I got a new phone at work the other day – a Samsung SGH D357. I’m not that impressed with it so far. I do love the fact that when the headset is connected you hear an incoming call ring before it answers. On the previous motorola phone I had it would just autoanswer with no ringing – not a good idea when singing along to the radio in the car.
The bad side of the headset is that it is not compatible with any of the standard 2.5mm jack headsets you normally have on a phone. I have a feeling that they have reversed the polarity of the jack in an attempt to make you buy their accessories. We got a bluetooth headset instead which I’m not crazy about as my plantronics wired headset was really comfortable but the bluetooth headsets are not comfortable and they flop around on your ear – after you’ve spent about 10 minutes putting it on your ear in the first place.
The ringtones are pretty gaudy, as usual, and its criminal to not have an ascending ring tone (like my uk nokia did) – which gives you the chance to answer the phone before annoying everyone else in the room with an obnoxious ringtone. I’m sure that the naff ringtones are put on the phone on purpose so that you can pay more money to download your own choice.
The phone also comes with a Push To Talk feature but it’s only any good if you have someone else on the network with this feature. There are now 2 of us at work with it, so we are trying it out, but for the past two days that I have tried it, we’ve not managed to make a successful connection and have resorted to going back to the standard cellular call (which again is a lot less obnoxious to those people in the room with you). The PTT feature could either be rubbish or really good but not intuitive on how to use it (as neither of us have read the manual yet). – Oh and did I mention that in order to use the PTT you have to…..pay more money ($10 per month per phone) to use it.
The phone doesn’t have a camera, the games are all demo’s (pointless but a money spinner) and the menu navigator is too small to use – I keep pressing the centre key rather than the navigation keys and as I haven’t paid for the web/wap access (sensing a theme?) it doesn’t work.
Overall I wouldn’t purchase this phone – I’d rather have my Motorola phone back although the bluetooth feature is nice (once you’ve paid the $50 for a bluetooth headset as the wired ones don’t work).
