Philibuster

I used to have a G’Zone phone with Verizon. I liked it, it was simple and I could scare the crap out of everyone by dunking it in a cup of water or washing it off in the sink. Sadly it died. Don’t know what went wrong but it suddenly started cycling the power on and off. I couldn’t even get into the phone to get my numbers out of it. All it did was power down then power up power down and then up again. I have wanted something a little more than the simple phone I had before so I decided to make the jump into a smart phone. I went with sprint because they are cheaper than Verizon.

I didn’t do a lot of research into the phone because I lot of what I value are in aesthetics instead of pure horse power tech specs. If I don’t like the way a phone fits in my hands then I don’t care how awesome it is supposed to be I won’t want it. This is with computers as well. It is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t like macs. The OS and hardware looks like butt. I simple don’t like the way any of it is laid out, colored, or designed.

Well there are a whole bunch of ugly ass phones. The interface is slightly less important because well, mostly you can change that with skins. I looked at a few phones and in the end decided on the Samsung Moment. It has a nice simple look to it and it doesn’t have any awkward bumps or bulbs on it like a couple other phones I looked at.

The slide out keyboard on it works well enough to get by but the raised portion of the buttons are just a little too small and a little too close together. I hit the wrong key all the time. But not enough to make me hate it just enough to know that this could be better. The most common typo comes when I am typing around or on the space bar. I probably dislike that key the most.

There aren’t any complaints about the interface on the phone or using it. I like android quite well. I do have a couple complaints about a certain weirdness of the phone.

Number one, while I am starting to get the hang of it I still mess it up quite a bit. There is a call start button and a call end button. You use the call end button to flip the screen on and off. When you get a call you are supposed to take the phone out of your pocket and wait for the little light sensor to detect that it’s out of your pocket and turn the screen on itself. Then you push the call start button. What really happens is that you take the phone out of your pocket and by habit since you get text messages more is you push the call end button to turn the screen on to see who has texted you. Then the screen flashes for a split second showing you that oh actually it’s a call but then the auto light detector has seen the light and doesn’t turn the screen on but FLIPS the state of the screen. In other words it turns the screen off on you at this point. Now the phone is still ringing but the screen is off. If you push the call end button again in order to turn the screen on again you will hang up on the person calling. So how about we push the call accept button to just right to the call. Well it doesn’t seem to work that way and so the only option is to hang up and give them a call back. I’ve done this enough times that it’s really getting old now.

Sometimes if I’m somewhere a little dark the phone will sit there and not turn the screen on for me right away and it take all of my will power not to push the button to manually turn the screen on because I know it’s going to screw everything up. The phone will on occasion get confused about wheter the screen is on or not. If I push the end button to turn it off I’ll see it turn itself back on after a second and the only way to fix this is to unlock the screen and then turn it off.

Another thing that bugs me is that certain apps seem to never close and after playing around on the phone for a little bit suddenly it’s super hot because the processor is going at full steam, even though it’s been in my pocket for half an hour. I’ve installed a kill everything app to help prevent this. I hate this more than anything else because this phone seriously has crappy battery life.

The GPS isn’t all that great on the phone either. A clear view of the sky is a must, because if you have clear glass or a tree branch or anything at all over you, you are done. The one time I wanted to use it, it sat on the dash of my friend’s car with a perfectly good overhead view and it hardly ever worked. Eh, it’s not a GPS device so I don’t care too much about this.

Overall I have to say I like the phone. The few minor faults are made up for in everything else. Another phone may do all of that and not have the faults that I have seen but after looking at all of the phones in the sprint store I’m fairly certain that it’s the only one I wouldn’t have wanted to toss out the window after a few days just based off of how the phone looks and feels.