PCS Phone Samsung i500 (Sprint)

by Samsung

Product Details

Product Manual [2.31mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 3.4 x 2.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000BXAYU
• Item model number: SPH-i500
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #254,613 in Cell Phones & Accessories (See Top 100 in Cell Phones & Accessories)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Designed for the business user, Samsung’s SPH-i500 slim wireless device combines a flip-top phone with a Palm OS organizer for maximum productivity while on the road. The dual-band/tri-mode i500 offers wireless fast web access from any location for looking up stock quotes, flight schedules, and weather forecasts or using email and text messaging. The 160-x-240-pixel, 65,000-color touch screen enhances the web capabilities. The phone also offers speedy information retrieval with its web clipping service. This wireless phone’s 16 MB of memory provides plenty of room for downloaded information.

The included desktop holder offers easy battery charging and synchronizing with your desktop or laptop.

Powered by Palm OS 4.1, the PDA lets you run standard applications such as an Address Book, Date Book, and Expense Report. The i500 has Graffiti writing software and a special writing area for entering letters as well as several other text input methods. This organizer even hooks up to a compact, portable keyboard for almost PC-like data entry convenience. The i500 synchs up information with other IR devices or PCs and also comes with a cradle for PCs that don’t have an IR port.

Top phone features on the i500 include voice memo, voice-activated and four-digit calling, polyphonic ring tones, and vibrate mode.This smartphone is rated for up to 2.8 hours of talk time and 210 hours of standby time on a slim battery; 4.2 hours of talk time and 250 hours of standby time on a regular battery; and 5.4 hours of talk time and 350 hours of standby time when using an extended battery.

SEE A DETAILED VIEW OF THE i500'S FEATURES

The i500's features summarized:

• Get two productivity tools in one compact wireless phone, and no compromise in functionality for convenience and style.
• See the Web at high speed and in living color on the i500's vibrant touch-screen display.
• Get quick access to flight schedules, directions, e-mail, stock quotes, weather, scores, entertainment listings and more.
• Get plenty of room for storage with 16MB memory.
• Palm OS 4.1 gives you the functionality you need to be more organized and productive.
• Get quicker access to Palm OS applications using hotkeys.
• Get Web information faster with Web-clipping capabilities.
• Extend your phone's capabilities using powerful third-party Palm OS applications.
• Multi-task with ease by using phone and Palm applications simultaneously.
• Make easier and faster calls with voice-activated and four-digit dialing.
• Take calls discreetly by switching to vibrate mode.
• Collect your thoughts using the voice memo feature.
• Use polyphonic and standard ring tones to create distinctive ringers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First phone that offer PDA in nice form factor, December 23, 2003

By 

"msabnj" (Plainsboro, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PCS Phone Samsung i500 (Sprint) (Wireless Phone)

I have owned many cell phones and pdas over the last 10 years, and have been searching for a phone that combines the two. After extensive research on the treo 600, kyocera, smartphones, and pocket pc pda phones, i chose the i500 and am quite impressed with the unit. This phone is great for someone who wants to have a decent pda integrated into the phone and not for someone trying to do spreadsheets and mp3s with the phone. To me, I realized that having too many things on the phone will eventually lead to running down the battery quickly and I did not want to sacrifice battery life. Most of my friends with the kyocera or treo do not use the mp3 player or much of the added functionality (after the inital 1 - 2 mo honeymoon period) so as to conserve battery life - so i felt this phone is the best. You have to go to the store to see how small this phone is in comparison to the kyocera 7135 and the treo. This looks, feels and operates like an ordinary cell phone with a heckuva nice pda built in to it, nice color screen to boot! The sprint service has been nice and the vision web browsing has been excellent in my mind - it is comparable to or faster than 56k dialup, which is excellent on a cell phone.

Some observations on the models I evaluated.
Did not like the bulkiness of the treo - also felt awkward talking into it.
I didn't care much for a 640x480 camera which i may only occasionally need anyway. Given a choice, I would go for less weight over the low res camera.
I Wanted a clamshell design to protect the screen - this also provides the best ergonomics for phone conversations.
The graffiti is a nice input mechanism in my view - I personally like it much more than typing on the mini keyboard.
Smartphones do not have good input mechanism - you can't enter a web address in efficiently if you have to tap the 2 button 3 tiumes to get a "c".

Samsung did a great job with the tradeoffs coming up with a very compact pda phone which when closed looks like an ordinary phone - not an easy feat. Quite Impressive, Samsung!

Things that would have made this the ultimate phone:
A high res 320x320 screen (even the larger treo 600 doesnt offer that so we'll have to live with this limitation for now).
64 mb of memory would have been nice - I'm not exactly sure why samsung skimped on the memory with memory being so cheap - may have been a size thing...
A faster processor may have helped with web browsing - not sure of this one - the transmission speed may be the limiting factor. For most applications, the i500 is plenty fast.

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best of breed - for now, March 27, 2004

By 

Braddlee "brookotter" (Boston MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: PCS Phone Samsung i500 (Sprint) (Wireless Phone)

Here's what I needed and spent a year waiting/searching for. A PHONE (not a paperback book stuck to my head) that also allowed me to 1) Ditch my separate PDA, 2) access the web, 3) have reliable text messaging and e-mail.

