Phone is nice, Sprint not so nice, maybe rushed to market!
Written: Dec 18 '02
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Pros: Looks great, awesome display, lots of features
Cons: Battery, pictures require ext camera, 10 char for names, volume/vibrate not separate settings
The Bottom Line: The phone is pretty nice, great look & feel, unfortunately it has some interface inconsistencies and works only with Sprint, their PCS Vision service is disappointing!
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| umgoblue525's Full Review: Samsung SPH A500 Cell Phone |
Well here goes, I have had my Samsung SPH-A500 and SprintPCS service for one month now, time for some feedback so that others may benefit by my experience. My review is long and detailed, but necessary as I found info out there to be conflicting and at least wanted to share my true experience.
I admit I was blown away by the coolness of the phone compared to all the others out there. That plus the deal on the SprintPCS of unlimited PCSVision (internet capabilities), unlimited night&weekend, plus 300 anytime minutes for $30/month. So I bought the phone at Costco for $199, was cheaper then any other place, plus includes a 3-piece accessory pack, plus free voice command service for one year (normally $5/month), plus had the standard $35 rebate and free coupon for the extended battery, all in all, service and phone, the price seemed right! The $35 rebate isn't really a rebate, it basically offsets the $35 signup fee they don't tell you about, and will appear as a credit on your bill the second month, to keep you from cancelling during the first month, so it’s a wash.
Hmmm…where to begin…first I had to charge the phone overnight, then the next day called to activate the phone, was fairly painless, although the guy wasn't that friendly. It was nice to hear that the vision service was unlimited downloads and didn't count towards connection minutes while using it, I even called a second time to verify that was true. Then I tried the internet features, first trying email. My previous phone was AT&T and could only do the short messages, 108 char limit, was fun at times but very limiting especially when sending from a pc to your phone, like directions or something you wanted to save. Well the vision thing has a "full email" account so I sent an email from my pc to my phone with "testing" and it worked fine. Then I wanted to see what it was like for a more typical email and forwarded a stock market newsletter, all text, not huge or anything. The phone said "message waiting" and I saw it in the inbox, but when I selected it, that’s when my phone experience went bad!! I got some kind of internal error message, kept trying different things but couldn't get to any emails after that including the first one that had worked. Then I tried the internet browser and every page came back with some error such as "MIC Error #208" (get used to that one!).
In frustration I called it a night, and next day on my lunch hour called Sprint as I was still unable to do any vision activity and couldn't find any help on their web site or in the manual. Well my lunch hour turned into 45 minutes on hold before I talked to someone, then several of my questions resulted in being put on hold, and next thing you know it took 1.5 hours and I was late for a meeting, but didn't want to go through the 45 minute initial wait again. But the good thing is I made progress, and the girl was fairly friendly on the phone, told me a few good sites to get started. Basically when you get in that error state, you have to remove the battery to fully reset the phone, and then start over, which is a 90 second round-trip including reentering your login info, not too bad. But unfortunately in 3 weeks I've had to do that 30 times. They claim the flip feature on the phone has been tested 100,000 times and won't wear out…well I hope they've also tested the battery removal/replacement feature as I might end up doing that more then flipping the phone open! It turns out that there is an email size limit of around 8K, and although the server is supposed to reject it, it doesn't, and if you open it your screwed, reboot! And you can't delete it unless you can open it first, that’s the only time the menu has "delete", so you have to go to their web site and you have full vision functionality there and can read and delete emails. Bad prank tip: if you want to cause your friends grief, just send them a large email to crash their phone, isn't that fun, maybe you can set it up to email every day automatically! Sounds virus-like! And I've since learned that attachments also crash the phone, not sure if its because they make the email too large, seemed the mail server should strip off the attachment but it doesn't, so don't sign up for any emails in HTML format either! Luckily the phone also has a SMS short mail option, but you're stuck back at the 160 char limit, slightly higher then AT&T. Oh, and unfortunately when you send a regular email with the phone, you can only enter a 128 char message body, hey wait, that’s smaller then SMS messages?
