mobile TV by pressing a button on the side of the phone. Surprisingly, although there's no pull-out antenna on the Access, its reception is almost as good as that of the LG Vu, which has a long, bendy antenna. As with the Vu, you can listen to your TV audio through the built-in speaker, a wired headset, or a Bluetooth headset. I got 6.5 hours of TV time on a single charge.

The Access comes with AT&T's lackluster mobile IM and e-mail clients, but there's some really good news here: On our test model, third-party Java programs were fully Internet-enabled, so you can run add-in browsers like Opera Mini, e-mail clients like Flurry, or anything else you find on the Web. The 190-MHz ARM9 processor did very well on our JBenchmark Java performance tests, performing better than the LG Vu on business and multimedia apps but not on games.

You may not need Opera Mini, however, because the Access's NetFront 4.3 HTML browser does a very good job of representing desktop Web pages (though you can't see much at a time on the small screen.) The phone can even handle H.264 streaming video links, such as those on YouTube Mobile.

If you'd rather use your own media, the Access syncs both music and video, including playlists, from Windows Media Player. The phone handled our 8GB SanDisk microSD card just fine, and also has 108MB of internal memory. I was able to play MP3, WMA (including protected WMA) and AAC files without a hitch through the built-in speaker and Bluetooth headphones. Video support is limited to 3GP and relatively small MP4 and WMV files.

We expected little from the Access's 1.3-megapixel, flashless camera and it delivered, taking reddish, relatively indistinct photos, underexposed in sunlight and blurry in low light. The video-camera mode, on the other hand, took surprisingly good 320-by-240 videos at 15 frames per second.

The Access is an HSDPA 3.6 high-speed device and worked well as a modem when hooked up to a Windows Vista PC with a USB cable; we got 1,244 kilobits per second down, an excellent speed. Oddly, the stellar network performance didn't help when I tried to watch AT&T's generally underwhelming Cellular Video clips deck, which perpetually stuttered and rebuffered. The problem was clearly with the deck, not the phone.

Ultimately, the Access is in a tough position in AT&T's lineup, with midrange feature phones that do almost everything the Access does for much less, most notably the Samsung SYNC and the Sony Ericsson Z750a. The Motorola Z9 our current Editors' Choice, swaps out the Access's MMobile TV for improved voice quality, a 2MP camera, and GPS, all of which will likely appeal to a broader group of consumers. And if you really want MMobile TV, it's hard to argue against the flash and pizzazz of LG's Vu, even though it is more expensive. There's nothing wrong with the Access, but in a crowded field, it's not our top choice.

Benchmark Test Results
Battery life: 4 hours 38 minutes
JBenchmark multimedia: 46
JBenchmark system: 81
JBenchmark business: 169
2D gaming: 250
3D gaming: 150

Compare the Samsung Access with several other mobile phones side by side.

Video
Watch the Samsung Access Video Review!

More cell phone reviews: