Samsung Uproar - M100 - mp3 player in the phone.
Written: Apr 27 '01 (Updated Apr 27 '01)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Durability: |
 |
|
| Clarity: |
|
|
| Portability: |
 |
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: First phone with mp3, calendar, and to do list.
Cons: non-technical people might have a problem with utilizing all of the functions.
The Bottom Line: If you have $400 it's a very good phone. I am having bad problems with Sprint, but am very pleased with the phone. I wish Verizon had supported Samsung products.
|
|
|
| elastica's Full Review: Samsung SGH-M100 Cell Phone |
I bought the Uproar last week after switching to Sprint from Verizon. It showed up working right out of the box
(charged and everything). I was very excited, but then, as I tried to learn all of the functions, it proved to be challenging. It took me a good 24 hours to feel comfortable with the phone.
Features
It holds 229 people with up to 6 numbers each per person (Home, Work, Mobile, Fax, Pager, and Other.
For 20 numbers, you can do voice dialing. Just say the person's name and it dials. I found this to be relatively flawless. I kinda wish there was more than 20 numbers though.
It has 10 numbers for missed calls, and 10 for dialed calls. Which again, I wish it was 20. One cool feature that Samsung has added is that you can delete the call list. You might be asking, "Why would anyone want to delete the call list?" but if you had a jealous girlfriend, you'll be thankful for the feature. Even better, you can program in secret people and numbers that you need to ever a pin number in order to see.
Continuing with security, you can lock the keypad (except for 911) with or without a password. You can also have 3 numbers that people can dial even if it's locked. So, if you want to give the phone to your teenager but you don't want him/her to ring up a ton of calls, you can lock it and just allow them to call important numbers like AAA, home, or a neighbor's number.
It has 9 dial tones and 4 songs that you can use to have the phone ring differently for different people or different alert. I read on some internet sight that somebody actually was able to have ANY song play when the phone rings. If someone knows how to do this I would love to know.
There is also a calendar, to do list, and alarm, which I find very helpful. You might think that typing is annoying, but it has this technology they call T9 that fills in the most likely word. e.g., you type 6-3-3-4-2-3 and it makes the word OFFICE. I find it very helpful for the calendar and to do list.
I also have web surfing which is pretty good on this phone. It's light years better than it was on my last phone, Startac. I was easily able to check my yahoo mail account.
The good stuff
When I bought the phone, I didn't realize that I needed Windows 98, 2000, or ME on my computer. Personally, I have 95 so I had to use one of my roommates. This is important to know, because buying a new operating system for this phone is quite a lot of money.
I loaded the software on my roommates computer (he has a pentium II with about 400mhz or so processing). It loaded all by itself, I just had to click ok. I rebooted and attached the samsung uproar through a USB port. I was very pleased to see on the phone that it said "Connected" and then "Loading Software". When the PC booted back up, I opened real player (It is installed with the PCS CD that they give you) and opened some mp3 and added the tracks. It probably takes 30 seconds a song which I think is very reasonable.
I have about 8 songs on there with about half the space taken up. There is 64 MB total in the phone, but some of that is taken by the address book. That includes the 3 demo songs they give you. That's right! You can test the mp3 player as soon as you get the phone because they preload 3 songs. The quality is quite good, and I was able to load and listen to any song regardless of bitrate. I was surprised by the quality and I even tried it with my "Noise Reducing" headphones and the quality was excellent.
I plugged in the handy headphones that have a little remote on them and was very pleased to see that the names of the music appear in the playlist on my phone(I have a Phillips Expanium and it doesn't show the names). The little remote is nice and it clips comfortably.
Success story: I was mowing the lawn with the phone in my pocket and the mp3 player going. A call came through and the music lowers automatically and the phone vibrates, and I was able to hit a button on the remote to answer the phone. It was my just my parents bothering me, but it could have been an important call.
The phone also has a memo feature. You can record up to 5 one-minute length memos. I didn't thing I would use this, but it's good for at night when I remember something that I need to do the next day. Or when I'm in the car and I don't have a pen handy.
Size
I travel a lot so the size and weight is important to me. It's about 4.4 ounces which is about the same as the Startac.
Price
All and all, I'm very pleased with the pricetag of $400. Sprint gave me a lot of money to sign with them so the phone wound up costing around $280 which isn't bad considering I paid $200 for my Startac last year.
Gimme the Juice
The battery life is plenty. It's a Lithium Ion battery so it's a damn good battery. You see, Nickel "forgets" how much power it has so you have to drain it to empty in order to charge it full again. Where as the Lithium lasts much longer and doesn't "forget" so you can charge it at anytime.
It has 3.3 hours of talk time and 140 hours of standby. OR 1 hour of analag with 16 hours of Analog standby.
I went ahead and purchased a better battery from sprint. For $59.99 they'll send you a lithium battery that is 5.8 hours of talk time. I get that next week. For $10.00 I also got a cigarette charger.
Keypad
It has two scrollbuttons on the side that are nice for one hand navigation. I don't like the placement of the memo button on the side because I do hit it sometimes by accident and then I have to exit the menu and start over. The rest of the keypad buttons are fine. There just as easy as the Startac. I would probably have a hard time going from the nokia to this phone, but with voice activated dialing, you will rarely have to type the number.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 400
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
elastica
|
|
Member: Eric Lastic
Location: Falls Church, VA
Reviews written: 46
Trusted by: 10 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.