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- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 70 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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4 out of 5 people found this review helpful
1.5 stars
"Poor Reception"
Pros: Comfortable, tactile design; great display; good camera; storage card; bluetooth
Cons: no reception inside; battery runs down fast; hard to use five way selector/cancel button area
Summary: The Samsung t809 is a very good looking device. It feels great in my hand, fits unobtrusively into my pocket and the slide action is very solid. The main problem for me is that it does not function as a phone! I work in an office building in midtown New York City and this phone cannot connect to the network. On out the street, it's fine; more than two feet from the window inside it loses the T-mobile network. Whilst the device does have a great screen, with vivid colors and a pretty good camera, those features need to work in addition to being a phone, not instead.
So, I ran an experiment. I took my old T-mobile candy-bar phone (Samsung x105) to the same dead-spots that the t809 experienced. I swapped my sim card between them and found that the old phone had between 4 and 6 bars, whilst the t809 had no service. There was nothing wrong with the T-mobile network -- it was the new phone. I had the new phone for three days in which time I was only able to make one call (out in the street) and only had one incoming that did not drop after a second or two. Other people who had tried to reach me said the calls had gone straight to voicemail.
That one outgoing call hurt me. T-mobile customer support used it as evidence that the t809 was okay and they would not replace it. So, after three days it has gone back with no replacement (luckily for me I am inside the 14 day return period -- but the return postage was from my pocket). Not only am I unhappy with this high-tech phone's rather low-tech approach to reception, I am also annoyed at the attitude of T-mobile customer service towards a defective unit. Doing research after my final call to them, I found a number of people with similar experience of poor reception.
My advice: if you plan to use this phone inside a building, make sure that you test its reception (and not just in the T-mobile store) before you make any long term commitments.
