I learned a hard lesson with this phone - never buy on impulse.
I bought it on ebay as a last minute impulse thing without doing my research. I have sold the phone now - I couldn't get rid of it quickly enough.
I have read contless phone reviews (on this and other sites) and I have never seen feedback as poor for any phone compared to the SL55. There was horror story after horror story. The main features were:
Software repeatedly crashing Poor reception Poor screen (resolution and scratches) Number buttons dropping off Poor service from Siemens Dodgy slide mechanism Poor battery life
My personal experiences are as follows:
It is a nice looking phone closed over. Open the slide to expose the buttons, it still looks ok. BUT, unless you have the smallest of fingers, you will find the keypad very difficult to use as the keys are so small and close together. They are also a very flat pyramid shape - do a lot ot texting, and you will find your texting finger/thumb becoming quite sore! No buttons dropped off on mine, but they didn't look that well stuck on, I have to say! Also, whoever thought at Siemens that it was a good idea to have the 1 key as a space key and the zero key as the full stop and other symbol key...well, get a grip. Every other phone manufacturer as far as I know has it the other ways round. I was forever putting in full stops instead of spaces when typing out texts!
The sliding mechanism is simply horrible. I have tried the slides on the Samsung E600 and E800 - smooth as silk quality engineering. The SL55's engineering is horrible - the two halves of the phone wobble around a little - it is just poor.
Sound quality and phone reception - poor. I live about 500 years from a mast. On the 2 Samsungs and 1 Nokia I have had, the reception meter aways showed 100%. On the SL55 it mostly showed 50%. No idea why. Reception while using the phone seemed to be poor wherever you were. It has polyphonic sound, but it is very fuzzy compared to other poly phones I have heard.
The menu system was a little confusing at first, but I got used to it a little. It is OK to be fair. What was poor though was that the phone seemed to have insufficient processing memory. Moving between menus was a slow business, and sometimes the phone would just go on strike for a while with a "Please Wait" message on screen, and then about 2 minutes later it would move on. Terrible.
Screen - the resolution wasn't great, and put it within a foot of anything not made of velvet, it scratched up like crazy - never seen a screen scratch like it no matter how careful you are, and I am very careful and have had other phones for over a year with absolutely minimal scratches.
Battery life did seem less robust than with other phones I have had.
Finally, I managed to have the phone about 3 weeks before it started to crash for no apparent reason. It certainly did not like receiving texts while I was typing one out, but as for the other times it crashed, I couldn't detect a pattern.
The bottom line is - awful phone, and simply awful value for money, even second hand from ebay. I can see why the seller wanted to get shot of it! I recently bought a Samsung x460 (which I will also review), and the retailer said that they stopped stocking the SL55 because they were sick of customer complaints and returned handsets.
I have had a Samsung S300 and a Nokia 8310 - decent phones. I wouldn't have an SL55 if it was the last phone on earth. if you don't believe me look it up on the net - the feedback is appalling!
Thanks
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the way you described it is exactly the same as the way that mine behaved....it was a poo phone and i was very disappointed.
mercury238 29.03.2005 15:33
what an idiot
don't people realise that things can't all be built the same?
and IT WAS SECOND HAND!! ofcourse the guy was selling it if it was faulty - you really believe that all ebay sellers tell you the whole truth about their items???
patriciat 10.12.2004 16:08
Don't think I dislike anyone enough to give them one. Thanks for the info. Pat.t
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Dec 10th, 2004
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