New Phone

Well, I've had the new phone up & running & working about a week now, so I might as well give my impressions of it, seeing as it took so much fucking hassle to get it!

Well, first bit I suppose is the touch screen. I've used the iPhone a bit before, and while it's maybe not quite as intuitive as that beastie, it's still pretty good. The icons are pretty big & easy to click, the fonts are pretty legible, you can flick the screen to scroll (and of you don't like that, the volume keys also let you scroll thru menus), and the screen is pretty legible even in bright(ish) light. Well, ok, we haven't had any scorching hot bright days, but it's been a bit sunny and I had no problems seeing the screen. this is apparenly an improvement on previous Samsungs - one of my friends had the Omnia and got rid of it 'cos the screen was terrible. The UI has a sidebar which you can put some of your most commonly used widgets/apps on for easy access, and then to make things even easier, you can drag the widgets to the "desktop" for even easier access. So, at the moment I'm one click away from writing a new message or reading my txts. One niggle with this is that you can't just put anything on the sidebar, just a limited subset that samsung seem to have decided you'll use the most. Is still handy tho.

One of the reasons I got the phone was the camera - is an 8 megapixel, so is 2Mp higher than my sony cybershot! Megapixel count tho is only really a way for camera makers to practice biggerdickism with their devices: at 8Mp I can print photo quality up to an A1 page, how many times am I going to do that? The picture quality is pretty good, about as good as you're going to see on a phone - the only better one may be the Sony Ericsson C905, but I didn't really like the look & feel of that one. I haven't done a huge amount of pic shooting yet but what I have done is pretty decent. The phone doesn't come with wi-fi but I figured I used the wi-fi maybe 2 dozen times tops on my last phone in the year and a bit I had it, so no great loss. the music player is decent enough, and plays most formats, and has a dolby-like option which reall puts a bit of "whoomph!" into your songs - I want to try this out with my Sennheuser headphones! The radio is pretty good too, and has a rather unusual feature that allows you to record off it, altho I haven't tried that yet. The video player on it is able to play DivX movies, I tried it and it works pretty well, and the sound quality is excellent too. Only problem tho is that all bar one of my movie collection on my laptop are XVid-encoded not DivX! The phone ships with the ususal other crap, alarm clock, calendar, calculator etc, and all are adequate enough, and for some reason they are selling it as a "gael fon", so it has an irish-english dictionary built in. Eh? :-P

And now onto the niggly little bits. One of the big selling points of the phone was apparenly that it has built-in GPS, but that's just a gimmick. All the reviews I read of the phone said that there were some built-in apps that took advantage of it, but it seems Vodafone in their wisdom took all them out on their version, so the only thing that uses it is the camera for geo-tagging pictures. I tried installing google maps, but even that seems to use base station triangulation rather than the GPS to find out where you are. In the phone settings you can get the GPS to get your location but it's fairly flakey, about 3 times in 4 it fails to find the satellites. So, if you're looking for a phone that has working & useful GPS system, don't get this one.

This is also the only touch-screen phone on the market that has an actual keypad as well, which slides out at the bottom of the screen. it seems tho that Samsung have fallen into the trap of all mobile phone manufacturers and put all the function keys wherever they want rather than in a commonly agreed place - space is on the # key, caps is on the *, punctuation marks/symbols are on the 1 which is normal enough, but t9 options are on the 0. The layout of the keypad means as well that the keys are out to the very edge of the phone, so if you're one-hand texting with your thumb, the space key is uncomfortably close to the base of your thumb, you're nearly stretching your thumb back to get to it. So, most of the time I just use the on-screen touch keypad not the physical one. Also, there's no actual delete key or any direction keys - delete is a soft-key on the touch-screen and to change the cursor position you tap on the screen where you want to go. You also can't select a word you already wrote to change the spelling, you have to delete the word and start again. so, if you type "he" and you wanted "if" instead, you can't just select it and use '0' to change the spelling, you have to delete it and go again. Having said that, the touch-screen typing is pretty fast, faster than I'd manage on my old phone - so long as you don't make a typo and have to go back and change spelling, for the reason I mentioned a sec ago. Also, the T9 dictionary is a bit flakey, it comes up with some "interesting" spelling options. One nice thing tho (which I just discovered today) is it autocompletes punctuation, so to type "can't" you just type "cant". This all just needs a bit of practise I guess, and the phone has at least passed the "drunk test": I was out for a few pints last nigth and was able to text easily enough about 5-6 pints into the evening! :-P

And now onto making calls: The phonebook only holds one number per entry, which is a bit awkward for ppl with multiple numbers, and for some reason when you make a call from teh phone book and hang up, you're left back at the phone book entry rather than at the "desktop" like on pretty much any other phone, so you ahve to exit out of it to get back. Also, there seems to be a lot of "spillage" of sound out of the earphone, when you're on a call you can turn the phone around backwards and nearly hear the other person as well as you could the right way around! There's great sound out of the headphones in a call, and if you don't like the Smasung headphones there's a normal headphone jack on the speaker part where you can plug in your own - the connection to the phone itself tho is a Samsung proprietary one which also doubles as the power port. It has a cover over it but instead of a sliding cover it swivels around and sort of sticks out when you ahve the 'phones plugged in, I can't see it lasting a huge amount of time without being smapped off.

All in all I guess, it's a pretty nice phone, worth the money I eventually paid for it (altho a little less vodafone-related hassle wud have been nice), but there are a few arez it does fall down on a little - apart from the GPS it sort of has the feel that as well as skimping on wi-fi, Samsung went to make a great multimedia camera device, and forgot to put very much effort into the actual "phone" features of the device like calls & txts....