fortes.com

I ordered Samsung E105 from Amazon today (currently negative $100 after rebates). It should arrive within the week with a new service provider (T-Mobile); I will keep the same number. I don’t have the cables for transferring numbers from my phone book, so don’t be surprised if I don’t recognize phone numbers when called.

Many of you have had the misfortune of hearing me rant about my cell phone and service before, but I just love to hear myself talk (I read my writing aloud when lonely), so you’ll have to suffer through this rant once more.

My current (soon to be previous) phone was the Samsung n400. Some of my issues stemmed from the phone, while others were issues with Sprint; apparently, I’m willing to blame most of the issues on Sprint, considering I’ve gone and purchased another Samsung phone.

• Text Messaging: Completely broken.

  • Receiving a text message was cumbersome. Because the Sprint doesn’t have native support for text messaging, you must connect to the Internet in order to read a text message. This can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute, if successful (roughly two-thirds of the time). Once connected, you’re just 4 short key presses away from reading your message.

    Text messages occasionally arrived hours after they were sent. I once received a text message 12 hours after it was sent (thus missing out on a hot date, but that’s another (fake) story).

  • As far as I could tell, sending a text message was impossible. My limited attempts were incredibly frustrating due to the non-native support for text messaging. Messages can only be composed while connected to the “Internet” (see above), and you cannot access the address book while connected. This means you either need to have memorized the number you’re messaging or have the number written down beforehand. (If you’re fortunate enough to be responding to a message you’ve already received, you can hit the Reply link and skip this step)

    Once you’ve managed to enter the recipient’s phone number (all input is awkward because you’re using an on-phone web browser), you type your message in a textbox that is about 10 characters wide. Additionally, I have no idea how to select alternate words while using T9 (tried most everything) and editing a character out of a T9-created word is impossible.

    After enduring the number and message-entry process, you may attempt to send your message by pressing the “OK” button. The phone’s web browser will display a status bar momentarily, and then … nothing. No confirmation, no failure message; nothing. I’ve never successfully sent a message, perhaps I was always doing something wrong, but I have no way of knowing.

• Time Keeping: Sprint phones require network access in order to tell time; there have been times while traveling that I would have loved to use the phone as an alarm but could not. (Also, this means that you miss an alarm if your phone is off service).
• Alarm: The alarm will not go off if the ringer is off, even though there are distinct Ringer volume and Alarm volume settings. I fell for this trick a couple of times, thinking the phone had lost service, and missed a few more hot dates. I haven’t found a way to blame this problem on Sprint, and hopefully Samsung has fixed this in their other phones.
• Battery Life: Much less than advertised and will drain quickly if the signal is not strong; I understand this is common across phones, however I’ve had charge times as low as 9 hours in downtown Seattle (one and a half days is typical).
• Address Book: Minor gripes here: scrolling is slow and only three entries are shown at a time, editing a number is cumbersome, and there are silly rules around “speed dial” numbers.

(To all those who couldn’t wait until I started a writing again, consider this entry proof of how uninteresting my life is)