White made the difference!. Review on Samsung D800

My Samsung D800 I should say was an impulsive buy. I was among the people who always believed phones should be from Nokia or Motorola. I was planning to get the Nokia 6280 but ended up buying this one. The executive at the Link store told me about this 'latest' Samsung phone which is as slim as a Moto Razr with a better screen and all stuff.

He told me he has the white variant which no one else in UK can sell (Not sure how true). I had seen the black one but was not impressed with it. However when I saw the white one. ..I fell in love with it. I never bought a white gadget till date, but was impressed with the neat look of this phone.

The finish looked like one of those Apple gadgets. So I decided to go for it even without knowing the features :) I got this phone free on a 18 month contract with O2 for 35 £ each month. I get 1000 free mins and some texts (I don’t know how many) every month. I also got a Jabra Bluetooth head set free.

Now about the phone:

The first thing which strikes is that this phone is real slim and extremely light. You can easily carry it around in your pocket. The sliding mechanism is best in its class. It would not be wrong to say that Samsung has created the best slider phones. The Nokia slider mechanism does not feel as good as this.

Slide open the phone, you see a neatly made keypad which resembles the one in Moto Razr. Some people who use SMS may not find this good. But for me this is good enough as I hardly use my mobile much for SMS or playing games.

The screen is big in size and has good resolution. The fonts used in the menus are ‘huge’ and people who use glasses can read them without actually wearing glasses. I personally like small fonts. However this is not a cause for concern. The brightness of the screen can be varied for power saving and the phone by default has some good wallpapers.

Coming to the features, this is a little more than a basic phone. This is not a PDA or something with which you can plan your year ahead. It has a music player and limited memory of something close to 80 MB. It should hold 15 mp3s which is not good enough. The worst part is that the memory cannot be upgraded. This is a huge let down. But the music player sounds very good, almost comparable to an ipod!! But the limited memory makes it useless.

The phone has 1.3MPx camera. This again is old stuff as 2MPx is the order of the day. It takes photos in widescreen mode which is good. The pictures are good when viewed on a PC. Video capabilities are real poor and useless.

However the actual call handling features are good. Voice quality is excellent and the phone works even in places where signal strength is poor. This is the most important thing and this phone manages to do this well. The speaker phone is not loud and may be annoying to use at times.

Bluetooth works well. I exchanged files with many other mobile phones. The voice quality is excellent even on a blue tooth head set (again depends on the headset). I did not find the software supplied with the phone to be of any use. I tried to set up the connectivity with the USB data cable supplied but it just did not work even after following the manual step by step. However I was not bothered as I can use Bluetooth to transfer any files.

Other features are not of great interest. It has java support so there is no end to the games you can download and play. It has all basic stuff like calculator, world time (looks like there is a bug with this), stop clock etc. ..etc ..

Battery life, it works for max 2 days once fully charged. This is acceptable as all phones with huge bright screens have the same problem. If you are looking for battery life never buy phones with TFT screens.

To conclude this is neither a feature rich phone nor a multimedia phone. The main reason I bought this phone is it looked classy in the white colour. I would’ve never bought it in black. If you are looking for feature rich phone don’t go for this one. One thing which I really hate is the memory. For such an excellent mp3 player, one should have the option to buy more memory. It does not have FM radio also!! But what sold the phone to me are the white colour and the classy look. Of course the basic call features are really good. I would suggest you guys should check out the white variant before making your final decision when you upgrade your phone next time.

Your comments are welcome :)