We report on the development of a freezing phase scheme for complete-field characterization and adaptive coherent control with a femtosecond pulse shaper. The operational principle is based on a concept that the highest peak intensity will correspond to a frozen phase state of all spectral components involved in a coherent optical pulse. Our experimental and theoretical results reveal this new scheme to be fast and immune to the noise and laser power fluctuation. The freezing phase method has been used to investigate three types of semiconductor saturable absorber Bragg reflector (SBR). The optical pulses reflected from the SBR can be distorted in the spectral phase by a minor structural change of the SBR devices and can be clearly resolved with our method. The technique is useful for a variety of applications that require complete-field characterization and adaptive coherent control on the same setup.