Samsung SGH D900

Author's product rating:   

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

Advantages:	Very compact, well designed .  Excellent camera definition .  4 - band .
Disadvantages:	Plasticky when you've been used to the construction of a Moto V3 .  Text outbox useless

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

AUGUST 2008 - I have now come to the end of my contract with this phone, so this seems like as good a time as any to revisit this opinion. There's not much negative to report - it didn't break, or rather I didn't break it, which is more than can be said for the Sony Ericsson I'm awaiting in the post., if its reviews are anything to go by.

I did at one point think that it's USB port was duff, but after a good 'de-linting' out, like all good navels, it worked again, and strangely enough, despite having the appearance of a 'scratch magnet', it is in good condition.

Anyway, back to the plot..........

TAA-TAA, MOTO! - Why I Changed

It hardly seems like yesterday I was writing about my Motorola V3 a.k.a. RAZR cell-phone. Since then, Motorola seem to have re-invented English with the SLVR, the PEBL and KRZR. If they lose any more vowels, they may as well call themselves MTRLA.

Well 2 thngs hv hppnd snc thn -

1.) I began to realise just how 'shafted' I'd been by O2, not so much as a network but as my service supplier too. £23.96 was starting to seem like rather a lot per month for 60 minutes line time and 40 texts. OK, that included nearly £4 (compulsory I might add) insurance, but since I've never lost a phone in my life, that's £72 down the drain over the 18 months of the contract and…..

2.) I started to realise that the V3 was not exactly famous for its ability to make the best of a poor signal when away from 'The Smoke'.

HELLO, SAMSUNG - Finding a deal

Following a link from the incentive website, www.themutual.net I quickly found myself at the door of www.Carphonewarehouse.com. This move alone is going to earn me around £15 in cash back.

There amongst their special offers was a Samsung D900, linked to O2's £35/month tariff, but which has a much more generous 600 minutes and 400 texts built in. At that kind of rate, using the mobile instead of my home phone becomes a distinct possibility, at least to get my money's worth and lower the home phone bill in one fell swoop.

It won't take a genius to see that this is way more than the £23.96 I was paying.

However, Carphone Warehouse were dangling the carrot of substantial cash or rather 'chequeback' to the tune of £280 spread over the 18 month period of the contract, bringing my monthly total to £19.44, which when you consider how many more minutes/texts I'm getting is a bloody good deal. Effectively, I'm paying £4 less for ten times more! All I've got to do is make sure I don't lose the copies of the four bills in question, as they're going to be worth £70 each to me.

Anyway, let's get down to the phone itself.

APPEARANCE

Unlike the V3 which was a very slim 'flip' phone, this one is reported to be the slimmest 'slider' instead. I like phones that open out in some way - that way you get a dinky phone AND a large screen AND a usable keyboard.

Closed up, has a footprint only slightly bigger than a credit card, or should I say 'stack' of credit cards since it's 13mm thick but even in this mode can be used to answer a call. Opened out for access to the key board it's still fairly dinky - I'm guessing that this adds around 30 mm to the length.

Unlike the mainly metal matt finished V3, the Samsung disappoints slightly by being hi-gloss and matt plastic only. The first thing I intend to do is get a hard crystal cover for it before it gets scratched - next stop e-bay.

FEATURES

I always feel like I'm on a "hiding to nothing", writing about a cell-phone.

For a start I'm really the most basic of users who wants to make a few phone calls and maybe to make a few text messages - but just try finding a phone without a camera these days!

For every reader that glazes over at the mention of 'four-band GSM and WAP/GPRS access', there'll be another bemoaning the fact that I didn't give a blow-by-blow account of each menu and how to navigate it.

Rather than run through the gamut of a huge list of features, which let's face it, even the most benighted of cell phones has these days, I'll concentrate on where it disappoints and/or delights compared to the V3 which can still be regarded as a highly desirable bit of kit, if only because it's become a bit of a design classic.

In amongst the old V3's most useful 'gadgets' was for me at least, its speaker-phone ability, which I came to regard as my 'emergency hands-free kit' whilst driving. All I had to do was answer a call with one button, switch to speaker and chuck it onto a seat; followed up by raising your voice. I'm told by my wife that it sounded OK from the other end.

The Samsung does the same - just with different buttons. The important thing is that it still only needs two presses, which requires no more of a diversion of your attention than changing radio stations on the stereo, and at no time do you have to raise the thing to your ear or even look at it.

Ironically, the accompanying 'outgoing' hands-free feature - the ability to recognize voice commands is lacking, so in that respect I've taken a step backwards.

To be honest I don't care that much since I never MAKE calls from the car, although it was fun to programme the phrase 'Kirk To Enterprise' to get the V3 to 'fonome', especially with it looking suspiciously like a Startrek communicator.

