Find tech advice for business here
- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 39 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
-
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful
3.0 stars
"Good Option for Hotspot @ Home"
Pros: Decent Build Quality, Nice Screen, Easy Wi-Fi Set-up
Cons: Ocassional Difficulty staying connnected to Wi-Fi networks. Mediocre Camera,
Summary: I purchased 2 of these phones for myself and my wife. We had previously been getting poor cellular service at our home so we opted to try out the @Home T-Mobile service in hopes that we could eliminate our need for a land line, as well as improve our cellular service at home.
The Katalyst received a decent review from cnet.com and was praised for having "excellent call quality". After several days of use, I am not entirely convinced that the sound quality is excellent, however, I am willing to give it a few more days. When conversing with my wife at home on her phone, there seems to be quite a bit more background noise than I am accustomed too. I was hopeful that a wi-fi connection would give flawless sound quality but I'm not terribly impressed. I suppose my expectations were a little too high.
Getting the phones to connect to our home wi-fi network was simple enough (although at first there were several "connection errors", persistence yielded a successful connection). I was also able to connect to my brother and parents home wi-fi networks as well with ease. Much praise can be given to Samsung in the ease of wi-fi setup. It is quick and simple. It also allows for several networks and profiles to be saved. The phone also seems to automatically switch to Wi-Fi when in range of your programmed networks.
I have had several issues with both of my phones intermittently losing connection to my home wi-fi network. I will contact T-mobile customer service to see if they can resolve this issue, but I am somewhat disappointed in this "bug". In the few reviews of the Hotspot@Home service I have read of several others with a similar issue. I am hopeful that T-mobile has a cure for this issue.
Concerning the rest of the Katalyst phone features, I was somewhat disappointed in the ring tones that came with the phone. There was almost no tones I would deem acceptable as a standard ringer. All the included tones seemed to be too "foo foo". Although it does seem easy enough to upload your own MP3 ringtones I am somewhat disappointed that none of the included ringers were even close to being acceptable.
Samsung Katalyst (T-Mobile):
%20user%20review%20and%20rating%20-%20CNET%20Reviews&srcUrl=http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/samsung-katalyst-t-mobile/4864-6454_7-32790414-2.html){kind=small}