Samsung MM-A700 / SPH-A700
Average Ratings
Samsung A700 support
While this phone has lots of hi-tech operations, and works well, it lacks the most basic support of a phone - no software to link to a pc. Cannot even download your phone book to save it, so that when your phone blows out (like mine did) and you have to get a replacement, you get to start all over re-entering 180 phone numbers the old-fashioned one key at a time method. It is unbelievable to me that anyone would produce a hi-tech phone in that time of pc-interconnectivity, and fail to provide that support for a phone that costs $400. If I had it to do over again, i would not buy this phone.
Misses on the basics
Sprint missed the boat on the fundamentals with this one. Had Samsung/Sprint worked out some of the bugs before they released this phone, I could easily rate this phone a 4.5 or 5.0. Here are some of the issues I found that made my decision to return it a very easy one:
- This phone is very 'buggy'. Something is going on within it's software that causes it to hang during certain operations. I've had experiences where it wouldn't dial out or the browser froze. In both cases the only remedy was to take off the battery to force a reset.
- Incoming caller's voice is choppy, meaning it seems to intermittently break-up -- it's a very weird and subtle effect, but noticeable during all calls, regardless of signal strength.
- No way to control the camera with the flip closed, yet they designed this phone with a swivel camera and dedicated camera button on the side???
- No volume control capability with flip closed.
- Menu display choices are limited to two, graphic styles (no simple list-type). While they both look great, they are inherently slow.
- Ships with a charging cradle (nice), but no provision to use a data cable while charging (bad). If you need to sync your phone routinely, you'll find this to be a cumbersome arrangement.
- Mega-pixel camera, but limited memory and no expansion slot.
- Low light (not night time) pix are terrible, just plain terrible. I ran a simple comparison test here and took several photos in the same lighting conditions with the A700 and a Treo600. Even at it's highest res and quality settings AND with the flash, once uploaded and viewed on-line, the A700 shots looked worse than those taken with the Treo's VGA camera and NO flash!
Sorry guys, but for $400, I need more than then a bunch of bells and whistles.
