Dour old men trainspotting. (Samsung SGH-U800 Soulb with Contract)

Member Name: ElykTh

Product:	Samsung SGH-U800 Soulb with Contract
Date:	14/05/09 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Won't get stolen over your mates blackberry

Disadvantages: The ringtones will drive your mate away with his blackeberry. Leaving you alone with a shit phone.

The Samsung SGH-U800. How disappointing.

Up until a couple of months ago I had been using one of the old sony k800i phones. A brick of a thing with antiquated features, camera and design. The Samsung SGH-U800 is my current model. What has irked me most is that it is so damn slow. Painfully slow! Like a little metallic sloth even. Every new screen slides far too casually into place. In the modern age we need speedy efficiency and atom shattering effectiveness. Waiting for a screen to load on a mobile phone should be a thing of the past.

Cost:
£80 from O2

Network:
I have always used O2. Fantastic company and service. God only knows why they took this particular model on board and offered it to their customers. Even though my old O2 phones (all three) still receive full reception everywhere, the new Samsung U800 struggles to push past 3 bars in the centre of Edinburgh at times.

Slowly, Slowly:
The truth be told it's only a couple of seconds delay while the phone changes from one screen to the next. But that's every screen, every time. So to get to a new text I go menu, texts, inbox, message - this then takes 8 seconds....oh ya wee bugger.

If you want to pick up or hang up... 3 seconds! The reason it's so slow is that each screen glides from one to the next, in an attempt to replicate the I-phone's style. In this case it isn't stylish - just infuriating. The k800i vs U800 in terms of speed - think Bugatti Veyron against a 1940's Volkswagen beetle. Better yet make it a rolling start drag race and you start to get the idea.

Style:
This phone is not, in my opinion, attractive. It is dull, grey and ignorable. It could only be less attractive if it were beige. To me that's one of it's few positives because it's less likely to be stolen. What it's looks do portray is industry and durability and dour old men sat on railway bleachers eating jam and butter sandwiches.

The profiles and appearance of the phone "desktop" are black, white or steel grey to match the case. Dull, dull and dull.

The only thing worse than the appearance of the phone itself are the sounds it makes. Oh please, please, please never torment yourself by listening to them. They range from irritating to someone scrunching polystyrene packaging together - yes really that bad.

Functionality:
Call log: Pretty basic, however it takes a while to get used to the odd way Samsung have chronologically ordered different events. A feature which you can't change.

Phonebook: Offers several pointless grouping systems. If you use them they only add another two or three screens through whcih to sliiiiide...

Multimedia: Really bad music player with terrible headphones and a poor connector making music impossible to hear on the move. FM radio which doesn't work without really bad headphones. Voice recorder - which not surprisingly records your voice... badly.

My Files: Holds files (I'm no Sherlock for figuring that one out I know!)

Texts: Inbox and Outbox has a capacity of up to 2 hundred texts without a memory card. I have no intention of investing (or more appropriately wasting) any more in this thing further so I won't be extending the capacity.

Calendar: Again no surpises here

Camera: 3 megapixel. So what? The camera isn't great. So a 3 megapixel picture is still a bad picture if the camera taking it sucks.

Entertainment: Games and more - the phone comes with two trial games that don't work after 5 uses. Image editor - doesn't help improve the bad camera's bad pictures. Video editor - The video editor is a bit redundant as the videos are also pretty terrible. I assume the lenses in the phone must be really bad.

Applications: Bluetooth is fairly standard and works well. RSS reader I don't use and frankly I don't understand what the point of it is. Memo and task functions are more or less the same as the calendar. World clock is ok, though I've never needed to use it. The calculator is very basic and has no percent funtion. The convertor is pretty good, I admit. Timer and stopwatch are fair enough though again I've never used them beyond testing them.

Alarms: You can set up to five.

Settings: These are fair enough. The layout can be confusing if you haven't used a Samsung previously.

On the box Technical Specififcations:
3 megapixel camera.
3G.
262k colour screen.
Bluetooth.
1GB internal memory.
SD card slot.
FM radio.

To sumarise this phone - it is horrible. Yes a phone is meant to be a practical thing, but it doesn't have to make you miserable. I reckon I'm going to sell mine. I hope someone really mean buys it.

All the best folks.

Summary: A disappointing waste of £80