A late review of an early PDA
Written: Apr 05 '06
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Durability: |
 |
|
| Clarity: |
 |
|
| Portability: |
|
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: Cheap! Nice deskstand!
Cons: Old technology. Obsolete and useless web browser
The Bottom Line: Old technology, A cheap way to find out what all the PDA 'hype' is about.
|
|
|
| brianutah's Full Review: Samsung SPH-I300 |
It's April 2006, and I just upgraded to a new PDA, so this review is about the old unit.
I’ve always been a late adopter of technology. Not because I’m a Luddite, but because new technology is so damn expensive. Take this phone, new it cost over $300, but I got it for about $50 on Ebay a couple of years ago. I don’t know if you can get this anymore, and them CongressCritters have mandated e911, which means if your phone doesn’t tell you where it is it can’t be activated. So I think this is now obsolete, but I’ll post a review anyhow for those who are even slower adopters than I!
The Phone:
The screen is color, but be warned, this is an older phone. Compared to newer phones, the color is washed out and it’s hard to see the screen in direct sunlight. To be fair, even the screens on the newer phones are hard to see in direct sunlight, but geeks like us don’t need to go outside, right? Action games (i.e., Galaxian) are hard to play because the moving figures are blurred.
However, the phone itself is quite rugged. I have dropped it a few times. If the battery pops out, you lose all your phone numbers, programs etc., but the phone still retains its phone number and still functions. It’s a good thing you can back up your data to a PC!
It’s not small, about twice as large as a regular phone, and it’s heavy, thus it’s not ‘pocketable’ but, it works OK in a suit jacket pocket. It’s also harder to lose!
As a phone it works OK. Sound levels are good, I usually don’t use the highest setting. There are a few ringtones built in, and that’s it, no tone upgrades. As before, the screen is hard to seen in the sunlight, so answering outside is somewhat iffy. The speaker phone works, but voice quality is not clear. Often I had to stop what I’m doing, and pick up the phone to understand the caller.
There is no ‘real’ keypad, calls are made from the palm address book, or from a keyboard drawn on the screen. Not very tactile, thus difficult to dial when driving, but were not supposed to do that (right??!) Because almost everything is accessed via the screen, you can inadvertently call someone when you put it in your pocket. About a year ago, I found the ‘lock’ button on the screen to prevent this. (It’s a tiny icon on the bottom of the phone screen)
The included charging/Synch desktop stand is sturdy, big and heavy. It’s nice to have place to drop the phone onto my desk and have it charging and ready to sync. I just got a new PDA phone (treo 270) without a stand and this is probably the biggest peeve I have with it. Where do you put the cord when it’s not plugged in, 2 hands are needed to plug it in and now I spend some time under my desk looking for that dang cable!
The PDA:
The biggest advantage to this unit is the Palm PDA. This is my first PDA phone, and I’m sold on the concept. All my contacts are backed up on my PC, and backed up on CDRW’s. And when I bought my new palm PDA, synchronizing to the new phone was a breeze. I wish all phones were this easy to use.
The Blazer software is actually obsolete. The Blazer company went under recently, so you can’t access web pages anymore. But, this feature was pretty much useless anyhow. I tried web browsing with the unit, but it was very slow, even without images. Plus, you pay for connect time.
Besides the palm contact features, I mostly used the free downloaded able games to waste time while waiting. The only games I permanently installed was “Lode Runner”, and “Same Game”. I also got a suite of card games called “Patience” off the net from SourceForge.org”, which has several other freeware palm programs. I also got a neat bookreader program from here called “Weasel” which I actually use, which is free and easy to use. The Gutenburg internet library has many text books (older classics whose copyrights have expired) which are free to download and read.
I never used the e-mail stuff. I didn’t need it.
Summary
All of the above peeves are because I got a newer phone. To be honest, if I hadn’t seen the newer phone I never would have noticed these ‘problems’ and I probably would still be happily using it.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 50
Recommended for: Adventurous Technophiles - Tough and Durable
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
brianutah
|
|
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.