Mine goes everywhere with me! (Samsung GT S8300 Ultra Touch)

Member Name: stephbond89

Product:	Samsung GT S8300 Ultra Touch
Date:	15/08/09 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, great battery life, reliable, everything I want in a phone!

Disadvantages: None at all!

I have wanted this phone for MONTHS, and so when I finally got it last week I was made up!!!!!

I'm just going to jump right in here rather than nattering on!!!

LOOK:
The phone is a rectangle shaped slide phone, when closed it's about 10cm tall and 5cm wide, and 1cm deep. It's a very dark grey colour with a deep red line around the outside, the keypad is also this same deep red. There are three buttons on the front, a call button a call end button/on-off button, and back button. Then a normal keypad where you slide the phone up. There is a small camera at the front of the phone, used for video calling (which you have to set up with your network provider separetly). Two buttons on the right hand side (a hold/keys locked button and camera button) along with the charging station, and a volume key on the left hand side.
When you slide the phone up, you see the camera on the back of the phone, which is 8 megapixels.
The screen is huge, and takes up most of the phones front part, this is touch screen, and the only part of the phone which is not touch screen is imputting numbers and texting. This is all done on the keypad.
The screen has a dial "button", Address "button", and menu "button", as well as a widget (I shall explain in a mo) as well as the time, signal strength, battery status, profile status and whether or not a memory card is inserted.

With the phone you get a microSD card and converter, which you insert and is in use right away, a battery charger, battery, computer lead and headset. Along with a small Users Manual...which I must say is not must use!

USING THE PHONE:
If you have never had a touch phone, don't despair, I had never owned a tough phone when I got this phone, though I had used an iPod touch which I suppose got me used to it. The phone is easy to use, and after just a week I am now picking up my husbands non touch phone and having issues in getting used to using buttons again! You simply touch the item on the screen which you want to go to, so if you want to go into your Contact list, simply touch "Address book", when your done, either click the back button or the end button. When you get a text, it comes up in the middle of the screen, and you simply touch "view" then "reply", and text as you normally would with a normal phone. Now, the only hard bit I have with this is when I want to go back a few spaces, I find it hard to get to the exact place I want to be, you hold your finger on the part for a couple of seconds and a navigation box comes up with triangles for the direction you want your cursor to move, but getting this up is a pain, and will take a little practice I think!

Other than that the phone is used in the same way as any other phones, only instead of having to use up down and scross keys on the phone, you just touch where you want to be, making it quicker to get where you want!
Calling is simple, but I recommend clicking the hold key on the right hand side of the phone when your in a call, so as you don't accidently cut off the person your on the phone to!
Other than that, it's so so soooo easy to get used to using the touch screen, much easier than I imagined it to be! But if you have big fingers you may find it difficult!! And if your hands are sticky/dirty/greasy/grubby you'll mess up your screen so be careful to wash your hands before using!!!!

CUSTOMISATION
This is where the phone falls down. I love this phone lots, but I find customising it very difficult. You can change the font of the phone, there is normal text, and then two more fonts which are cute and curvy and funky. But you can't change the colour of the screen which is black and kind of "boyish", I wanted to change mine to bright colours, which with much cheaper much older phones you can do with no problems, yes you can use your own pictures for your wallpaper etc, but the menu is always the same, you can't change it at all...if you have this phone and have found a way to do it, please do enlighten me!!!! :)

As I said though, you can pop your own pictures on from your computer, as well as songs, and customise this yourself, by simply connecting the phone to the computer via the lead supplied or via bluetooth if you have a dongle! :)

DOWNSIDES:
Along with the customisation thing I just mentioned, there are two other downsides:

Widget: This is on the home screen at all times, you can minimise it, which makes it go to left hand side of the screen, but whenever you touch it by accident it comes up, and I just find it gets in the way, and I just don't want it on my homescreen, I don't use it, and I just think it looks silly there! It's so so easy to find anything you need and so quick, there's no need for it to be there in this phone!! But I've not found a way to get rid of this either, this is a bad thing for me, but for many other people, I suppose it would be something good, you can move things from the widget to your homescreen for easy access, but for me I don't like it and I think for those who don't want it there I think should have the option to not have it!

MESSAGING: Ok well the messaging on this phone is very easy to use don't get me wrong, and it works...but the problem I have is the length of the messages...if you write a pretty short message, it comes up as around 4 messages...now for me who is on Unlimited messages this isn't too bad, but, I was writing messages to my husband last night, and I was only writing a few words, and it was coming up as two messages, it seems much much shorter than in normal phones...again I don't know if this can be changed, I have looked through the user guide, and also had a rummage through the phone, but can't find any way of changing the message length as you can with some phones, again if you know how, please let me know as it would be very helpful, but as far as I can tell you cannot change this which means a pretty short message turns into a very very expensive message, you get 1005 characters per screen, and when you have used all of these 1005 characters you have written 15 text messages.....this doesn't seem right to me. But, it's not really anything too bad for me, but for someone on pay as you go, it would mean a lot of money!!!

The technical specs of this phone are available at http:// uk.samsungmobile. com/mobile-phones/samsung-tocco- ultra-edition- specification. But the basic information is:

Battery Life:
Call time: 4 Hours
Standby: 10 days

JAVA/GPRS/EDGE enabled
Weight: 118g
Dimentions:110 x 51.5 x 12.7mm

Camera:
Camera Resolution 8MP
Digital / Optical Zoom Digatal zoom
LED Flash Dual power LEDs
Auto Focus Yes
Shot Mode Normal/Timer/Multi/Mosaic/Night
Photo Effects Grat/Negative/Sepia

Video:
Video player Yes
Video recording Yes
Video messaging Yes
Video streaming (sending videos over the internet, think YouTube)
Video Calling

The phone is pretty great, though the price of almost £300 if your not on contract, is pretty steep, but I think I would have paid this if I had it for this phone! :-)

Definitely recommended to anyone who likes style as well as functionability in a phone, it's excellent, easy to use, pretty, and has some great features.

Summary: A great phone which I am in love with haha!

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