Mobile TV is beginning to feel doomed here in the U.S.—unlike overseas, where it thrives. That's not stopping AT&T, which is giving it another shot with the Samsung Mythic. Like several phones before it, the Mythic contains a broadcast TV tuner that picks up FLO TV service (in applicable coverage areas). It's also a rather nice touch-screen slab otherwise, with more than a passing resemblance to Samsung's good Instinct HD over on Sprint. At $199 with a two-year contract and after rebates, plus extra for mobile TV, the Mythic isn't cheap—but chances are you'll be very pleased with your purchase. We were pleased enough to name it our new Editors' Choice for a feature phone on AT&T.

Design and Call Quality
The Mythic measures 4.5 by 2.1 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.8 ounces—on the light side for a large slab, and especially impressive given the built-in TV tuner. The Mythic is pretty sharp looking, with a black front panel, a deep ruby-colored back cover with a wave pattern, and plenty of chrome accents all around. The 3.3-inch plastic resistive touch screen offers a sharp 360-by-640-pixel resolution. That beats the iPhone 3GS, the Instinct HD, and just about anything short of a Motorola Droid or Imagio on Verizon. The Mythic's screen isn't capacitive like those devices, though (with the exception of the Imagio, which is also resistive). Its panel offered just-average touch response that was slightly enhanced by haptic feedback.

As a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and tri-band HSDPA (850/1900/2100 MHz) device, the Mythic is a true world phone, albeit with no Wi-Fi. You can use the Mythic as a 3G laptop modem with the appropriate broadband plan, as well as use data and voice simultaneously. Call quality was good overall, with a touch of static in spots and one dropped call during the review period—typical for AT&T where I live. Reception was solid, and generally held onto a 3G signal longer than a nearby iPhone 3G did in rural areas. Calls sounded fine through a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. The speakerphone went pretty loud but sounded harsh. Battery life was good for 3G at 5 hours and 38 minutes of talk time.

User Interface, Messaging, and Mobile TV
The Mythic's UI is similar to the Instinct HD—once you get past the home screen, that is. The Mythic's home screen contains Samsung's TouchWiz interface. It lets you drag and drop widgets for common tasks on one of several, flickable home page panels, including shortcuts to the Facebook and MySpace WAP pages and the built-in music and mobile TV apps. Once you tap Menu, though, it looks remarkably Instinct-like, with scrolling menus and three pages of icons you can flick between with your finger. Tap the custom icon at the top right, and you can move individual icons around.

AT&T's standard messaging package is on board. You can hook into AOL, Yahoo, and Windows Live e-mail, plus some common ISPs with AT&T Mobile E-mail, but not Gmail. The instant messaging client hits Google Talk, AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo Messenger, and the Mythic supports AT&T Video Share. AT&T Navigator offers TeleNav-powered, voice-enabled turn-by-turn directions at $9.99 per month. The Opera-powered browser rendered HTML pages well, though it's no iPhone when it comes to scrolling and zooming.

Fortunately, AT&T cut the price of its broadcast Mobile TV service. The Basic package now costs $9.99 per month, which is more reasonable than the previous price of $14.99. That includes CBS Mobile, Fox Mobile, NBC 2GO, MSNBC, Comedy Central, ESPN Mobile TV, MTV, Nickelodeon, CNN Mobile, Sony Pictures, CNBC, FNC, and FLOTV. As expected, mobile TV looked sharp and smooth. It was easy to follow the movements of individual football players on ESPN, while talking heads in news programs looked natural, and audio was properly in sync. This was especially nice given the Mythic's lack of a pull-out TV tuner antenna. AT&T Cellular Video is on board if you don't pay the extra $10 for mobile TV, though it pales in comparison.

Other Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The Mythic contains a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack. There's a microSD slot underneath the battery cover; the card fits inside a fragile aluminum sleeve on a hinge, similar to the BlackBerry Curve series. This isn't ideal, as it can break off with time. My 16GB SanDisk card worked fine, and there's also 230MB of internal storage.

MP3 and AAC tracks sounded surprisingly full and clear over Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones. Album art displayed when available, and the music player's UI was simple to navigate. WMV and 3GP videos played very smoothly when blown up to full screen in landscape mode. It couldn't scale down a 720p video, but that's a minor issue. You can also buy music tracks over the air from Napster or eMusic.

My one major disappointment with the Mythic involved the camera. The 3.2-megapixel camera has an LED flash, image stabilization, and auto-focus. Test photos were sharp, but colors were so flat they were almost all shades of grey. Shutter speeds were reasonable at just under one second, and the auto-focus didn't slow it down much further. Saving each photo afterward took several seconds, however. Recorded videos looked smooth and well balanced. But resolution was poor at 320-by-240-pixels and 15 frames per second; many similarly priced handsets offer 640-by-480 recording these days, and Samsung's own Instinct HD bumps this to 1280-by-720.

You won't find much competition on AT&T when it comes to mobile TV. But plenty of other handsets are worthy of consideration. The LG Xenon, our previous Editors' Choice for AT&T feature phones, includes a horizontal slide-out QWERTY keyboard and solid media features in addition to touch. But its screen, interface, and overall styling lack panache compared to the Mythic. The Motorola Karma QA1 offers a vertical slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but it drops the touch screen and looks unusual. Although the iPhone 3G is a smartphone and requires a more expensive data plan, it's a good buy at $99 up front and offers access to Apple's enviable catalog of over 100,000 apps—plus best-in-class music and video sync.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 5 hours 38 minutes

Compare the Samsung Mythic SGH-a897 with several other mobile phones side by side.

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