Review: Samsung Flight II
The phone comes with all of the basics you'd expect to find on a messaging device, and I do mean basic. The phone uses a dated SMS app. While some AT&T quick messaging devices are getting threaded text messaging, which presents texts in a more conversational format like an IM chat, the Samsung Flight II was left out of the mix. Instead, you can see one message at a time, and only one side of the conversation. Also, picture messages I sent to the Flight II never came through.
The phone also has instant messaging and email capabilities. The instant messaging app is very simple, but it got the job done nicely. My instant message chats came through without a hitch. The phone supports AOL, Yahoo and Windows Live for instant messaging.
The email app works with POP and IMAP accounts, and it had no trouble setting up my account for me. The app was fairly basic, and very slow. Messages required multiple taps to select and view. The phone never alerted me to new messages in my email inbox.
The keyboard has a nice design, but some flaws made messaging and typing more difficult. The Flight II does a horrible job with capital letters. When you press the shift key, instead of simply capitalizing the next letter and moving back to lower case, it acts as a caps lock and capitalizes everything. Press the shift key again and you get sentence case, which capitalizes the first letter in a word. But if you use sentence case for the second letter in a word, that gets a capital, too. In other words, you have press the button three times to shift from capital letters back to lower case. This was especially a pain while entering passwords, as the phone often hides the tiny icon that tells you how it is handling letters. I almost always entered an incorrect password on my first couple of attempts.