The Armchair Politician

I think I’ve finally found a phone that doesn’t suck. At least, not as much as every other phone. My old Motorola flip phone was the worst phone I believe I’ve ever come in contact with, and my old Nokia (the 6800) was okay, but had its own flaws.

The Samsung t509. It’s everything a phone should be, and absolutely nothing more. Camera, contact list, text messaging, and…well, that’s it. It’s the first phone I think I’ve actually liked, rather than tolerated. I think it supports voice recording, but if so it doesn’t get in the way. It’s also damn small.

The thing also acts reasonably intelligently. I can assign a photo or ringtone to a contact by either going through my contact menu and assigning it, or going through my file manager, finding the song I want, and saving it to the user. I’m not forced into one way of doing it, I can use whichever is easiest from where I’m currently at.

That’s not to say the phone doesn’t have its faults. It does, but they aren’t critical flaws. To list a few:

• It’s easy to accidentally dial the wrong digit. The buttons are all angled up slightly, but this causes you to hit the digit above the one you’re trying to press, if you’re too high up on the button.
• The default menu option on assigning a ringtone sucks. When you finally pick a ringtone to assign to a person, and choose it, you get a small menu that asks if you want to use that one, or download a new one. 99% of the time, you’re going to want to use the one you’re selecting. However, the default action is to go to the t-zones ringtone site. This wouldn’t be so bad, except t-zones is absurdly slow, and the only way to escape out of it is to return to the main screen (i.e., you have to go all the way back to assign a ringtone to the contact again).
• Automatic typing completion is a little bit hard to use if the word you want isn’t in their database. Plus, I don’t think it automatically learns which words you use more often. Still, it’s the first one that I haven’t felt an urgent desire to immediately turn off. Which is good, I suppose, because I haven’t figured out how to turn it off anyway.
• You can download wallpapers from t-zones, which blanket the full screen. However, images you save to your phone (via email) are automatically resized to be smaller, preventing you from putting your own full-screen backgrounds on the phone. To be fair, I think this is a t-mobile issue rather than one dealing with the phone. Also, I suspect if I were to do it over bluetooth I wouldn’t have any issues.
• Ringing volume doesn’t go high enough. Really, this is only an issue with some of the ringtones I’ve downloaded. They’re inherently soft, but the phone plays them too softly, even at maximum volume. Most ringtones are okay, but I wish there was a way to turn the volume up even louder. And this is coming from someone who hates extremely loud, distracting ringtones.
• Getting ringtones to the phone is still a pain in the ass if you don’t have bluetooth. Really, this is another fault of t-mobile’s, rather than Samsung. The cellular providers make it annoying to transfer songs and media to your phone, because they’d rather you buy these things from their own store. Fuck off, and just give me an “upload to phone” button, where I can put in a gif, jpg, mp3, or midi, and have it SMSed (for free, ahem) to my phone.

That’s all I can think of for now, but it’s really small complaints. Overall I’m very satisfied with the phone (although I wish it did have more than 10M of internal memory, given how cheap flash memory is these days).