This is probably the worst phone I have ever used. It's steaming tu rd
of a phone I recommend nobody buys. It is both leaps and bounds
backwards in usability.

Physically the phone is fine. The camera specs are ok and touch
buttons are clean. Unlike earlier models which have clean lines, this
one has an ugly cut across the bottom but I don't care about
aesthetics enough to go into too much detail.

There are three fundamentally screwed up errors which prove beyond a
shadow of a doubt that the phones designers and electronics guys with
no knowledge of writing good software.

The first is simple. When you start a call the keypad locks so you
can't hang up. With 2 uber-touch sensative dialling buttons the phone
often rings your ex girlfriend or the girl you like at 2am when you
were just browsing your phone book. You cannot hang up. This is a
pain. It should be easy to hang up after you initiate a call without
having to jump through hoops. Only if you change the entire behaviour
of the phone to "cancel ANY operation on close" do you stand a chance
of getting around this irritating bug.

The second is even worse. predictive text is broken. YES BROKEN
COMPLETELY. Say I want to write 'Phill'. I press the correct keys
74455 and it writes 'Shill'. Then a drop down appears with the word
phill in it. I press the down key and select it. But... if i'm writing
this at the end of a message, the drop down box of suggestions appears
above the correction. press down here by accident because you were
looking the screen for feedback causes it to do something weird
pissing you off. Sometimes if I'm lucky i do 7445 at the top of the
screen, then it wraps the word onto the next line meaning it's
extremely hard to write a message unless you concentrate completely
and wait for the options to appear. This is experience talking right
now. Do not buy this phone.

Let's move on to software mistake three which is really fun. The
'cancel' and 'undo' buttons are inconsistently mapped. Say, you type a
message and get a word wrong and need to go back. The hang up button
(with a C on it) deletes the last character (like a backspace key).
However the top right touch button says "back" does not. Press it by
accident and your asked if you want to save to drafts. Answer Yes and
your message is saved to drafts and you are returned to the main
screen, press no and your messages is forgotten and your still taken
back to the home screen. When asked this question you cannot say "I
change my mind, I want to keep editing this message" regardless of
what you want you are taken back to the main screen.

When you finish writing your message you press the menu key. It
doesn't offer you a save option if you haven't already entered a
telephone number in the box at the beginning of the message. however
to cancel looking at the menu and go back to editing you have to press
'back', not cancel. The buttons have been reversed. One cancels
everything giving the you option to save to drafts before it takes you
somewhere you don't want to go, the other lets you escape the menu.

It's this level of inconsistency through out the phone software that
completely destroys this phones usability and makes it a pain rather
than a pleasure. I consider this phone to be seriously flawed and I
strongly recommend you do not buy one.

I have an honours degree in Software engineering and as a programmer,
unlike the people below, I do not consider these annoyances to be
tolerable. From this day forward I will never buy another Samsung
product as long as I live and I suggest, for your own sanity, you do
to!

This phone is unusable. It's so bad I have been forced to use un-
predictive text mode hurtling my experience of phones back into the
ninties.

I flashed the firmware 3 days ago and these issues have not been dealt
with. Are there alternative operating systems / firmware products that
I can use instead? Anyone got linux running on it?

Is there anything I can do? If not then I will just throw this heap of
sh.t into the dustbin. It's not worth getting this frustrated / upset
over a mobile phone.

Phillip Taylor