Anyway, I was back in business. During this learning process, I now have quite a collection of logins and passwords unfortunately, I should have made them the same, but one was created on the account by the guy when I activated the phone, that gets you into the pcs web site as a customer. Then you get another that you create for the pcs vision. Then another login id and password for your pcs vision email account. Then another for the pictures feature on the phone (something I'll mention later). And I can't remember for sure but I think one other feature required another password, plus you can have one to lock the phone, what a nightmare! I have yet to go in and make them all the same, not good planning up front on my part but who would have expected that? I did find an option on the phone to "remember" the pcs vision login, which was nice because at first I just hated having to enter that every time on the number keypad, surprisingly it was off by default.
I next wanted to try the photo album picture feature, which was so highly advertised. Forget it, you can't do it unless you have the add-on camera attachment! I don't have it and have read all reviews saying its junk anyway, basically only buy it if it's free. But I feel somewhat scammed on this one, obviously they are blackmailing you into buying that or using the online account or something because it would be so simple to allow you to email these photos to your pcs account. By the way, even with the pictures, they aren't really stored on your phone, but are stored online in your personal photo album, and flipping through it with the phone would require each one to be downloaded each time. But ahhh, there is a compromise solution for the picture feature, its called wallpapers! You CAN send wallpapers to your phone, I've found several free sites, just crop/resize your pictures down to the correct size and use the site. Then in a sense you can show photos on your phone by going into the configuration section and selecting to change the wallpaper, then you can navigate through the pictures, and the good thing is they are downloaded to your phones memory so display isn't hitting the Internet to download each one.
As to the Internet browsing experience, very disappointing! I guess it's just a fun toy, but occasionally I thought it would provide timely useful info. Maybe their 3G network (more accurately 2.5) isn't at its best yet, at least I hope so! To explain why it's bad, here goes. First off the thing has no cache, so on pages like the "home" page they provide, it has a few tiny icons to pretty up the page, you have to wait for them to download each time, thus slowing your surfing. Each page access seems very slow, mostly I'd guess some kind of connection time, then page download seems reasonable, but I'd estimate 20 to 40 seconds per page. And since a typical web page is broken into multiple pages on this phone so that it can handle it better, reading a full page requires sometimes 3 or 4 page loads. If only a small cache on this thing I think it would greatly increase performance, but then again hard to tell exactly what the bottleneck is.
Then the part I've spent the most time on, using the Internet. It has a bookmark ability limited to 10 bookmarks, a little small…, so I decided I want one for each: weather, traffic, news, sports, several stock and financial, movie times, etc. I quickly found the weather channel and that works fine, bookmarked it. Then found CNN and ESPN, also bookmarked. But that’s about it. I spent hours browsing all kinds of sites, mostly on my pc, looking for a few useful sites to bookmark, and got very frustrated. For example, even though Hollywood.com said it had wireless ability for PCS Vision, I couldn't find the URL to enter for over an hour, finally guessed it, something like mobile.hollywood.com, don't remember for sure. So then I had movie times, which is cool although slow. Next up, Etrade, once again they said they had wireless ability and specifically PCS Vision, but again it doesn't work. The Etrade site says to access the main menu, then click stocks, then etrade or something like that, but there is no main menu like that. Everything in this phone is more like a full browser and you need to know the URL. The tutorial help on Etrade's site shows a phone with perhaps some built-in menu that this phone doesn't have, I suspect the phone is too new, and the old phones had some built-in WAP menu. But again I think the URL is something like mobile.etrade.com, but when I enter that it seems to start to load, an "S" appears on the top indicating the browser is in Secure mode, but the page never comes up, I've tried a dozen times and different days. I guess the phone doesn't handle it for some reason, and I have checked that I have the most recent firmware on the phone V10. Well my dream of having my 10 best sites quickly faded. I guess I will occasionally try again to find useful sites but very disappointing. Most of the sites you hit with the built-in google search page, hit sites in the UK, I guess they are big on the WAP phone Internet. And yahoo mobile seems it might be cool….some day…unfortunately the help/tutorial online doesn't match what you will see on your phone, some features like directions, movies…are missing? And you can't get it to remember your account login, so you'll have to enter that each time. It's just hard to find good sites it seems, I think Sprint should have a "10 most popular web sites" on their pcs vision site, how hard could that be?
