Samsung SGH-D357 (AT&T)

Summary: I got two of these phones. I was replacing my Siemens S46 and my wife's old Nokia PCS. This is my 3rd phone with Internet access.

The D357 has all the features that one would want today, higher speed EDGE downloads, Bluetooth, email, IM (pick one only: AIM, ICQ or Yahoo), and a bright large color screen. Sturdy feel, and a comfortable size.
Samsung covers all the basics. Multiple phone numbers and email addresses for each user. You can have custom rings aka caller ID (It uses 60 voice polyphonic midi or TruTone (mmf) rings). You can add a photo for the caller too. The phone has no camera. It does have PTT, but that’s not why I bought it.

Bluetooth Functionality:
The phone supports many Bluetooth functions. Audio, headsets/handsfree, object push, file transfer, serial port and dialup. There is no PIM or FAX suport. You can easily send any of your contact list or other files (ring tones, video, etc) to other Bluetooth devices. I shared some of my numbers with my wife's D357 and my daughter's Sony Ericson W600i. They sent some back. You can not select which services are available or not. You can disable Bluetooth, visabilty and be in secure mode. I made my laptop be the microphone and speakers for the phone for amusement. No sync software came with the phone. The Broadcom device makes "Bluetooth places" on your desktop and is drag and drop. My old S46 supported IR and serial port, and came with sync software for contacts and the calendar in Outlook. My daughter's W600i also comes with sync software and supports PIM transfers (along with IR, Bluetooth and USB connections). Pairing can be problematic, and an ‘authorized device’ should always connect, every time, all the time, but YMMV.

Using a Broadcom Bluetooth 2.0 USB adaptor, I opened up Outlook and dropped all my contacts on the paired phone from my laptop. All the VCF cards were accepted (one by one in 'secure' mode). This is when I discovered to my personal horror, the major failing of this phone for me: no address storage.

Contact List is Lacking:
While a multitude of phones and files, custom ringtone and photo can be attached to any contact in your phone book, the phone has no place to store Address information. This is a basic feature in my mind, as having a phone number without a address to back it up (when you have hundreds or the 1000 numbers that the phone can hold) makes the phone useless for many functions. There is also a lack of space for a company name.

Let's list a few where this shortcoming is needed. Sending a Bluetooth Card. Now a card to me should have address information. Doctors that have multiple offices. A business that has multiple offices. Business contacts. Personal contacts: you want to send flowers to that girl from last night, right? Your kid's friends’ address. After all, if I wanted to carry a PDA, I would have purchased one. I just want to go out with one small pocket device with decent but not advanced PIM. Address information doesn't take up that much space, and this phone is not either a beginner's or a kid's phone like the W600i. My old S46 did all this.

Additionally since I was changing SIM cards my old card would not work (they said) in the phone. Samsung has forgotten to put a 'copy to SIM' in the phone. You can only manually enter and save to the SIM, no Bluetooth or Phonebook to SIM is allowed. Also, a phone number in the SIM wil be displayed along with a Phonebook entry, so you can have duplicate numbers rather than just showing the SIM's numbers or the Phonebook's numbers. An icon tells you where the contact is from. In an odd way, this may explain why there are no addresses, as it is not usual to save addresses to a SIM card in any phone, AFAIK.

Name sorting is by first name only. However if you put in RU as the search, you MAY get all the 'Ruth Smith' and 'Sam Rubin' numbers shown, putting in the last name will not always show the perfect matches at the top, but may have them grouped under partial matches and may not have ALL matches. This needs a lot of reworking, IMHO.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to use the contact list to make calendar appointments such as reminders to call, etc. Copy functions from the contact list is also lacking here, and to the Bluetood ‘card’. You should be able to copy from the contact list to this. You can email, send MMS and SMS messages and transfer via Blueetooth any contact.

Internet Browser
The soft keys can override the BACK browser button making impossible to move back up the path you took to get to a page. Exiting is the only way out. PITA. Putting the back button at the top of the browser's page rather than a soft key is needed. The 'getting data' or browser wait is a very very small red arrow on a globe, not noticeable all the time. Soft keys on Contact list are opposite of browser sometimes.

Cingular's Web Tools
This phone is JAVA enabled. However, Cingular controls which Cool Tools (Wine Spectator, Mapquest, My Cast, Match, etc) can be used on the phone. No Travel Cool Tools are available at this writing except for SABRE and the site seems to be confused as to which games are available too. The phone has yet to show up as compatible for any MediaNet items. I used My Cast Weather on my S46, even in black & white as a WAP display (which is still available according to the MediaNet site), the radar was usable and I could get a close-up. On this phone only TWC is available; the radar is far far away and can't be usable for Metro NY when it's showing everything from Maine to Mississippi. Sorry TWC. Customizing the phone's home page is tedious and prone to errors. I have not found a way turn off graphics to save download time (and money) though it seems to have a setting to do this.

Cingular also is currently wasting 2 master menu spaces for purchasing media for your phone. While this is good marketing, it is a problem when the phone comes preconfigured to go shopping at the brush of a button. I would much rather have had the My Cast Weather or a Sport Team News Item than the MediaNet Mall available to me with one touch access.