Samsung Solstice II SGH-A817 user reviews (AT&T)

Pros None that I can think of

Cons - Shuts down all the time
- Same price as smart phones like Droid and Iphone with no advantage

Summary This phone would shut down and restart at least 5-6 times a day, many times during phone calls or texts when only a couple of months old. Our provider provided a second phone and new battery as a replacement...same thing happened. Talked to Samsung, they stated "their warranty only covers repair, not replacement" and that would should ship the phone back to them for repair. I asked what my wife should do for a phone while it was "repaired". They told me she would just have to "deal with it".

I will never buy another Samsung product period.

Pros Ease of texting with touchscreen, the three front screens, size, color of pictures, ease to use web

Cons signal strength? slow to load almost anything, fails when loading things often

Summary This is a pretty nice phone so hard. Sometimes I have a hard time holding onto it and texting but this is the first real all touchscreen phone I've had that I can actually text with it horizontal and not make many errors. My mom has a different phone in the same house as me and we can be sitting next to each other, but my phone will not send a message and hers will. I could try over and over, even with 2 or 3 bars, and I eventually just have to shut off the phone and see if it works. Sometimes I do this multiple times a day and it can be very frustrating. The web is very nice and usually quick. Sometimes it chooses not to load at all and I have to start over or shut off the phone and try again. The music player is really nice, can even be minimized to do other things on your phone (not sure about web). But the thing about it is I can be listening to music just fine and then it stops. When I try to play another song, it tells me the file doesn't exist. Then my whole library doesn't exist. If I play the music player for any length of time, this always happens. So that's a downfall. Also, if your heavily into watching Youtube, this phone takes a lot of buffering and loading time. Even when the song has started playing, it can either skip really horribly in the beginning or just skip slightly through the whole thing. This isn't a bad phone and I'm not unhappy with it. I like almost everything about it but when it gets frustarting and won't send messages, which I don't know if it is a signal strength problem or what. Calls are pretty good, some people say they can't hear me well. And I always have to lock the phone on the side or otherwise I've been to 20 pages with my face. The battery isn't bad. It takes about an hour to almost fully charge and ten will last almost 2 whole days and I do a lot of texting and using the web. I've giving it a 3 mostly because of the web and messaging messing up so frequently since this phone is made specifically for that stuff. But otherwise, plenty of apps for people who will pay for them. And nice touchscreen.

Pros Threaded text
Customizable menus
Long battery life
Responsive touchscreen
Horizontal touchscreen keyboard and vertical touchscreen standard phone pad

Cons Powers off randomly
Call quality
Reception
One app keeps disappearing
T9 instead of autocorrect
Hard to get back cover off

Summary When I first got this phone, I was very pleased. I knew anything would be a step down from my MyTouch 3G, but I was pleased with this one for only $30 (when I renewed my AT&T contract). I was very impressed at first because the screen is very responsive. It is even more responsive than the MyTouch 3G, which surprised me. If you want to text, this touch screen starts out at a normal number keyboard with the three letter pairing to each number; however, if you turn it vertically, you have a touch screen keyboard. While this has its kinks, I really like that configuration. What was also appealing to me was the customizable menus, as well as a pretty simple way to make your three home pages that you can flip between.

One of the most important things for me in a phone is battery life. One time when I was looking for a new phone, my friend let me borrow his old one, and I quickly figured out how much bad battery life could be a drag. This one will easily get you through the day. I text quite a bit, and I take calls occasionally throughout the day. This phone lasts at least two days on the same charge. I usually come close to three days without having to recharge it. That's definitely a positive.

The big kink with the keyboard is the sensor that determines when the phone is horizontal. It never has a problem initially getting it to that screen, but sometimes it will randomly switch back to vertical. Sometimes it is just for a couple seconds and sometimes you have to click back and re-enter the texting screen to fix it. You don't even have to change the angle it is at. It can be really annoying because sometimes it will switch it vertical and I will hit 'Send' accidentally because I was intending to hit another letter.

Another thing you can notice as soon as you get this phone is that the back is hard to take off. I wanted to add a microSD card, but I always felt like I was going to snap the back cover. I try to take it off as little as possible.

Next, the call quality. It is not so good. I never used to have problems hearing what others were saying, but now I find myself occasionally asking someone to repeat something 3 or 4 times. To add to this, I have had a recurring problem with Samsung regarding their signal reception. It's not unusable by any means, but HTC and Nokia have had much better reception when I have used them.

Now here are the problems that you won't be able to see on first glance. There is one certain app that you can put on it that shows you missed calls, text messages, emails, IM...all sorts. It's a very convenient feature. Unfortunately, at random times this app just disappears. Now, this can be easily remedied by immediately dragging it back on to your screen, but it is a big annoyance that I have to do that about once a day.

The other thing that happens about once a day is more frustrating. It will randomly turn off. I don't know what circumstances trigger this. All of a sudden, I will click to text, and the keyboard is a different color than normal. Even if this remedies itself by backing out and then trying again, you can count on the phone turning off within a couple minutes. When I first saw these last two problems, I thought it was just a problem with my phone and not the whole series, so I returned it to AT&T within their grace period, and they kindly switched it out. After two days, the new phone just turned itself off. Shortly after I turned it back on, the app I mentioned earlier disappeared.

So, this phone is a mixed bag. It is sleek, very responsive, and has great battery life. It is a very good texting phone as well, using threaded text as well as a touchscreen qwerty keyboard. It has some annoyances as well, like powering off randomly, a disappearing app, variable call quality, and not as good of reception as other brands. I think it's an okay phone, and I was initially shocked that it was priced so low, but with the bugs I have encountered, it may be easier to understand.

Pros there are none

Cons EVERYTHING!
and I can't get a refund for it

Summary Shuts off randomly, bad call quality, scratches easily, takes forever to shuts off in your pocket, calls SOS randomly, and basically EVERYTHING is wrong with it. Just the worst phone ever. NEVER EVER BUY IT!