Value for money. Review on Samsung X-200

I have been using the Samsung X 200 for the last 2 months. Till date I have always been a hardcore supporter of Motorola phones because of the stable and tested technological features. This time I bought a Samsung only because I was travelling out of India and had limitation on my expenditure, as I lost my Motorola V3.

I was pleasantly surpised on quality of the phone, the feature set provided in the price and functionality of the freely downloadable phone software from Samsung website.

To start with it is a very small, light, handy, sleek phone with a decent battery life. The melody tones are quite basic and can termed as cheap tunes and one can make out when it rings that the phone is not a high end phone. The most important feature is that it can communicate to a laptop through the Infrared port and works seamlessly as a modem when accessing internet if the gprs services are enabled on the sim. Samsung provides a very user friendly software freely available on the website and it surprised me when it had all the PIM features at the price. The internet access software has built in gprs access numbers for many countries and it works perfectly in India, UAE, Europe. I beleive this is a terrific feature that works absoultely seamlessly without messing up any settings on the computer.

What still lacks in any of the Samsung phones are details in features and how user friendly are these features. A very simple example is that of a Speaker phone while the call is on, one has to press a button 3 times to activate the speaker phone. The quality of a conference call is no where near a Motorola or a Siemens phone. There are voice breaks when having a conference call. If it is more than 3 you are dead. Samsung claims 6 party but whne I had a 4 party conference one could hardly underatand due to the frequent voice cuts. It was not due to a low coverage area but I think it is an inherent problem.

What also surprised me is that when you receive a call, the phone rings through the same speaker that is used to hear the caller. Normally there are 2 different speakers oin a phone, one as aringer and the other is a standard speaker for hearing. This being a 22khz speaker, affects the quality of the sound and is too loud and one has to often lower the volume and then remember to increase when the call is over as the ringing volume will remain low if you dont change after the call is over.

Most intriguing issue is that after a 10 minute conversation, the phone's backside becomes hot. This used to be the case 10 years back and currently only for CDMA phones. It was unheard of a GSM new technology phone getting hot after a 10 minute conversation. Not really acceptable.

Will not comment on advanced features like - Blue tooth, edge, http browser, mp3 players, camera as it is not Samsung's forte. I am of the personal opinion that such technology intensive areas should be managed only by technology leaders like Motorola, Siemens, Ericsson and to a certain extent Nokia. Samsung could manufacture low end phones and LCD screens and provide them to the other cell phone manufacturers.

Verdict - A very basic phone with standard functionality, value for money. I would not buy a Samsung phone again.