Oh well, there goes another source of childlike fascination in gadgets, prostituted to the cause of economy!

I've always sneered at cameras in phones, preferring to wield a Nikon D70 with 6.3 mega pixels and a decent lens. What with their puny pixel ratings and fixed focus, cell-phone cameras have always failed to impress me - until now. However, the camera in the Samsung weighs in as a begrudgingly pleasant surprise at 3-megapixels and b****r-me it's got auto-focus and a tiny flash gun; all wrapped up in the slimmest sliding phone ever. I'll bet there's no 'real' zoom lens in there though - mmmmm, thought not; well it IS only 13 mm deep.

Even so, it's starting to look like a half-decent pocket camera of three years ago now. The pictures below at least show that up to postcard size, the photos are worthy of the name.

Likewise the Samsung is a half-decent mp3 player, capable of actual stereo playback through either the stereo hands-free headset (supplied) or its puny pair of speakers. Of course, the capacity for all this is limited to 60 Mbytes but you can treat it to a larger memory card, which, mercifully these days are pleasantly cheap.

Who knows, somewhere in there it may be possible to make a phone call or two?

BLOW ME, IT'S A PHONE TOO

Ah, yes, so it is, and another surprise - despite staying on O2, I can now get reception when staying with friends 'down a dip' in darkest Dorset, so chalk one up for Samsung, and yah-boo to Motorola who nearly got O2 the sack as well.

The extending fascia lends itself to be more face-shaped than many of the ultra-dinky phones around. I know they work, but I don't feel right knowing the mike is miles south of my mouth.

Texting can now be done in several standard modes including using predictive text, although I'm no great fan of it - I seem to spend more of my time unravelling what it thinks I meant in favour of what I really meant.

NAVIGATION

Like most devices with more functions that buttons, lavish use of a 'thumb pad' is needed to access menus and sub-menus. Once you get used to where everything is, and you grow up pretty quickly if you want to start using a Bluetooth headset right away, it all seems pretty instinctive.

Unlike the V3, which lists every single phone contact separately, i.e. their cell-phone number, their home and office numbers and even their e-mail address, the Samsung defaults to showing you the primary entry for each (usually the mobile number unless there isn't one) Pressing the central OK button gives you a broader look at the person concerned. This keeps the scrolling down the list to a minimum.

OTHER THINGS I CAN DO WITH IT

As this phone has got the GPRS facility, a sort of air-borne entry-level broadband, it is possible to browse the web with the phone. How much this costs is very much down to your network provider but generally speaking, you get charged by the 'meg of download' - being on line itself costs nothing. On my O2 tariff, the first megabyte of download is inclusive, whilst subsequent 'megs' are charged at £3 each. The problem I have with this is tracking usage. I'd imagine that if you only want to read the text of your e-mails via your ISP's website whilst on a week's holiday say, you could keep within the first meg. Downloading all those joky file attachments and movie clips that all you friends send you ("I know you don't mind - you've got broadband") could be 'rather' costly and you'd only find out when the bill lands on your mat.

WAP Is Cwap - Excellent though it is, at 32 by 42 mm, it's also easy to see how you might get a trifle frustrated with surfing on a screen this size, and this is where the phone's USB link cable comes in. This enables you to use the phone as a modem for a PC, e.g. a laptop.

This can either be used to give you that GPRS 'poor man's' broadband I spoke of at around 486 Kbytes, or used as a dial-up modem over the normal telephone network. Be warned, if you thought dial-up from home was slow, nothing prepares your for a 9.6 Kbytes connection! It's a good job my 600 minutes allow access to 0845 numbers! Even so, it's OK for accessing your e-mail from your ISP and just reading the text bits without downloading any file attachments (and easier to control costs since it's just any ordinary phone call).

Just a footnote about that GPRS 'thingy'. Having used it with my laptop on holiday, I can confirm that it works a treat, but just make sure you have deep enough pockets. A few days use (just downloading e-mails etc) put £36 on my monthly bill! I can't help feeling that the major culprit was one day that ran up £16 in charges alone. 6.7 megabytes was all it took, most of which, it now appears, are down to my anti-virus software doing a large update in the background whilst I tutted about how slow it had become - OUCH! Never again. Be warned - as a bare minimum, make sure all daily update routines are turned off on your lap-top. These cost nothing back home on your broadband, but as you can see they might cost you a tidy sum when roving around.

IF THIS IS WEDNESDAY, IT MUST BE BELGIUM

One really nifty feature, at least on mine was its ability to remind you in a pictorial fashion which country you are in - this might seem superfluous but bare in mind that I recently went for a day trip to France and thanks to faulty Eurostar doors, ended up in Belgium! When in Britain, you get a view of The Houses Of Parliament, complete with varying levels of daylight commensurate with the time of day. Greece gives you The Parthenon, southern Spain gets you the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, France The Eiffel Tower and so on. Somebody should tell Samsung that the view of the HofP is the wrong way round - there's no way that Westminster bridge could be at that angle!

