Samsung SGH D500

Author's product rating:   

Look & Feel	Excellent
Durability & Robustness	Satisfactory
Battery standby time	Good
Value for money	Excellent
Range of features	Large selection

Advantages:	fantastic features for such a small phone
Disadvantages:	not entirely user friendly

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

INTRODUCTION

I have read some cracking reviews on this phone, and they even managed to persuade me to buy one. I've had mine for a few weeks now and I thought I'd let you know what I think of it. I have decided to write a technophobes guide to the phone. I don't really understand all that technical stuff and I think there are plenty of reviews covering that side of things that give all the technical info you need. So I'm going to let you know the main features, benefits and problems I have found in simple terms. I've broken it down into categories, so you can just look at the bits that interest you rather than trawling through all of it. I'll start off with a general overview of the phone.

GENERAL OVERVIEW

The D500 is a sleek little dark metallic grey mobile phone that opens with a slider instead of a flip up front. This is a nice feature, it opens smoothly and automatically locks when the slider is closed. This stops you from pressing buttons on the phone when it's in your pocket. It also stops the camera from going off in your pocket which is a problem I've had with other Samsungs. The only slight issue I have with the slider is that when you take the phone out of your pocket, it sometimes opens as you pull it out. This isn't generally a problem, but the phone answers a call when you open the slider, so if it automatically opens as you get it out of your pocket, then it's too late if you didn't really want to speak to the person calling because by the time you know who it is you've already answered it!!

The phone comes with a little grey charger. This is great because it makes it stand out from the other 10 leads that I leave near my electrical socket, making it a lot easier to plug it in in a hurry. However, you don't get a car charger, which would have been useful. Where you plug the charger into the phone, there is a detachable bit of plastic that you take out. I think this is there to protect the hole you put the charger in. Only problem is, it isn't attached to the phone in any way, and I lost mine within a couple of days. My housemate found it on the living room floor, but I soon lost it again because it's just too small. I think its currently living under my bed. When you first charge the phone, they recommend charging for 4 hours for optimum battery life. Then they say you should have 8 hours talk time for it… and if you can stay on the phone for longer than that you are a more patient person than me!! I generally find that with normal use, which for me is the odd call and loads of texts, the battery goes down to 2 bars after about a day and a half and then I charge it overnight.

When you get the phone, you also get a free pyramid. I was most intrigued about this, and spent quite a lot of time explaining to my house mate what a good phone it was because you get a free pyramid. Eventually I figured out that this is a plug in speaker. Its quite a nice little feature, because you can play music from the MP3 player on it and the sound quality is a bit better. It also makes the quality of the speakerphone a bit better when this is plugged in. Again, it's a bit little and detachable for me, not something I would manage to carry around with me without losing it. You also get a free hands free kit with the phone. This is good, but with it being a Bluetooth phone, I think it's shame they couldn't stretch to a Bluetooth hands free kit because the one you get is one of the ones with wires, so you get a bit tangled up on hands free. But it's better than nothing. Overall, the features of the phone are quite good, although there's always room for improvement. I'll move on to look at the actual calling features now.

CALLING

Making a call couldn't be more straight forward. You either dial the number or find it in your phonebook and just press the dial key. The phone book is well organised, you can enter up to 4 numbers for each contact, and you can also add their email address, and any notes you want. You can assign a ringtone or picture to a contact, which is pretty straight forward and the guidebook explains how to do it. The phone has a pretty good signal, so you can usually hear quite well without breaking up. The voice clarity feature makes it even easier to hear, and you can switch this on whilst you are on a call if you are having problems hearing, you just press OK. You can also put the phone onto speaker phone when you're on a call, which I find useful if my mum feels the need to nag me, I can just get on with what I was doing and she can rant at me without disturbing me too much! You can take the phone abroad, and it is triband, so should even work in the U.S. I never trust it when I'm told my phone will work in the States though, I travel quite a bit and still haven't found a phone that works anywhere in the States although I've been promised in the past that they would. That's about it as far as calling goes, personally I'm a text fan, so I'll tell you about that next.

MESSAGING

Text messaging is the most important feature to me on a mobile phone. This one is quite good for it, but I must say I have had one or two problems. Firstly, whilst it is really easy to change font whilst you are texting, the message sometimes starts on predictive text and sometimes on normal ABC text. This is quite frustrating, because I automatically assume it will be on predictive and start texting, only to realise I am writing utter rubbish. The other slight problem I have found is that texting is rather awkward with the slider ridges either side of the keypad. These get in the way a bit, I'm used to it now, but I think this would make texting a nightmare if you had big fingers. On the plus side of texting though, you can block particular numbers from texting you. This isn't a feature I have seen on a phone before, but it seems like a great idea, no more drunken texts from irritating ex's for me!!