Oh, and before I forget, one MAJORLY annoying design flaw with the phone is this, your finally browsing some web page, reading news or whatever, and the page is obviously bigger then the display, so the phone uses the volume up/down on the side to scroll a page at a time, nice because the arrow up/down line at a time would wear out your thumb, only problem is that the display is I think 10 lines, and the page feature scrolls 12 lines at a time, thus you miss one line, so reading requires page down, line up, read….page down, line up, read, etc…How could they do that? Didn't someone test the phone? Maybe the Internet feature wasn't working when they made it? What a blunder, but still its 2 buttons as opposed to 10 to get to the next page so you'll learn to love it.
Next up, I was showing off my phone at work to a coworker, had hardly used the phone features at this point. First wanted to show off the ringers, which do sound very cool. Like others I would complain that there are no simple "beep" type ringers because when my phone does ring at work, it causes one of the panic situations because its so loud and obnoxious and can be heard for 1/4 mile I'd guess. Anyway, my co-worker tried to call my phone and I was standing there all ready, but it went directly to voice mail. Hmmm, signal strength was 2 of 3? So we tried again, and again, and the damn thing never rang. Well then I had her send me an email to show that feature. But after 10 minutes I had to walk off, embarassed of my new purchase. Finally 2 hours later the phone exploded with a melody that indicated an email was received, and everyone in the area knew it!
To concentrate on the phone a little…it looks very cool, display is great, buttons feel good, but the navigational pad has a center button that you think would be "select" but its not, doesn't do anything except if you hold it for 3 seconds it connects to the internet. My guess is they decided it was too small for most people. So you have to use the OK and Menu buttons a lot. And there is a Back that I've hit by mistake several times, but no forward, resulting in sometimes starting over entering a URL, that takes a minute and I wouldn't recommend while driving. And the use of the OK button is different when on the internet versus doing phone features like adding to your phonebook, where it’s a Save button. I've done that so many times by mistake and had to go back into the address book and select the entry I want to edit, then select edit, then I've recovered from the accidental Save. Poor consistency with the user interface, but not unbearable, you'll get used to it eventually. Another poor interface example is the voice dialing. You can't somehow select an existing entry in your phone book and record a voice entry to dial it….no, that would be too simple…instead you have to navigate to the voice dialing menu, then select to record, say the name, then re-enter a phone number to dial with that voice, another poor choice for design. And warning…you only get to have your top 10 voice recordings for dialing, so if you have more then 10 friends, you'll have to drop a few, who needs that many friends anyway? The battery wouldn't last long enough to say hello to each of them anyway. Yes, that’s a slam, the initial battery lasts maybe 30 minutes talk, 45 minutes internet, maybe 2 days standby if you store it in the refridgerator. But luckily the free upgrade battery doubles that and they delivered it in a week, which was pretty responsive! Oh, and if your friends names are longer then 12 letters, you'd better rename them or enter by nickname or something because that’s all you get. And although its nice to have several numbers grouped under a user name entry, unfortunately when someone calls you, you'll only get the 12-char name, not the phone number that they called from. I think its probably a conspiracy with Sprint so that you'll have to call each number for that person to track them down, resulting in 1 minute connect time for each call minimum!
The display of the menus and such are pretty cool, very dissapointing though again about the no photo album unless you buy the add-on camera. Some of the pictures I'd want to put on the phone (maybe a total of 10 or so little ones to show it off), were from trips years ago, how can I go back in time and retake those photos with the attachment? What if I had baby pictures but the kids are now 2 or 3? I guess you could take pictures of your pictures perhaps. I would guess they will fix this and allow you to upload pictures if you follow some size and naming requirements, but they don't have it yet and don't hold your breath! They must get so many complaints about this! Next, how else to sugar-coat this, but entering text into the thing at any time is very slow and time-consuming. The T9 mode is pretty nice as it predicts the word with less keys, but I wish I knew early on that hitting 0 tries different words as the first one was quite often not right and I had to switch back to Alpha mode and enter that word the long way, but that’s my fault for not reading the manual closely in that section.
