Customer Reviews

Samsung Blast Phone (T-Mobile)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I'm a proud owner of the Samsung Blast for roughly 1 month. My motorla phone finally took one fall to many and stop functioning. Of course I initially wanted an Iphone or its likeness based on all its cool new features, but quickly realized that both the phone and the monthly plan was to expensive. My criteria for a phone was cheap, be cool, and have a qwerty like keyboard.

I was initially drawn to the Blast because of its mini-qwerty keyboard. The pearl 8100 was my only other finalist. Afters days of indecisiveness and research I choose the blast because A)surfing the web wasn't important feature for me {and i wasn't impressed at all with the speed of the 8100's net}. B)Blast was noticeably cheaper.

Most sales rep's are useless about all the features this phone carries. After purchasing it I had mixed fixings but let me tell you, the more you know of the phones features, the more you're GOING TO LOVE IT! Things I love about this phone, in order of coolness determined by me!

Keyboard: I found myself typing more and more on the phone this year so having extra buttons has been a great addition. Auto-complete is almost always on par(to the point I only check right before i send). Once you understand the rhyme and reason to how its laid out you'll be sending messages faster. Except, somethings like, :) , make you go through an extra set of menu to type out which makes me very :(


Checking email without paying an extra $20-$30 a month. Had no idea my phone had this feature til after i bought the phone (again, thanks to useless sales guys)!I mainly use gmail and I connected very easily - not sure why people had problems. Yahoo's built in so that too was easy. Very surprised how easy it was based on other peoples problems.

Voice Activated Commands - Typically anything voice activated sucks. My GPS has one, voice dictation, my other phone. Heck, my other phone made me record the name and then when i went to search by voice it couldn't find it. This phone makes every entry in your contacts callable by voice, without any set up! With one button i say "call mike". If its sure it will connect you directly, if not it will give you three choices. These two options are right about 98%, amazing! Theres many other voice commands like say, "Call 555-555-1234" or ones that take you right to a function.

There's also this cool feature that will sound out what number your dialing. Don't have it turned on, but a fun feature, possibly great for the blind community (but how will they know this from my review?)

Auto-Complete - lets say its noisy, voice activation won't work that well, so dont worry. After you type in the first 3 numbers, it automatically brings up numbers fitting that sequence stored in your phonebook for recommendations.

Seach phonebook by name: This feature was a big pet-peeve of mine with my motorola. Lets say i wanted to get the number for mike. Well i had 20 friends that started with M and i had to scroll down past everyone til i got to his name. Not anymore, just spell his name in the directory and takes me right there. This isn't a new feature, but my motorola didn't have this feature and I never got over it (my 1st phone did)!

Large picture ID when your friends call and you store their photo.

Bluetooth works great. Nothing really special but no problems either.

Tip Calculator that factors in percentages a user can define (no big deal really to me as this is a simple math equation) but it then has a feature dividing it by number of paying customers and the total for each person, pretty nifty.

Unit Calculator: Whats 1.5 oz in pounds, or whats 83 fahrenheit in Celsius. It converts length, weight, volume, area, temperature 100's of different ways - very cool feature i discovered & now my friends turn to me and say " Hey, whats ..."!

Lock out feature: Letting somebody borrow your phone doesn't have to feel like an invasion of privacy. By pushing some buttons you can make the phone locked out to only the most basic features like dialing digits. Haven't found a use for it just yet but i predict it will come in handy someday.

It also has tons more basic features and some other nifty programs waiting for you to discover. The phone had a bit of a learning curve, new keyboard layout, new features all took time to get use to but once you learn them you'll love the phone for what it can do.

So my experience isn't 100% rosy. Here's what i don't like.

The Manual. Since you'll find yourself referring it dozens of times it didn't always give you a clear answer. Example:

The phone has tons of icons on the main page and one of these icons kept blinking - for the life of me i couldn't figure out what it was. Checked the manual 10 different ways and it was finally 3 days later, annoyed at my blinking phone i call the friendly customer support tmobile lady who luckily had a similar phone. Same exact problem and went through pulling her hair out to get rid of it. She guided me to the fix. Come on Samsung, go through the book fill those holes (theres more I could go into but for the sake of your time and my blood pressure i'll skip)

Comfort - I've always had the flip phones and like that design. The slide design doesn't contour that well to your face and i find myself either blocking the mic with my finger (who's the genius engineer who places the mic where you naturally rest your finger) while trying to wrap it around my head . I'm getting more use to it, positioning my hands. If i'm goign to have a long conversation I tend to use my bluetooth anyways.

Mini qwert problems. Since you now have letters assigned to different buttons you can no longer make a call based on letters (IE: call bob at 800-CALL-BOB) because the letters now don't properly align. This could be an easy fix but Samsung doesn't have any solutions that i'm aware of.

Cases: Because of its unique design, finding proper, form-fitting cases has been somewhat of a challenge. Although i've found some options, there not readily available.