Photo and video messaging is pretty much standard on mobiles these days. I do find the D500 particularly good for this though, because the message sends in seconds, and it still sends if you close the slider, so you don't have to hang around waiting for it to send. There are a few cute little templates too, so if you feel the need to send an animated message telling someone that you love them with a soppy little tune then this is the phone for you!! The other thing I quite like is that if you have Bluetooth on your PC, you can avoid expensive photo messaging altogether, just send your pictures to the PC via Bluetooth, and you can email them to people instead of sending by MMS- that way it's free!!

SOUND

No don't worry, I haven't gone all chav on you all of a sudden, I just thought I'd tell you about the sound features on the phone! Firstly, the all important MP3 player. This is a great feature on a phone, and I am sure that as soon as I manage to download some tunes I'll be over the moon. In fact, this is half the reason why I chose this phone. However, I got the phone and looked through the guidebook in anticipation… how do I download the tunes? And how many will it store? But low and behold, nothing. The guidebook tells you how to play your MP3 tracks, but it doesn't even give you a little clue as to how to download them in the first place. I am sure it is quite simple, but as I say, this is a technophobe's guide, I have no idea how this is done. Can anybody help me out on that one? I do have a computing friend who has promised to help me out, and he assures me that my phone should store 20 tracks. If I manage to get him to show me how it's done, I'll be sure to update you!! It's a bit of a shame this won't work really, because the sound quality's really good on this phone, especially with the pyramid plugged in. It would be even better if there was a radio on it like the nokias, then I wouldn't be so worried about my lack of technical MP3 knowledge because I'd still be able to listen to some music! The only other sound feature is that you can record up to an hour of voice recording. Useful I'm sure if you're into that kind of thing, but I must say I can't see myself using that one!

CAMERA

The phone has a 1.3 megapixel camera. What does that mean? Not a clue, but it takes nice pictures. The quality is pretty good, especially close up. And the quality is even ok if you send them to the PC to email or print. It does have a zoom, but that really doesn't go very far at all. If you want photos of something a long way away you'll just have to use a proper camera. One thing I do understand is the fact it's got a little mirror on it so if you want to take a self shot you can see what you're doing. Also doubles as a very useful feature if you forget your makeup mirror and want to touch up the lippy!! The effects are quite good for a little phone, including black and white, rotate, zoom, multishot, mosaic, sketch, nightshot, flash and a timer. You can also record up to an hour of video with sound. Again, possibly not entirely worth it, phones really aren't up to the standard of handheld video recorders yet but it's a fun little feature and the video quality isn't too bad for a phone.

GAMES

Disappointing. There are only 3 games, and in my opinion they are all a bit too technical for a phone. I have always enjoyed wasting time on the simple little games like snake and pinball. But if you are into games in a big way you might prefer these. The graphics are certainly good and you can play with or without sound, so if you find yourself listening to Mr. boring in a lecture or meeting he'll never know if you are playing games while he drones on at you.

The games you can play are Forgotten Warrior, Freekick and Archangel. Forgotten Warrior is one of those games where you have to control a little man running around killing things and picking up treasure. In Freekick you get to be David Beckham or Michael Owen kicking a ball at a goal. Not overly exciting in my opinion, but then I was more like Gareth Southgate than David Beckham! The last one is Archangel, where you have to fly around in a plane and do stuff… as you can tell I really never got into this one!

GRAPHICS

The graphics are really good on this phone. There are lots of wallpapers to choose from, including animations. You can also use your own photos as wallpaper. The only thing is, when you put your favourite wallpaper on, you don't get to see all of it. There is a lovely big screen on this phone, but it is obscured by loads of text. There are short cuts on the front screen to call history, messages, calendar and WAP. Personally I think this is completely unnecessary. I would rather use the menu and be able to see my wallpaper. When the back light is not on, the screen is dark grey with the time and date on there in black. It is easy to see, and if you want to get to the other screen you just open the slider. There is WAP on the phone, which is pretty easy to use. The WAP graphics are pretty good, and the speed is good too. But again, not really my thing, I only really use it to look up cinema times or catch up on the news.

ORGANISER

This is the final feature I want to tell you about. If you can be bothered to plan your life onto your mobile phone then this is the phone for you. It has a calendar, diary, currency converter, calculator, worldtime and an alarm. You can set an alarm to remind you of the things you put in your diary, and another alarm to wake you up in the morning. I quite like the morning call alarm, the tunes are nice and relaxing, none of that jumping out of bed with a start when it goes off. You can also leave the phone on silent or vibrate, and it will still play the alarm.

TO SUMMARISE

This is a nice, sleek looking little phone with virtually all the features you could want. It can be a little bit complicated, but most modern phones are. For the amount of features and memory this phone has, it is amazingly compact. There are a few improvements that can be made in my opinion, but it's certainly the best phone I've had so far. I'm not sure I'd be over the moon if I'd paid £250 for it, which is what you could get charged on pay as you go. But as a free upgrade, I can't complain!