The SPH-I500 does all of these well. I am already comfortable with Graffiti, so the text input is managable for short messages. If I really want to write an essay, I'll attach a keyboard or find a PC. Stylus input works best for "sure, I'll be there in five minutes" or "here's the address" messages. Much better than SMS keypad typing, not quite as easy as thumbtyping on a Treo or Blackberry. A workable compromise.

The phone is good, although it lacks some of the spiffy things you might want in a high end phone (such as speakerphone). However, after listening to a call at work where the remote side was on a Treo 600 speakerphone, I'm not certain I've missed much.

Blazer web browser is decent for images, Eudora web good for text only. Yahoo and Avant Go bundle decent content, many traditional websites are clunky.

SMS limitations mentioned above by others can be addressed by getting i500 SMS from www.pdaapps.com (also see their mark-n-dial utility for dialing phone numbers from webpages, and Verichat (solid AIM/MSN/Yahoo chat client).

Sprint recommends Eudora for e-mail. I found it to crash reliably on "reply" messages and have switched to Snapper, although it's more expensive.

Voice dialing works well - On my previous Motorola phone it was unusable, on the i500 it works 90+% of the time. I have no complaints about battery life, especially with the standard battery.

Things I'd take issue with:

1) Sprint Customer Service and Technical Support via phone. (2 on a 1-5 scale, and I'm being nice). In the Sprint store, they were great. Over the phone, I wanted to commit mayhem, and I'm a pretty patient person. My favorite (?) Sprint tech support quote, "they don't actually train us on these things, so you probably know as much as I do..."

2) MacOSX support. Mac support for this device is apparently an open secret. Samsung will help some with this, but I haven't yet had time to track all the bits and pieces down. It works just fine on my XP box at home, but I'd love to connect to my iBook, and not feel like I'm living on the edge! (hint, hint if anyone's watching). I've installed the version of Palm Desktop recommended by Samsung for MacOS, but it's not working - at least not yet. In searching the web, I see varying reports of success/reliability. Sad to say, try at your own risk, and be prepared for it to be a project.

3) I'm seeing an uncomfortable number of apps produce "fatal exceptions" including Eudora, Avant Go, and some ASL tutoring apps that were rock solid on my IIIx. I'm not used to saying "Sorry, my phone just crashed."

4) Don't know how you'd make it different, but teeny phones have teeny buttons. I keep hitting the wrong ones on the side of the phone. I have very small hands for a guy, so if you're big fingered, you might want to try it out first.

5) Likewise, a bit more of a margin on the screen. If trying to not use the stylus because I'm in a hurry (which for me is most of the time), it's hard to hit icons in the corner of the screen when using a finger or non-stylus pen, pencil, chopstick, whatever's-at-hand.

6) While the PalmOS integration with the phone is about the best I've seen, there are still some glitches, "huh" moments and things that don't work quite as they should - especially when switching between apps or some of the dialing features. I'd love to know why it doesn't ship with Palm OS5.

7) The cradle/charger needs to have the travel charger plugged in to function. This is both expensive (if you need more than one setup, it'll be an additional $80.00/per) and stupid design.

8) When powering off/on, haven't found a way to make the phone quiet. This results in a lot of head-turning at the beginning/ending of meetings. May be a way to fix this, but I haven't found it.

I'd love to have:

1) Expansion slot
2) Bluetooth!!
3) More memory
4) Palm OS5

I'll let other people complain about:

1) limited ringtones
2) camera (what *exactly* are you needing this for??)
3) weak vibrate mode

Overall, I'm really happy with the phone, especially now that I've gotten Sprint to provision it correctly (long, annoying story) and installed the applications and utilities that allow it to function the way an (ahem!) $600 retail phone should. Overall, in the past few weeks I've probably spent another $100-120 to get the applications I needed to really make this thing sing. But, having done that, it's been great. I'm sure that in the future, there will be devices that take this further, but - for me - this is device I've been looking and waiting for.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Truth is:, July 14, 2004

By 

The Truth (Tulsa, OK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PCS Phone Samsung i500 (Sprint) (Wireless Phone)

Take what ya want from these reviews...but don't make the mistake of assuming half of them are worth a dime, makes me wonder if some of ya'll even own the phone...whatever.

That said, You can't go wrong with this phone. You can't go wrong with a Treo 600 either, I own both. I don't really think you can compare the two, they are totally different concepts and given apples to apples, one will always dominate the area you set out to compare. IE: I'm still waiting on that *5 star* phone that DOES smoke 'em all, it's not out there...yet. (the i550 due out in Jan 05 might get there)

Anyhow, i500 Pros: 98 voice dial tags, Flip design (I like the way the flip opens, keeps it off my cheek so the screen doesn't get all greasy), Size (same size as my wife's Star Tac), Voice memo/converstion record, Screen clearly visable in direct sunlight! (try that with your Treo 600), Unlimited battery power, Quality of build, Tri-band w/analog roam, 3G internet speed, Loud Loud Loud ringer and earpiece (earpiece is loud enough to use as speakerphone and I can hear the ringer while I'm riding my motorcycle!)

Cons: It has 'em like everything else, read about 'em in other reviews.

If ya need a phone with a PDA get a i500, if ya want a PDA with a built-in phone, get a Treo 600, if ya want a perfect combo, wait about 6 months...They are getting real close now.