Download AT&T Samsung Impression A877 drivers and manuals - no manuals, no drivers included with product.

My daughter bought a Samsung Impression A877 AT&T cell phone the other day. It's an interesting phone, and it looks like a high-quality mobile device (at least so far.)

She decided to connect it to her computer. She inserted the CD-ROM in the computer's CD-ROM drive and was greeted with a nice Flash-based menu which included links to install USB drivers and the 'friendly' PC Studio application. She clicked the link to install the software -- and was rewarded with a web browser opening up to visit the Samsung website in order to download the requested software. Same with the USB driver and documentation -- each resulted in a web browser directed to a Samsung web page to download the requested items.

Exploring the CD-ROM using Windows Explorer (configured to show all hidden and system files) the only files present were the .inf file and the 3.5MB menu program. No documentation, no drivers, no application.
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I'm going to assume, for the moment, that this is not a manufacturing error or other glitch -- that this was an intentional decision on someone's part.

Um... what if you don't have a broadband connection handy? I realize that some people think that everyone on the planet is connected to a fat broadband connection, but it just isn't so.

We downloaded the files from the web site (the PC Studio application download was 87MB... geez, what do they put in these applications, anyway?), but it's pretty clear to me that Samsung may have been under pressure to ship this product as quickly as possible.

Or is this something that other consumer product vendors are doing lately? I find that a bit hard to believe, but these days, anything is possible.

I wonder why they bothered putting the CD in the box? They could have put a sticker on the phone, with a short URI to the friendly Flash menu.