Electric Ode: Samsung M8800

I've used the M8800 for a couple of months now. It was gifted to me after someone else got a phone upgrade on their contract and gave me this one. This process is known as a 'shut-upgrade.' I can't describe how intently I hate this phone. I put up with it for a full couple of months, before reverting to my old, clapped out piece-of-shit instead. Let's have a run through of the M8800:

  It looks good, and certainly feels like a high-tech bit of kit in your hands. The camera is ostensibly very good, an 8.0mp, with all the various impressive shutter speeds you would expect. However, it might be the least user-friendly phone ever made. Let's look at taking photos. Getting to the camera from a locked screen takes an age. Instead of, as you would hope, unlocking the phone and then pressing the camera button to get the camera, you have to go through an elaborate song and dance, which lets you fanny around instead of enjoying the moment. I was trying to take a picture of some wildlife (nothing interesting) and in the time it my girlfriend to take seven photos, I had just taken my first, this is why: After getting it this phone out of the protective sleeve, unlocking it, selecting the main menu, and then selecting the camera from the main menu (you can't select camera as a shortcut, nor can you select it merely by pressing the camera button, setting the M8800 apart from every other phone with a camera to have ever existed). If you can be bothered going to the menu, waiting for the camera logo to show, choosing the correct setting, and then holding the camera button down for around three seconds, you can get great pictures.

  Balloons up in celebration of finally getting the camera ready to take a picture.

  Reviewing the photos takes an age, and deleting ones you don't want takes even longer. It is impossible to review pictures quickly, instead you have to look at each and every photo you have taken, scrolling through them slowly as you do. There is no way to scan from the earliest photo to the latest, so once you finally reach the end, you have to go all the way back to the beginning. There is no wi-fi application, which seems a huge oversight, for something which is basically a camera which happens to have some phone aspects.

 As to the phone itself, the main problem, other than the enormous amount of time it takes to do anything, is the unresponsive touchscreen. If you receive a message, the typical transaction will be: unpack the phone from its protective pouch, press the hold button (if it hasn't already been pressed accidentally), get the stupid stylus out, press 'read message', wait four seconds (I just timed it) to get to the inbox, press the newest message, wait too long for that to open, and then read it. If you want to reply, and there is reception, you can use the least helpful predictive text of all time (typing in 'ok' at first came up with 'homo' - apt, perhaps, but pretty useless) and then try in vain to get the stylus to touch the button you want (it won't). If you want more screen, you can tilt the phone on its side to get a 'QWERTY' screen, which makes things easier, but, again, takes forever. There is also no d-pad, so you have to use the stylus to move your cursor to correct the errors which will occur. The result: a quick response to a text will take minutes instead of seconds.

Using your fingers on the touch screen is nearly impossible, especially if you have fat, ape-thumbs like me. The alternative, the stylus, is particularly unresponsive; scanning from one screen to another takes ages, noticeably longer than it should do. When it comes to calling or texting contacts, contacts aren't listed easily, and there is no easy bit where you can select contacts of a certain letter. So, if you want to contact, for example, 'ZZ Top' you have to slowly scroll down past everyone else. It is incredibly irritating.

The reception is sub-par, and even in the middle of cities I struggle to make calls. The act of texting takes forever, even without the  long delays of typing (see above); after you write it, instead of sending straight away, it asks if you would like to send multiple messages, then you have to choose send it. If it doesn't send (and this happens often) there is no option to push the message when you get to somewhere with reception, so it sits in your out-box like a fat kid in time-out. It doesn't tell you that it hasn't sent, so your friends start hating and resenting you even more than I hate this phone.

  The battery life is appalling, needing to be charged every day. It was worse before I changed it from the 3G always on option, where you would go from full charge to a warning in less than two hours. the headphones and music features are good, but listening to music eats up batteries like nothing else. Other than that, and a useless calender, the features are nearly non-existent, and the whole thing is incredibly responsive, and very very sloooow to use. I've hinted at the pointlessness of having a hold button which can turned on or off with the power of a though, so won't go into it further. The whole phone, and every feature, seems to have been pushed out in order to meet a deadline, and is the very definition of style over substance.

My conclusion: If anyone offers you this phone, throw it back in their faces, and tell them to get fucked.

Camera: ***** (quality) ** (Ease of use)
Phone: * (for camera)

Love, P.