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"Don't waste your time." on by bruce1638
Pros: Thin & lightweight.
Cons: There are many.
Summary: I was looking for a basic phone that had good clarity in both speakers, had good volume and reception. I use cell phones to make calls. I don’t care about the camera or playing music. I could be standing still and could watch the signal bar go up and down, until it dropped the call. I took it back and they changed my SIM card. That made it worse. The phone would freeze trying to connect to the Bluetooth. I had to reset the phone to make a call. Don’t waste your time with this phone for any reason and don’t believe the Cingular rep. that you are the first one to complain. All I had to do is look at other reviews and know I wasn’t the only one. The only good thing about the phone was the size
CONS:
Menu is very slow
No customizable options.
Bluetooth connection is horrible.
Reception is a joke. It can't hold onto a signal.
Calls are very choppy I was saying “what” every other sentence
Low clarity and volume in both speakers.
Short cuts are geared towards buying stuff from Cingular
Very hard to talk on if you are charging it The charger is on the right side in the middle of the phone.
PROS: Thin & lightweight. -
"nice looks do not make up for poor call quality" on by rpk145
Pros: nice looks, thin, light
Cons: poor call quality, static
Summary: Although this phone looks nice, looks only go so far. I would miss entire sentences when I was talking on the phone, it sounded like there was a lot of static and it just fuzzed out. The overall call quality was horrible, I had a motorola before, returned this phone and got a motorola again.
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"P.O.S!!! DON'T BUY!!!" on by shirleyqt
Pros: small size, good features for a basic
Cons: you can't actually have a conversation w/o it being dropped!
Summary: AWFUL PHONE!
A friend who works for Cingular says when it was field tested, it FAILED, it should've never been sold!!
It drops calls, if you even get them. The sims card is always falling out.It'll go straight to voicemail sometimes, never even rings.
Stay away from this phone! CINGULAR SHOULD BE GIVING REFUNDS FOR THIS PHONE AND THE DISHONESTY OF SELLING THEM! -
"Poor call quality, took it back" on by MikeS8727
Pros: Slim design is pocket-friendly, bright readable screen, sleek layout
Cons: Poor call quality, low headset volume
Summary: Bottom Line: I would not give this phone a second look, even if it is a “free” upgrade. Poor call quality is so prevalent that we considered them unusable for serious business application.
My wife and I “upgraded” from our previous Samsung phones after a solid three years of abuse. The previous phones were nothing special, but they served our needs: making phone calls from nearly anywhere in the country and composing the occasional text message. We would have thought that this phone would have been a great upgrade, and it was feature-wise. However, with all of the features, the engineers somehow missed that a modern cell phone should first excel at its core function: making clear phone calls. The signal itself seems fine, but words tend to “short out” for a lack of a better description – essentially the person speaking on the phone tends to have substantial portions of their speak cut out in segments that are short enough to not completely seems to lose reception, but enough that it makes conversations unintelligible. My initial inclination would have been that I simply received a defective phone, except that my wife had the exact same problems. We used them for about two weeks solid and the poor performance was consistent: I use mine for occasional business and personal calls, while my wife is on hers for hours a day returning sales calls. We took them both back and exchanged them for simple Motorola V557’s – nothing very cutting edge and quite brick-like compared to the C417, but they already sound amazingly better.
I’m very disappointed with the Samsung C417. Frankly, we really liked the design, but the old-school Nokia phones that we had in 2000 and later in 2002 made better phone calls than this. I wouldn’t have bought a Samsung at all except that we inadvertently ended up with some in 2004 and were surprised at how much we liked them. Samsung needs to get back to the basics here – make it a device that makes quality phone calls first, and then work on everything else.
For what it is worth, my boss also has the same phone and shares a very similar opinion.
As a side-note, it’s worth mentioning that both Samsung models that I have had exhibited a low volume for the hands-free sets (non-blue tooth, wired versions). I’ve tried many, and eventually bought a model specific Samsung headset, but overall the max volume is almost too low to use while driving. My old Nokias, an even older Ericsson, and our new Motorolas have had much higher volume capabilities while using a hands-free set than either of the Samsungs I have used. -
"Broken Implementation" on by SylverDragon
Pros: Small form factor, flip phone
Cons: No voicedial, broken bluetooth, useless buttons
Summary: I purchased this phone based on the form factor, and good experiences with Samsung's past products. My next phone will not be a Samsung.
Voicedial:
This is my fault, when I purchased the phone, I made the assumption that any phone which worked with a Bluetooth headset would naturally have voicedial. Mae Culpa. Voicedial is oddly absent in this phone.
Bluetooth
This phone does not fully implement Bluetooth. It will work with Bluetooth headsets, but that is it. If you want to do any data transfer (say ringtones, pictures, etc.) with a PC, you have to buy the data cable (or so I am told, I have not tried it as I am unwilling to pay for the cable). I somehow doubt that the extra few bytes of code necessary to do this via Bluetooth would have really been a problem, this is just a marketing trick to get you to buy extra equipment.
Buttons
This phone has the usual complement of number, navigation, and shoulder buttons. And most of them do what you would expect. The problem is, by default your right shoulder button goes to an IM application, which is pointless if you don't want to rack up a huge data transfer bill. the Up button goes to text messaging, again, a data transfer bill trap. Right goes to the IM app, so now we have two buttons with the same, useless function. And left goes to a "My Stuff" menu, which should be named, "Buy stuff". In fact, several of the menus seem to revolve around trying to get you to buy stuff or waste money. Yes, I like to be able to buy games via my phone, having to navigate around the "Buy Games" option every time I want to play a game is annoying. And, of course, none of the button functions can be changed.
As a last note on the buttons, the camera button on the side is an amazing testament to bad design. This button will start the camera, and take pictures. Now, one of the reasons for a flip phone is that you don't have to lock the buttons. So, thanks to this misplaced button, I now have some great photos of the inside of my pocket. I guess if I were to throw a light in there I could document the lint for posterity, but I still would have no way to get those pictures onto my computer.
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