Samsung Soul Review

Overall Rating

Samsung U900 Midnight Soul

Coming up to the end of an 18 month contract, I'm still fence sitting when it comes to this phone. I think it is the right size, it's gorgeous, the display is nice quality and it isn't completely touch screen (I can't stand touch screen). Also, even though I do now have a couple of scratches on the screen, I've dropped and accidentally chucked this phone so many times and it's still lasted longer than a few phones that I've had previously - though it hasn't had a water incident yet.
All of these things make it possibly the perfect phone for me, but the negatives are just so frustrating: the battery life is great if you only use your phone to text, but a ten minute call will lose you a whole bar; I have no signal in places where people on the same network do; the touch panel, even on its least sensitive, makes it far too easy to accidentally send texts before you've finished them, sometimes has a delay and has also caused a problem with games -the buttons can still be used, but the games have been rewritten to work for the touch panel, so sometimes they're just not as good as versions on other phones. I don't use the internet on it much as it is a bit annoying and the screen is still only about a quarter of an actual page. The camera is wonderful when you've just gone from a really old Nokia to this, but you quickly discover the limitations when something you're standing right in front of looks about 100m away through the camera and you obviously can't zoom.

ALL of this would be forgiveable for me as I'm more a text person anyway, I can get a real camera if I want one, I have the internet at home and I have games consoles, but I just can't get past not being able to send a text message to more than ten people at a time; you have to wait for those ten to send before you can send the rest, even though it fools you with its send to ALL option. It's not a problem that I encounter daily, but it's such a basic function that it gets me fuming every time. I'd tolerate the text functions being a bit weak if the battery life made phone calls a better option, but, as it is, both leave me feeling that fundamental functions that old, mobile dinosaurs had sorted about 10 years ago, have had their corners cut so that people like me can play around with swishy graphics and touch panels and forget the problems of the phones because they're so pretty. And that's it really. There just aren't that many slide, non-touch screen phones out there with specs like these and such undeniable style and gloss. Getting a better functioning phone that looked worse would now make the word "upgrade" feel like it doesn't fit. I don't know; I don't know where I can go from here without succumbing to the world of touch screen and iPhones.