Samsung D500 Mobile phone! (Samsung SGH-D500)

Member Name: missy0303

Product:	Samsung SGH-D500
Date:	12/12/05 (3778 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great camera, video messaging, mp3 player, good memory

Disadvantages: tends to slide open when taking out of pocket, no option to add more memory.

I have had my Samsung for about 8 months now and feel I have good enough experience of it now, to tell others about it.

The phone itself is a slide action phone with a 262,144 TFT colour screen….this just means the screen is very clear and precise. You can even change the colour (skin) of the screen I will go into more detail of that later.
The casing of my phone is a dark grey and charcoal two tone effect but a friend of mine has the exact same phone and hers is black casing and I have since seen it in silver too, I prefer the black personally, it just looks more stylish.

It is an easy to use phone, Once you have stored your contacts to your address book, you can simply access it by pressing the right soft key on the phone, and scroll down to reach the desired number and then just press the green phone key and you're calling that person.
Adding a contact is simple to do also, just access the menu by the left soft key and find address book, click on that and an option on that screen is add a contact, You simply type in the name of the contact and the number and then save and hey presto you've got a contact.

The only slight problem is the predictive text messaging which can be temperamental in this phone, it will recognise a huge variety of words and will let you add new ones which you use most often, but I have found even after adding them, if I haven't used it in a little while it forgets it again, I don't know why this is but it can be a pain, but nothing major.

You can of course turn off the predictive text but this also has to be done every time you text so it's usually easier for me to just leave it on!

I got my phone free on the Orange network when I signed up for a one year contract, but you can buy it for varying prices on a pay and go tariff. It pays to shop around.

***Features***

• 1.3 MP digital camera.
• Photo Messaging.
• Video Messaging.
• MP3 Player.
• Bluetooth.
• Access to GPRS wap.
• Infrared.

The camera is great quality and using a dongle (which can be bought for around £10 on eBay) and the Bluetooth connection, you can upload your photos to pc or download photos and music from pc to phone. I think all new phones should have Bluetooth as standard nowadays but this is sadly not happening yet. You can also transfer data between other phones which are Bluetooth enabled.

You can also exchange music and photos free using the infra red connectivity with other compatible mobile phones, You can also get Bluetooth headsets which can give excellent hands free ability for when driving or on the go.

It’s very easy to use the camera and video function of the phone, you simply slide open the phone and pressing the button on the right on the side of the phone you instantly get the camera menu.
1. Take Photo. Press once then simply aim and shoot…press OK to take photo. Also by pressing the left soft key you get the camera options, shooting mode, effects, frames, timer, go to photo album, settings, flash, and camera short cuts. These really help to personalise your photographs.
2. Record Video. As with the photos you simply aim and shoot your clip. You can change the settings by pressing the options soft key, which will let you change the effects, timer, and the settings button which will determine the quality and length of your clip. You can also have the flash turned on when in camcorder mode.
3. Photos.
4. My Photos.
5. Video Clips.
6. My Video Clips.
A great feature of the camera is that you can take a multi-shot (6, 9 or 15 photos either in normal or high mode) of something which may be moving, and if you scroll though the pictures it looks a bit like a video shot.

The MP3 function of the phone is brilliant, the only downfall is that there is no option to add a memory card to expand the memory the phone already has.
SMS, MMS, Photos, video clips, games, ringtones and MP3’s all take up memory so make sure you have enough left on your phone before downloading something else. You can check this by pressing the menu soft key and scrolling around to get the “settings tab” You then press this tab and scroll down till you get the memory status option.
I have at the moment got 17 mp3’s (full songs) 1 short video clip, 59 photos and still have 29194KB of memory left, I’ve used 67059KB so you can see roughly how much you can have left. So there is approximately 1MB of memory in total I think.

You can download excellent graphic games on this phone. I have 3 games on mine at the moment all of which I downloaded for around £3 each on the Orange world through my phone! There are loads to choose from. You get 3 games that come with the phone which are ok but not to my liking so I deleted them. I cannot remember what they were called unfortunately, but one was a football game, one was a platform game and the other a shooting game.

The phone does have a reasonable battery life, If on standby and not being used much I can get about 3-4 days without having to charge it up. I only have to charge it up for a few hours as well which is great.
But if you are using the camera/mp3 player or playing games then expect to charge it more often.

You can send the usual SMS text messages and also picture messages (MMS) and video messages to other compatible phones, The memory for holding messages is quite good too, I’ve had about 90+ messages in my inbox and also in my outbox before I am asked to delete messages.

The phone is very easy to personalise, you can change the skin colour….
Menu > Settings > Display Settings > Skin.
Take photos and make them your wallpaper….
Menu > Settings > Display Settings > Wallpaper and then choose which photo you want to make your default.
You can also personalise your calls, click on a contacts name and scroll down their contact page till you see a little bell, clicking on this will bring up the menu that allows you to change the ringtone, this can mean you can personalise each person who calls you to have different ringtones and also you can add a photo of the person who is calling so you can see who it is without having to read the name!

Overall this is a wonderful phone and possibly the best I have had and have seen about lately. The only way I would upgrade my phone at the moment is if I can have the same features as this phone but with choice to add more memory….I do stress though that the memory in this phone is sufficient enough for most people, but if you want a lot of music then it would be handier to have more memory.

Summary: A great all round mobile phone which is robust and has great features.

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