Sigh, I don’t even really know where to begin. I finally got a hold of this new phone of mine and I’m having a problems with it. If you don’t know this phone, it’s the Silver Plum as I like to call it. It’s supposed to be Samsung’s answer to Motorola’s SLVR L7.

The Good

There are a few things that I like about this phone: it’s thin, it’s slick, it’s stylish, and the display looks good. I also like the navigation they got on this phone. The main menu has nine (9) items on it. When you pull up one, the nice thing is that you can move to the other menus by hitting left and right. This means you can go from the Phonebook to Messages without having to exit Phonebook and hunting for Messages. This premise also works for submenus; in messages you can go from the Inbox to Sent messages just like that.

While we’re on the subject of messages. There is something that I experienced with my old phone, the Nokia 6101. You couldn’t go from one message to the next. I mean, what gives? You wake up one morning and have 5 new messages. You read the first one, then have to exit, scroll, THEN go to the next message. That really sucked. So I’m glad that Samsung has made things a little bit easier in this respect.

There are a few excellent shortcuts on this phone. You can hold down the * key to lock the phone and hold down # to switch between silent and normal mode. Excellent for classes and meetings.

And yep, I think I’ll stop here.

The Bad

Now frankly, it could very well be me, but I have problems creating schedules with this phone. I cannot, for the life of me, get a schedule to repeat without a whole lot of hoopla. I always get an error which says: “No exist entry”. Now, somebody out there, please give me a hand with this, because I’m afraid that I’ll one day toss this phone out of my window out of frustration. Sometimes though, if it feels really nice, it will decide to put that schedule on the day after you wanted it. So, for my weekly appointments on Sunday, I’ve created my schedules on Saturday, got the error and the phone decides to place them on Sunday. For the love of me, I can’t figure this one out. Neither can the T-Mobile techs and Samgsung has yet to respond to me.

I have one slight problem with text messaging on this phone. The predictive text isn’t bad. It’s pretty standard in my opinion. My huge problem is the space key. Why the hell is it on the # key instead of the 0? This what I can’t understand with cell phone makers. What goes through their mind when they decide to change something that has been in existence since the beginning of time? Now I have to re-learn something that I’ve been used to for years. It reminds me of Motorola, when they decided to switch the Talk and End buttons. I’ve accidentally hung up on many a friend like this.

There is a Templates folder that you can use for text messages. That’s good, right? Well, I suppose so. You can edit the messages but you can’t add more. Ok, that’s good enough I guess. They also have the following folders: Inbox, Sentbox, Outbox, Drafts. What’s missing here? Maybe an Archive folder? Sometimes you want to save important text messages, while being able to do a Delete All on your inbox. You can set a protection on individual messages, however every time you delete all from your inbox you are bugged whether you want to also delete the protected files. Of course I don’t want to delete the bloody protected files; that’s why I protected them, duh.

While we’re talking about standards, this one pisses me off. From the advent of Call Waiting people have been pressing the talk button to switch between calls. I’m talking about land lines and cell phones. But Samsung in their infinite wisdom has decided to change this convention. You can accept a call by pressing talk, but as far as I have found, you have to press the menu key then, scroll down, then select swap. Damn it!!! What the hell? Where did they get that from? After all the good things I’ve said about their menu system they pull some crap like this. I mean, did the engineers sit there and deliberately try to find ways to piss off phone users?

Now, there is one last thing. On all phones I’ve seen, you can copy all your contacts from the SIM card to the phone. Now on most phones you can go the other way around, but again Samsung has decided to kill this function that has been around for years. So if your phone gets screwed up you cannot easily use a temporary phone and transfer your contacts.

One more tiny thing: I hate phones with Vibe Then Ring. Why can’t they do both like Nokia phones? What’s so hard about that?

The Ugly

Now, I need to let the masses know some things about this phone. Things that you don’t see in reviews. Let’s warm up with their little bluetooth problem. A lot of people use the bluetooth capability to transfer files to the phone. Now this is what I’ve seen with other phones: you plug up the phone and drag and drop files onto the phone. As far as I’ve been able to determine with this phone, the only files that you can do this with are MP3 files, I’ll get to the catch with that in a minute. Everything else gives you an error. In order to transfer files you need to put them in the shared folder of your bluetooth program and browse them using the phone. No biggy right? Also, from what I’ve see so far, using bluetooth file transfer, the phone only gives you access to the Images, Videos, and Sounds folders. So I guess there’s no uploading of java games for you.

Since this is my first bluetooth capably phone, I was thinking about pick up a bluetooth headset. Not to wear on my ear and walk around like an idiot and hope I get a call, but to use in the car when I’m on long road trips and in my house while I’m doing other stuff so I don’t have to crook my neck to the side. Samsung has also decided to strip another feature that cell phones have had since they were monochrome. There is no voice activated dialing, so you can’t utilize the headset to its full potential. You need to actually pick up the bloody phone and manually dial before using the headset.

Now for the part that really pisses me off: MP3s. With most other phones you can use your computer and pull up your copy of Audacity and load up your favorite MP3 song, trim it down to 20 seconds, stick it on your phone and use it as a ring tone. I guess Samsung is trying to get people to download ringtones from cell phone providers, because they have disabled the ability to use MP3 files as ringtones. Oh yeah, you can bluetooth the hell out of the phone and load all the MP3s you want onto that sucker, but when you go to select them as ringtones the menu option is conveniently grayed out. Again I say, WTF Samsung? People paid tons of money for this phone only to have a feature like this maliciously disabled? Come on now. This is a grave injustice. I’m just pissed of that I’m stuck in a 2 year contract with this pile of crap.

Oh well, after all, I guess it is thin and apparently that is all that matters these days.

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