I’ve had a mobile phone since the days when the 088 analog network was the only one available. I originally signed up with Eircell (who were later bought out by Vodafone). When Esat Digifone, (who eventually became O2), became the second mobile operator, I signed up with them. And up until a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been with them ever since.
I have to admit that I am a mobile phone junkie. I’m on my fourth phone this year alone. I change my phone regularly. Not because I have to have the latest and greatest, but because I’ve yet to find a phone that I feel 100% comfortable with. No matter what the phone, there’s always something that annoys me. Eventually these annoyances become so great that I have to try another one.
Apart from my first two phones, I’ve always had a pre-pay phone. In other words, I purchase phone credit, top up my phone and talk and text until my credit is gone and I start again. I’ve realised over the last few months that I’ve been spending on average €50 – €60 a month on credit. Given that bill pay phones can be had for €20 a month, I thought it was about time that I moved back.
Before I moved, I did some checking. My requirements were pretty basic: pay about €50 per month and get as many free minutes and texts as possible. After checking with O2, Vodafone, Meteor and 3 Ireland, I eventually settled on Meteor with a Talk 300 plan.
With this plan I get 300 minutes and 80 texts per month for €50. This is a fairly average plan for this price point but the clincher was that Meteor offer free calls to any number, any network, every weekend. So from 8pm on Friday to 8am on Monday all my voice calls are free. It’s hard to beat that.
Signing up is easy enough. Call into any Meteor Store with proof of identity and address, and you’ll be set up immediately. When I purchased my bill pay phone, I chose to keep my number. The sales assistant advised me that the process of moving my number from one operator to another takes an hour or two to complete. In reality it took about 30 minutes. As soon as I turned on my new Meteor phone, it registered on the network immediately, and my old O2 phone told me that I had an unregistered SIM card inserted.
So now on to the phone. As I said, I’ve had a lot of phones, and have had problems with all of them. Not hardware faults, but issues with the User Interface (UI), or the usability of the phone. In the last year I’ve had phones from Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson. This time I went with a phone from Samsung – the SGH-D900.
From an external point of view, the D900 looks positively sexy. It’s slim, light and it’s sliding number pad really decreases the overall size of the phone. Unfortunately, that’s about the best part of the phone.
From the moment I turned on the phone, I knew that this was one phone that was going out of it’s way to annoy me. The very first thing that you see when powering up the phone is a flashy ad for the Samsung FunClub (I’m not going to link to it here). There’s no way to turn it off and it has to waste a lot of battery power. I was away from home overnight and I forgot to charge my phone before I left, so my battery died. When I tried to turn on the phone, all I got was this annoying ad, before the phone powered down. Amazingly there was enough battery power to play this ad in full several times, but not enough for me to enter my pin and access my phone. It makes me wonder that if the ad was not being played, how much more time would I have had before my phone became completely dead?
I’m a firm believer that no matter what the platform, a UI should be intuitive and efficient as possible. I shouldn’t have to press 10 different keys to complete a task that should be achievable in 2 key presses. The Samsung UI designers obviously didn’t take efficiency into account when they sat down and got to work. Here’s an example. To send a text message you have to press the following keys:
- Menu
- Messages
- Create New Message
- Text Message
- Type your message
- Options
- Press up/ down to highlight “Send Only” or “Save and Send”
- Select
- Options
- Phonebook
- Search for the number you want to send the message to.
- OK
- Options
- Select
- Options
- Send
That’s 16 menus and buttons to navigate before you can even send a simple text message. Usability was not high on the agenda for Samsung. A word of warning: The D900 will not save any of your sent text messages unless you specifically choose that option every time you send a message.
The next biggest annoyance is the message tones. I’m not 16, so I don’t want a fancy message tone. A couple of beeps will do just fine, but the preinstalled tones don’t give you this option. There is no way to change it, so you’re stuck with using a tone that will within the first 10 minutes drive you crazy.
One of the selling points for this phone was that it comes with a bluetooth connection. Initially I had no problem connecting it with my MacBook, but when I tried to browse the phone contents I was met with a blank screen. I could browse the various folders on the phone, but there were no files visible at all. It was only much later that I discovered that you have to make your files visible to other bluetooth devices. This is despite the fact that you have successfully paired with another device. It’s an extra unneeded step which seems to be designed to annoy the end user.
So far, it seems like it’s all bad news about this phone. Not quite. The call quality is good, battery life is generally excellent and the inbuilt MP3 player and camera are very good. Those pros unfortunately aren’t enough to save this phone. In my opinion, this is one of the worst phones that I’ve ever used. It’s annoying at a level that I didn’t think any phone could reach. Because I’ve just signed up with Meteor, I’m stuck with it until I can get an upgrade from Meteor.
