Source.kohlerville.com

I just got a new phone today after 4 years or so with my Samsung T-809 with the T-Mobile Tap and so far it’s pretty cool. The touch screen take a little getting to but so far I’ve been working pretty well. So far the web browsing is pretty decent and it’s only $10 a month! There’s a google maps program that works well enough for me and it has a gps inside this device. Another thing to boot is that I got it for a super cheap price because of a mail in rebate at costco and I qualified for an upgrade to my plan!

Check out the review at c-net and I’ll post another update when I’ve running it for awhile.

==== Update 3/19/2010 ====

So using this phone for a month, I can say that it is awesome for the price plus the cheap internet plan. I have some cool pluses and some minuses so far but keep in mind that I haven’t explored everything on the phone yet.

Let’s go with the pluses first:

1. After installing the program snaptu, I now have an awesome little java program that can do rss feeds and google calendar. There’s other little options that are available when you install snaptu, but I found that I use the rss reader every single day when I have a few minutes to kill.
2. The web browser works well enough that you can surf around and see regular pages like on your computer. It’s nice when you flip the phone to the side that the web browser will change to landscape mode (sometimes). Downloading the newest Opera Mobile works really well too. This and Snaptu are the main apps I use on this phone. Just be sure to use the regular web browser for your ssl and not Opera Mobile because they do a man in the middle for the Opera compression.
3. Text messaging with the on screen keyboard took only a few minutes to get used to. I vary between using T9 in portrait mode, or swinging it to the side to get the qwerty style keyboard.
4. Onscreen lock, if you touch the screen when the display has timed out, it’ll have a big icon where you press and hold to get into the phone. I think this option is great because I’m not forced to press the lock button on the side of the phone everytime I need access.

The minuses:

1. In landscape mode when text messaging, the space button is too close to the send button! I’ve accidentally sent messages when I was just trying to hit the space. The pain of having huge hands I suppose.
2. E-mail isn’t as wonderful as I was hoping on this phone. It sends e-mails perfectly fine, the only problem is that you can only have up to 100 e-mails on it. Using imap doesn’t really do the full imap experience because when I’ll read a message on the phone, it is still marked unread on my computer when I connect to my mail. It’s more like pop using the imap protocol to get the e-mail.
3. Delayed touch responses on the screen. This could be due to the low processor, but I know that every time I go into the java apps menu, there’s a huge lag of time when I touch the screen to flip to the button for snaptu. It happens sometimes in other places, but I always go to the java apps menu and hence why I notice it all the time.
4. Lock/unlock button on the side of the phone. This is a little annoying because the button always gets pressed when I put the phone in my pocket or when I take it out! No butt dials or side pocket dials have occured which is good, only pictures of the inside of my pocket.
5. The home screen has a side bar on the side with widgets that you can drag onto the home screen so you can have quick access to your mail or text messaging. Unfortunately, if you turn the phone off, all the widgets go back into the side bar! Also I noticed that my wallpaper got reset too.