Buy Microsoft Office Home & Student
- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 21 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"The best of what's around!"
Pros: The screen is beautiful. The form factor is smooth, and it feels well-put together. The slider mechanism works well. It supports up to 4GB of external memory, which is great. The 3G works well for supported pages. It's plenty loud enough.
Cons: The web browsing on unsupported pages is buggy and frequently causes reboots, or freezes. The messaging is also occasionally unreliable. The camera works well if you take exactly the picture you want, but there are no editing features afterward.
Summary: I love the idea of this phone, and I wish it worked as well as it could. The text entry on the web is NOT easy, and doesn't learn words, and capitalizes every word, so all your friends will know if you send a Myspace message from your phone. The bugs causing reboots and freezing are scary, because you never know when that freeze will be your last. I definitely recommend making sure you put all your videos and pictures on your external memory, just in case, but you can't send videos saved on the card. They keypad locking during calls is an inconvenience, as is the unlocking keypad in your pocket when you receive messages. The touch sensitive keys are too sensitive even on their least sensitive setting when bringing the phone out of your pocket, but then become slightly difficult to use during regular use, so you have to pick the lesser of two evils.
On the up side, regular messaging is a breeze, phone calls are simple and clear. You can access a multitude of functions with the phone closed, which is nice, though the menu system is much easier to use with the phone open. Sending picture messages and video messages is easy, as long as the video's not on your card. Playing videos and looking at pictures is great, because the screen is so big and pretty. The media player is basic and useful for personal spaces, but don't plan on entertaining friends unless they all like the same music you do, because it's not a very customizable player, and it's not all THAT loud. I would positively LOVE this phone if the resetting and freezing could stop. It goes for days and sometimes weeks just fine, but with as much as we all depend on our phones, it's just not reassuring that it continues to work again after hard resets (removing the battery with the phone still on, depending on your phone model you could lose some settings such as personalized ringtones or words added to the dictionary). I also have a hard time with the data plans offered. With the 3G speeds, which are great for checking Myspace and Facebook, you can actually burn through 20 or 50MB pretty easily if you do that a lot and hit some other, non-WAP pages. Some of those, which the browser will do it's best to load (it's best isn't good enough), are upwards of 1MB on their own, and hitting back doesn't always save you from burning through that data. This is the best phone Virgin Mobile offers, with the most features, but I'm seriously considering downgrading to the Samsung Slash just because Samsung is generally so much more reliable than UT Starcom.
Where to buy
Virgin Mobile Shuttle - red:
$69.98
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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