I haven't played much with the ringers, I uploaded a couple of them and it was pretty easy. But again they sound great, but can be obnoxious. I hope I don't someday forget and leave my phone on at a movie theater! And I think they call them "ringers" for a reason, the first few calls that came in, I'd flip open the phone, then raise it to my ear, but the ringer still goes for like 2 seconds after flipped open, so you have to be slow or the result is that blasting volume into your ear, resulting in your own personal "ringer" for a few minutes of pain. And I would like to always have it in vibrate mode, independent of the ringer volume, but unfortunately the settings are: off, vibrate but no sound, sound only with volume 1 through 8, then high volume with vibrate. So I can't have the volume at half plus vibrate, that sucks, pretty much have to put up with max volume or no vibrate.
Ok, as to the Sprint PCS service itself. For the most part the connection area is about the same as my last phone, but as in the work example, for some reason even when it indicates full strength signal, sometimes it doesn't receive calls or notifications, so that’s a pretty serious issue, someone will call, your phone won't ring, they'll leave a voice mail, then 3 hours later it lights up saying "voice mail" even though you had a decent signal the entire time, not exactly timely. I could just imagine: "John, call me back before 6 if you want to go to the game tonight" and getting the voice mail alert at 8. The reliabilty of the Internet connection isn't too bad, usually good, but sometimes can't connect. One thing to watch is the extra costs, as I'm SURE that’s where Sprint makes their money. Like roaming or going over your daytime minutes, either resulting in the price going up to near dollars per minute㐒 minutes over on one call and you've doubled your phone bill that month, ouch! And with the roaming, the phone has a nice feature to set whether to automatically or never use, so I set to never, in case I'm on the road and accidently venture into a roaming area. And don't be fooled by that initial deal of $30/month, its only for the first 3 months, then it becomes $40/month, plus at that time another $10/month for the pcs near-sighted vision service, basically $50/month. Average that out for the first year and its really $45/month, which I think is still slightly cheaper then my previous AT&T account at $55/month when internet is included there.
The extra accessory kit isn't so hot. The belt clip is sooooo hard to get the phone separated, you'll need two strong hands when a call comes in. Luckily I bought a little leather case and it has one that is much nicer, and the case fits great except if you want to plug in the charger, or do the reboot as mentioned about in which case you have to remove it from the case to remove the battery. And the handsfree thing is junk, hard to hear for some reason, voices sound like in a movie where the kidnapper electronically alters his voice so as not to be caught, plus the cord is coiled like a spring and is pulling the earpiece out of your ear when stretched, but I guess you could hang the phone from your ear too somehow? And when that’s in and you want to end a call and flip the phone shut, don't make the mistake of saying something like "what a jerk" because the call doesn't disconnect unless you push the end button or the button on the ear piece…flipping it shut has no effect, unlike without the ear piece in. And as to the Costco deal, I still haven't figured out how to activate the voice command feature without signing up for it online and probably getting billed for it, I guess I'll just have to call for that some day when I have an hour to kill.
It's been a time consuming and frustrating experience, but I've somewhat gotten at least half of the things working that I'd hoped for. I don't claim to have even tried all of the phone features like alarm clock (I hear some people say it isn't working for them, but supposedly V10 of the firmware fixed that so I should be all set), or the planner, countdown timers, etc. Although I was old school with my AT&T phone, which lasted me 4 years, it did have something I really miss which was the #121 free feature, basically a voice-activated system where you could get stock quotes, weather, traffic, movie times, directions, etc, worked very good and I could do it while driving. Now I feel crippled without it, don't have half of that functionality, and certainly can't be typing while driving (I've tried and am sorry to those drivers I've run off the road while trying to get my horoscope)
And to sumarize, I'm not sure if I'm recommending this phone or the Sprint PCS service, I guess it depends on your own personal pain threshold, and it would help if your retired and have lots of time to spend. Nice try everyone, but I can't wait until the Sprint 4G network comes out, along with the Samsung A600, maybe I'll be retired by then!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200
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Epinions.com ID:
umgoblue525
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Location: Canton, Michigan
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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