THINGS I CAN'T DO WITH IT

Like I said before, it doesn't accept voice commands, so there'll be no more tapping the side of my Bluetooth earpiece, uttering 'fonome', or was it 'Kirk to Enterprise'?

It also isn't '3G' whatever that is. Frankly, I've had a belly full of hearing about what 3G can do, like watching TV on your mobile and the like, so I'm glad it isn't. It's only a way to get you to part with even more of your money. Listen - I just got used to a camera in the phone, don't push me too fast!

One major gripe I have is the way in which it handles unsent text messages, when for example passing through an area with no reception.

Firstly, as you'd expect it coughs up an error message with an invitation to 'Retry?'. Nothing odd about that you might think, but after being unsuccessful, it proudly proclaims that it has saved your message in 'Drafts'.

OK, you'd think, but no. This strips out the dialled number information leaving you to re-associate it manually. Alternatively, if you answer 'No' to the 'Retry' question, it does actually put the message in the 'Outbox' but there it languishes.

The phone makes no attempt to resend the message, which to my mind is unforgivable, bearing in mind the usual implications of an Outbox, as in e-mail for example. Why in hell's name do they think that I WOULDN'T want to send the message as soon as reception returns? A quick check of the Outbox menu reveals that it's left to you to select the 'Resend?' option. Crazy and not a good experience when comparing to my (now regretted having cascaded to my wife) Motorola V3. I'm downgrading this phone from its previous four star rating on this alone.

LINKING IT

Like iPods and other mp3 players it becomes harder and harder to report on a portable bit of kit without making some comment on the PC software that comes with it.

The Samsung comes with a suite called PC Studio, which allows for things like management of the contacts list taking whilst advantage of a 'proper' PC keyboard. You can even draw in your list of contacts from the Windows Address book and many other file formats to save typing too much. If anything else, it'll force you to tidy up your address book before you clutter your phone with multiple entries.

The software works in a 'Windowsy kind of way', so anyone familiar with the principle of draggin 'n' droppin' will be at home. You can off-load your photos, add mp3 files, add ring tones etc all through the USB cable link to the phone (you can use Bluetooth also if your PC has a......ahem......dongle).

If I'm honest, it feels clumsier than the Motorola offering which always was excellent, and it didn't help its case by immediately finding 281 updates to the software which HAD to be installed before the software would deign to start. I get the impression it wasn't so much an update as a re-install of a newer version of the software.

It's from here that you configure the phone as a modem for a laptop, the options being GPRS or Dial-Up. Curiously, the two processes are almost the same. At first I couldn't see how to make an old-fashioned dial-up connection, but by failing to select a country and network (the UK choices being limited to O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile) I was able to key in my own dial-up number given to me by Telewest, now Virgin, for when I'm 'out and about'.

SPECIFICATIONS - Well SOME of Them!

4-Band GSM - works just about anywhere that Coca Cola is available.

EDGE/GPRS - Where available, EDGE gives faster internet access

Weight - 85 grammes

Ring Tones - Polyphonic and mp3

Memory - 60 Megabytes fitted. Upgrade with micro SD cards

Talk Time - Up to 6h 30m

Standby Time - Up to 260 hours

Bluetooth v2.0

USB v1.1

Camera - 3.15 Megapixels, auto-focus, flash. Video mode

CONCLUSION

If you have to change phones at the end of a contract, the Samsung D900 is worthy of your consideration - with the exception of that lack of voice-actuation, and 3G capability, it's every bit as good as the V3, and in many aspects, markedly better (except it's nearly all plastic!).

On many of the reviews I've read it scores at least 8 out of 10.

Its camera is way more than I deserve, and its mp3 capacity, as yet untested by me could be useful.

It's pretty without branding you a style victim, and unobtrusive in your pocket.

It's available 'free' with many contracts.

FOOTNOTE

Bloody marvellous (not!).

Five days in from changing my telephone number, I'm being plagued by missed calls from 'New Logic Communications'. I've added them to the very useful 'Reject Calls' list in the Samsung.

At least this ensures that their calls can't ring my phone and distract me but they still show up as around five daily attempts to call me.

Do Carphonewarehouse sell likely new numbers on to telemarketing companies? Looks like it. Maybe this is one way they finance the chequebacks!

Anyway, the Telephone Preference list can now have cell phone numbers added so that's precisely what I've done, although it may take twenty eight days to kick in fully, it certainly seems to have worked on my home phone.