Samsung Mythic brings TouchWiz and Mobile TV together

AT&T releases an upscale Solstice with MediaFLO TV in tow. Is Mobile TV making a magical comeback? Find out in our hands-on look at the Samsung Mythic.

The Samsung Mythic on AT&T has a much more shapely and classy feel than the decidedly mid-range Samsung Solstice that we reviewed this summer. It’s also got a tweaked feature set and a more polished version of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface on board. We’ve been hard on TouchWiz phones in the past, most recently lamenting the interface on the Samsung Behold II and the Samsung Omnia 2, both smartphones, of the Google Android and Windows Mobile variety, respectively. It does offer a lot of improvements for not-so-smartphone feature phones though. If you don’t want a deep, complicated system and would rather just focus on a few solid, basic features, the Samsung Mythic is actually a quite likeable touchscreen phone, though it’s still got some issues.

The Good

The Samsung Mythic ups the ante on the decidedly cheaper (now free after rebate) Samsung Solstice, though we still wouldn’t call this a smartphone. But the Mythic uses a greatly improved Web browser based on Webkit, the same browsing engine behind the best smartphone Web browsers. It isn’t nearly as perfect as it should be, and it kind of mangled our homepage, but it was capable of rendering the New York Times in full desktop mode. In fact, there seem to be two different Web browsers on the device, a Samsung browser and an ATT.net browser, with two different interfaces. But both worked fairly well, so long as you disable mobile browsing modes. Both browsers had interesting navigation tools, as well. The ATT.net browser used accelerated scrolling, where the page moves quickly under your finger, and this helped with long pages. Samsung’s browser used a gesture-based, one-finger zoom. Too bad the two couldn’t meet in the middle.

You can skip the Web browser for some basic social networking tasks, as the phone comes with AT&T’s surprisingly useful Social Net app. Social Net basically delivers your news feeds and recent updates from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and your RSS feeds. You can view these separately, or in a split window that you can cycle through. There’s little advanced functionality for these services, but it’s nice for simply reading updates without having to log into numerous separate sites. The app is a bit slow, and the buttons can be unresponsive sometimes, but it was a nice surprise to find a simple, useful app for an increasingly popular feature.

The display on the Samsung Mythic is a 3.3-inch LCD touchscreen. The phone doesn’t get Samsung’s increasingly ubiquitous OLED technology, like we enjoyed so much on the Samsung Impression on AT&T, but it’s a fairly high resolution for a feature phone, at 640 by 360 pixels, and it looks very good. It failed at being perfectly responsive, but managed to come through at the most important times. For instance, the main menu screens and the TouchWIZ widgets can be a bit twitchy. They might not register your tap, or they might register a tap when you meant to slide your finger to see the next of the multiple homescreen panels. On the phone dialer, too, we had trouble with unresponsive software keys. But the QWERTY keyboard on the phone, available when you tilt the phone sideways into landscape mode, was much more responsive, and this is where social networkers and serious messaging fans will do most of their tapping, anyway. The screen was also surprisingly responsive in the photo viewer, so showing off pictures was smooth and easy.

Finally, we liked watching Mobile TV. It still isn’t as sharp and fluid as we’d always hoped for with MediaFlo’s service, but it’s far better than the streaming options you’ll find on AT&T’s Mobile Video service. Programming was also fun and current. The participating networks, including all the majors like CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox, tend to replay their prime time shows during the day on Mobile TV, so you can catch up on recently missed episodes during your commute. Plus, there are ESPN, MTV and Comedy Central channels all offering the best programming you’ll find on those networks. You have to put up with commercials, but the networks didn’t skimp on giving you the good stuff.

The Bad

Though you now get 3 TouchWIZ homescreen panels (and up to 5 main menu panels) to arrange your widgets, shortcuts and buttons, they still tend to look haphazardly arranged on screen, and it’s hard not to overlap. Plus, the whole system tend to be sluggish, whether its flicking from homescreen to screen or dragging and arranging widgets. Most of the time we simply opened up the main menu screen, which was a much more orderly, though somewhat dull, icon grid of menus across multiple pages. You can drag and rearrange icons, and you can even give your menu pages different custom labels. But keeping these icons organized was a chore thanks to the unresponsive touchscreen and the laggy interface.

There are some carrier-enforced clutter on this phone. Why offer the far inferior Mobile Video alongside (their icons are next to each other) MediaFLO’s Mobile TV service. It’s confusing, and when customers stumble into the low-quality section by accident, it makes the better service look bad. And why are there 2 browsers? Even if both of them are adequate, they have different bookmark archives, different interface designs and different gesture controls.

We were disappointed with the video player on this phone. Considering Mobile TV and Mobile Video were front and center among the features, we hoped for a more advanced video player, something approaching the DivX playing powerhouse on the Samsung Omnia 2. Instead, we got a player that couldn’t handle any but our most basic video files. Any resolution above QVGA, 320 by 240 pixels, would simply not play on the Samsung Mythic. VGA movies or strange size videos wouldn’t open at all. So, if you’re not paying AT&T monthly for your video content on this phone, you won’t be enjoying the experience.

Would we buy one?

We think the Samsung Mythic could find an audience in buyers looking for the features this phone does well. This would make a great device for commuters trying to kill time and keep in touch with your social network. The AT&T Social Net app is a simple way to keep up on status updates and news feeds. Typing on the software keybard was smooth for messaging fans, and though it doesn’t offer an advanced, smartphone messaging experience, the Mythic still makes it easy to stay in touch. The Mobile TV service is one of the best ways to watch TV on a phone, and the programming will keep even hardcore TV fans satisfied. Plus, the phone packs all the essential features, from music playback to a decent Web browser to GPS for turn-by-turn navigation.