Samsung SGH's (Samsung SGH-M100)

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Product:	Samsung SGH-M100
Date:	18/07/01 (601 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: -

Disadvantages: -

No-one will ever complain that the ringers are not loud enough on this phone or that the vibrate alert is too soft! Sadly it lacks the escalating ringer that is so useful on other big brands. The earpiece volume goes up impressively loud but does distort a little at full blast.

The screen is fantastically sharp and detailed. Despite its small physical size the number of tiny pixels squashed into the space make for a detailed - if eye-straining - experience. Unfortunately it is not so sophisticated as to adjust the spacing between the letters so that an “i” takes up as much space as an “m”. but, apart from looking less appealing, this is a minor niggle.

Logical and numbered menus mean that you do not have to cursor to your option every time but can simply select the number of the option if you remember it. However, if your are used to Nokia’s menu, or even those on a modern Ericsson, you may begrudge the unnecessary key presses to get to some options.

Many features of the phone are customisable including the start-up animations and screen contrast. You can even choose to turn the service light off so this is the phone for you if you are annoyed by the blinking green LED in top of your phone. A virtually unique gimmick is the voice control for major functions.

The voice command function is probably the most sophisticated on a currently-available mobile. The best setting is to prompt you for the name as soon as you open the flip. However, the voice command feature is also limited to the 20 actions pre-selected by Samsung. Sadly, its use in WAP browsing is limited to launching the browser, a function that has single key activation anyway.

Although an excellent screen for SMS, taking 16 upper case characters per line, there are only three lines viewable at a time. The Tegic predictive text works well but it could be easier and more intutitive to toggle between T9 and standard text entry. Choo
sing recipients from the phone book is also not as simple as in many competitors’ handsets. Although there are a healthy 15 slots for old SMS messages, it takes an excessive five keystrokes to delete each one when the memory is full.

Inputting the settings to use WAP is as complicated as we are now used to. If there are any phone designers reading this: please could you all agree on standardised names for various functions in a WAP phone? The Samsung instruction book is particularly unhelpful in this respect. On the sole page that it devotes to helping you configure the phone it refers to “WDP address” (elsewhere known as a DNS - the long number separated by dots), “NAS phone number”, “PPP server” and “V.32 Transparent”! Eventually you work out what they mean and the “access point” gets you the options for dial-up settings. But this complexity and confusion is unforgivable and simply plays into the hands of people that criticise the technology for not being accessible to the average user.

Design/Style

Samsung has forsaken the loud styling typical of some manufacturers, such as Alcatel, and gone for a sombre grey case with tasteful chrome highlights on the top and side of the phone chassis. The whole phone feels very solid down to the flip which shuts with the same sort of reassuring clunk that a Volvo door does.

The grey stub antenna lets the side down since it is a lighter-coloured plastic than the main case. An unnecessary “i” logo on the flip also seems a slight detour off the taste highway but the large sharp aquamarine-lit screen above balances the diversion. Unfortunately, Samsung decided to show off the screen’s capabilities on the shut-down screen with a childish spinning phone animation accompanied by the words “bye bye”!

Lift the flip and you are presented with an unorthodox set of keys in stainless steel. The k
eys have no gaps between them but are spacious and would suit even the largest of fingers. For the same reason, they are ideal for long fingernails. Disappointingly, the backlighting on the keys was not even and 1, 4 and 7 could not be seen clearly in dim light. Hopefully this was just a demo-version flaw.

The whole phone is very angular and a pleasing departure from the streamlined shapes many new handsets have adopted. The design clearly appeals to the conservative, quality-oriented users that are looking for solid essentials rather than changeable fascias.

The ring tones among the most annoying ever known on a phone and you have 47 to choose from. But you do have 11 great games and voice control, as well as voice dialling.

Vital statistics



Screen size:
- 128 x 64 pixels
- 29 x 20 mm (1.1" x 0.8")
Dimensions -
- 105 x 42 x 17.5mm (4.1" x 1.65" x 0.68")
- 83g(2.9 oz)
- 500mAh Lithium Ion “slim” battery supplied: 2.5 hours talktime, 55 hours standby

- Dual band: 900/1800 Mhz
- Bookmarks: none on phone
- Phone.com browser UP v 4.1.19k

- other features: vibrate alert, no infra-red, 11 games, personal information manager, Tegic T9 predictive text, voice dial (20 names), alarm, to-do list, calculator, voice memo (90 secs), melody composer,

WAP browsing


WAP does not feel like an after-thought on this phone and you have one-touch access to a WAP session. Press the "i/c" button between the up and down cursor buttons and the Phone.com browser is launched immediately. Alternatively option 8 of the main menu also makes a connection.

The screen uses five lines to show WAP pages which is perfectly adequate for the task. Although six or more is far preferable, there are still many WAP phones with less lines to view.

Navigation was overly complex and the user manual inadequate f
or the task, even if you were proficient with WAP. Several options such as “Outbox” and “Offline services” go totally unexplained and we were unable to establish their uses. In addition, there are options for encryption keys which seem unnecessary for any reasonable user, even a seasoned wapper.

Since most of the functions that you would want from a WAP browser were either disabled or unusable, WAP was easy to operate. It was a little confusing that the softkey option for “back” would swap between the left and right softkeys depending on the function.

To bring up the list of WAP-related options you need to press the * key where you get the choice of going to the homepage, bookmarking and reloading. However, when we used it with Vodafone through Vizzavi, we were unable to bring up the bookmarks or find a option to enter our own URL. In fact we found different errors when attempting to use the bookmarking option depending on the gateway and service provider we selected.

The same was true of the “mark site” function which presumably should have added sites to ones’ bookmark list. The “Homepage” function in the “advanced” sub-menu responded “feature not available” and most options used while at the Mviva or Breathe portals returned “404 error”. Clicking “back” then returned “cannot locate server internal” and a further click of back returned you to the original page.

We had to conclude that there was no way of storing any bookmarks on the phone: a major failing. We have in the past complained about phones that only allowed five bookmarks but this takes the biscuit!

There also seems no way to view the browser offline. To edit WAP URLs you have to simultaneously connect to the gateway as well as launching the browser.

On the positive side the phone processes the images and brings up pages
quickly. It was robust and was not as inclined to crash with long sessions as some phones.

WAP-related features


In the setting menu you have an option labelled “browser settings” which allows you to choose your dial-ups or “proxy”. A satisfactory five are easily chosen and just as easily changed. However, if you want to swap between gateways and thus sites you need to connect and disconnect. The phone seems to offer only set gateway/service provider options here and no separate bookmark list.

When browsing there is no indication how long you have been using that connection. This is a major factor when WAP calls cost around 10p a minute for most people and you can easily lose track of how long you have been online while reloading pages or reading articles.

There is a particularly neat feature that allows you to set how long the backlight stays on: particularly useful when WAP browsing and you are reading a page for a few seconds without a key press. If the backlight does go out then it can be restored without disturbing the navigation by using the volume keys on the side of the phone. You will want to minimise the time that you use the backlight since the quoted battery life is one of the lowest we have seen on a new phone at only 55 hours standby.

OVERALL

A stunning sharp screen, high quality construction, sophisticated (some might say boring)looks and great games make this a highly desirable phone. A very inflexible WAP browser pushes it far down the list if you plan to use the mobile Internet extensively. This is a real shame because the phone is excellent value at GBP 50 with a one-year contract.

Summary: