Nixta Sinks

I tend to keep my gadgets flowing in at a modest rate compared to some, some others, and then indeed more others, but of late I've had the pleasure of purchasing a few things. The most recent and what has prompted me to write this right now, is my Samsung D500. Looking at photos of it online at the suggestion of MiniMo, I wasn't too impressed. It seemed nerdy and chunky compared with the delightful Motorola V3 which I had until then been contemplating, though frankly I don't think I'd consider many other phones on the market right now. It almost strikes me that phones were smaller a couple of years back. Perhaps the downwards progression in size has just stalled and that's what's bothering me.

Anycrap. Verdict on the Samsung D500? Bells and Whistles. Absolute: 70%. Relative: 95%.

Don't get me wrong - it's a sweet looking phone - it feels good in the hand (to start with), and when you turn it on you're blown away by the screen. Simply fantastic. The specifications are awesome. 80Mb RAM, 262K colour TFT screen, Polyphonic/MP3 ringtones, etc. Oh, don't forget the 1.3 Megapixel camera *with* flash. All very good, and better than most phones out there at the moment (nearly all the phonts I know about anyway). The Bluetooth implementation is great. I was able to browse my (Rob's) old Z600 phone and pick up all the photos and even a less irritating MIDI ringtone from it (what the fuck are Samsung thinking - there's not a single usable ringtone on there, unless you're some 15-year-old babychav). Shame I couldn't browse the phone book and just pull it all over - I had to do that one by one, not having a bluetooth thing for my PC.

What pisses me off about this phone? Text entry. You can't fucking type effectively or efficiently. I've just come from Ericsson's T9 on the Z600 and Samsung's festering T9 sucks hairy balls. Here are things Samsung doesn't do:

• Remember that I like typing my fucking messages using T9 - it defaults to la-di-da multitap.
• Realise that if I delete to a capital letter, I want the letter I type in its place to be a captial letter.
• Allow me to revisit a word that came out wrong earlier in the message and apply T9 to it again. I have to delete the whole bastard and retype it. Now that really pisses me off.
• Allow me to have vibrate and ring at the same time so that I don't have to not notice the phone vibrating for 10 seconds before it starts to make a noise. Come on Samsung. It's just one more option on your ring settings menu. Sort it out.
  

I don't know about you, but I don't look at the screen or sometimes even the phone while I'm typing texts, and I'm arsed if I'm going to remember that I have to explicitly select "then" over "them" before I press space or I have to type the whole thing again. What a crock of shit. With the Z600, you place the cursor to the right of the word and click left. It selects the word and you have all your T9 options.

Spelling a new word - you have to scroll through all the bad options before you can get to the Spell item. It's not really a scroll. It's a one-way trip through the dictionary. When you reach the last item, you can press spell, or you can press Next again and go back to the beginning and can't spell again. FUCK ME DUDLEY! And I can't find a way to edit the dictionary, though to be fair it took me a year to realise I could do that on the T600.

Now. If I am at the start of a message or after a full-stop and a space, or even after a colon, you might expect that the next thing I'd want is a capital letter. Not Samsung. They do you the courtesy of putting you into a new message with the first charater to be capitalised, but you start typing and then realise the bastards didn't put you in T9 so you have to delete to the start and begin again. Only now the cursor isn't a capital letter, so you have to go back to the start again and replace the first letter. Oooooh! It makes me want to cry because it ruins such a great phone.

I sincerely hope I'm missing something here because this text entry method is retarded.

Calling someone is similarly a frustration of the good and the bad. You type in a couple of letters, scroll to them, and pick their name. Now, by default I always call this chap's mobile? Is that selected. Mmmmm. No. I have to then scroll to it and click the green send button. Why can't I click the OK button to call them? I've used it to navigate this far. Now I have to switch to another button or else I end up editing the bloody thing. Pile-o-shite. I'll get used to that though, but the lack of a default number is something of a bastard.

Also, there's bugger all games and goodies on it, and no data cable by default. That's what I liked about the Motorola V3 package - all inclusive. Again, I can fix all that, but for the price of the bloody phone they could chuck in a CD and a 5 quid cable. Honestly.

I imagine that some of these things are merely my inexperience in the Samsung world. I shall see with time. If anyone has any tricks with working with Samsung phones, please let me know. I eagerly await enlightenment.

My next gadget was an iPod shuffle. It said "buy me" so I did. What's to say? Nothing. It does what it says. I had some teething problems where all the songs disappeared from it, but that hasn't happened since day 2, and my confidence is slowly returning that I can trust it with my data. Makes a damned useful pen-drive too, if you have an exposed USB port - doesn't always fit in the alcove-positioned USB ports of some desktop PCs. Cheaper than buying a 1Gb pen drive from PC World anyway. Those overpriced rip-off artists.

Up yours, I'm going to see how I can make my phone actually make me aware that someone's calling.