I've had the Samsung Moment SPH-m900 for Sprint for the past 2 days and all I can say is this phone is a giant mixed bag.
Bottom Line
Good for casual user
Bad for business user.
I researched the phone online before I bought it and came across positive reviews. It's clear though that those people didn't really own the phone and go through it thoroughly.
I'm not one to get on forums and post but I'm writing this so that other people have a real life review of the pros & cons of the Samsung Moment from Sprint.
PROS:
- Awesome display. It looks great.
- Touch screen and slide out keyboard so you don't have to type on those pesky touch pads.
- Android user interface is fun to use
- Excellent rendering of websites
- Quality media player (sound & video)
- Integrates with gmail / google users well
- Seems like a good device design for a CASUAL user - college student type who maybe texts a lot and wants something fun, but doesn't use their phone for anything serious.
- The optical mouse works pretty well, although sometimes it jumps too fast from one item to the next skipping what I want to click on.
CONS:
-
Poor phone for business users (for all the reasons below)
- For my taste, the touch screen does not respond fast enough. I'm used to having a blackberry and flying around from one thing to the next.
- I'm new to touch screens and was worried I would have this exact problem, and it's true. I have trouble clicking on the smaller items or ones close to each other. Too many times over just the last few days I tried to click on one thing only to be sent to the adjacent link. Very annoying. Could I get used to / better at this? ...maybe
- The touch screen is supposed to automatically detect your face when your on a phone call but this is pretty spotty.
I had an important business call come in and when I put the phone to my ear it automatically called someone in my favorites list. When I realized, hung up and got back to my original call, it then opened up a game application which started playing music during my call. Needless to say, I was not amused.
- It almost forces you to use gmail because:
1.
There is no contact sync for Outlook users. In fact, the only way to get your contacts on this phone is to either buy third party sync software - why should I spend extra money on something every other smartphone does for free --- OR you can export a .cvs file and import into a gmail account. But then the phone only sync to the gmail account, it'll never sync to the Outlook or Yahoo or where ever your contacts are stored. Plus this work around does not get your Outlook notes or tasks onto your phone.
2. Ironically google does have a free application you can download to sync to your outlook calendar but again it requires a gmail account. Though I did this and it works (really 3 way sync - phone, gmail, outlook).
3.
The Samsung Moment only pushes emails for gmail accounts. Again, it seems google really wants to force everyone who gets an android phone to switch everything they do over to google. Not cool.
4. For POP / IMAP email accounts, the fastest it checks your email is every 5 minutes.
5. For POP users (read Yahoo), when on a computer the emails you send from your phone you won't be able to see in your computer/online sent mail folder. *Not good*.
6. To try and work around this problem, you can setup your gmail account to check (fetch) your other pop / imap email account. Then it'll push those emails to your phone.
***But the catch here is that it'll only fetch emails for the other address when it feels like it! - Technically google has it setup to fetch emails more frequently if you receive frequent emails and less frequently if you receive occasional emails. Makes sense for the casual user, but for work purposes I can't have google deciding when it wants me to get my emails. I'm on the road a lot and I rely on getting information asap. This sucks!
7. Yahoo email users (like me) can only get emails on their phone if you have a Yahoo Plus account ($19.99/yr). That sucks. That's more of a yahoo problem then an Android one, but still. At least with the blackberry there is a Y!Mail application you can download to get yahoo mail for free with similar functionality as you do on a computer. ...Maybe Yahoo will do the same for Android, but I don't know... Google & Yahoo are competitors.
8. The battery dies fast when using email & the internet with the frequency I do. My blackberry curve never died this quickly. I'm charging this thing twice a day.
So far that's my assesment. I am very seriously considering returning this phone and getting a Blackberry Tour. I'm going to sleep on it.
If anyone has any comments to add to this, PLEASE do. Also if you have solutions to any of the following, let me know!
The Samsung Moment from Sprint runs the original Android, I wonder if these same problems exist on the newer Android 2.0? Can anyone tell me?
Thanks!
Linear Mode