Shortcuts - You've probably notice a tendency in my review to make a call or function in as few steps as possible. Samsungs done a great job in this regard except you can only program one button on its face (out of a possible 12) to your preference. Sucks because some shortcuts i'll never use (like memo voice recorder) and would love to change it out.

Very limited choice of ring-tones/msg tones. I'm surprised by this,well, maybe not 'that' surprised considering if you want something cool sounding on your phone be prepared to fork over $2 a pop. No thanks, i'll figure out the free way, eventually.


Overall i'm happy with my choice. Receptions good, volumes are about average of a cell. I initially only resigned with Tmobile for a year because i figured in that time Tmobile will have phones more like the iphone. But each day i discover something new within the Blast and it's been a fun, rewarding learning experience. Still have a few more unknowns to solve & can't wait to figure them out. I'd recommend it as a great mid-range cell. Price was right & rich with feature. Perfect stepping stone to those of us that want something more then a basic boring phone but don't want all those unspoken of fees associated with those latest & greatest snazzy phones. Hope my review gives you some insight to my experience and helps you on your journey to a new, exciting phone.

I got this phone yesterday because of the seamless integration of email with text messaging so that you don't have to pay data charges to get and send email. Every press release I saw claimed this phone integrates with AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail - AOL and Yahoo yes, Gmail no. In fact, I found out today from a TMobile dealer that it is a "known issue" that the Blast does not work with Gmail, Earthlink, or SBCGlobal email at the current time. This is a big problem for me, and they're not sure if/when it will be resolved.

The second problem is that no one who works for TMobile seems to understand that this phone can get and send email WITHOUT subscribing to TMobile Web. That's the whole point of the phone, but none of them will believe me. However, it does work, so don't listen to them and sign up for the web service if you don't want it!

Other than that...I do love the phone. It looks great, sounds great, and works great for most things. But I did get it for the perk of easy, cheap email and it seems like I might not get that.

I have had my own Samsung Blast for a little over 4 months now and decided to read through some of the customer comments and reviews. The one that really jumped out at me was Sarabellum's comment stating that you can't switch from predictive text (T9)and when the phone is closed you can't operate it. These statements are completely false.

The predictive text is extremely easy to turn off. You press the upper right hand button on the main keypad when creating a message. This will cycle you through the different text options. It is one of the easiest problems to fix.

As an earlier cutomer pointed out, you can do many things while the phone is closed. You can make and answer calls, read text messages, play games, listen to music, check e-mail(if sign-in is saved in phone), etc.

As a user of the phone, I have been very pleased with it. Sound quality is excellent, the new letter design which is set up like a comp. keyboard may take a bit to get used to but eventually works quite well, the camera is wonderful, memory space is just fine without a memory card (I have had the phone for 4 months and still have not bought a memory card. Overall it performs well and is great all around. Although I will agree that the battery could be a bit bigger or at least made to last longer.

Got the Blast from T-mobile about 5 days ago -- so far I'm quite happy with it.

In the store I thought the volume for incoming calls was a bit low, but in real use I have not had a problem -- even turned down the volume a few times. Sound quality is quite good -- better at least than some other cellphones. I've also had pretty good coverage with T-Mobile so far -- better than I expected, actually, since they don't have as much coverage as Verizon or AT&T. As a plain cellphone, it does a good job.

One peculiarity is that it doesn't have the normal letters-to-numbers assignment of standard phones -- I guess they're trying to make it faster for text-messagers, but they've got a sort of QWERTY layout that assigns two letters to most keys and one letter to some keys, which can be confusing if you're trying to dial some mnemonic number like 1-800-SPELL ME.

I bought a Plantronics Bluetooth earpiece/headset to go with it -- sound quality both of the person you hear and how you sound to them deteriorates with distance -- try to keep the phone within 6 feet of the earpiece for maximum quality.

The "My Faves" feature works pretty easily and is a nice feature of T-Mobile. I've used the phone pretty heavily each of the days I've had it -- getting it set up as well as actually making calls, so I've recharged it every evening. Can't speak to total battery life therefore. My guess is that if you keep Bluetooth enabled all the time that drains the battery a bit faster than if you just use the built-in earphone and microphone, or if you used a wired (as opposed to wireless) earpiece/microphone.

The camera works reasonably well, though I haven't inspected the few photos I've taken on the web-based "album" that T-Mobile provides. The lens is pretty wide-angle, however, so if you want a close-up you need to get *really* close-up! The camera does have a dedicated "shutter" button on the edge that makes taking quick pictures easy, although you have to get into picture-taking mode through the menus first. (Unless you set up the shortcut key to take you to photo mode, in which case it would be just one key and then press the shutter.)

The display is fairly bright and has good contrast, though it's hard to see in bright sunlight. My only complaint is that the date and time are displayed in in a strange outline font that is visually "busy" and hard to read at a glance -- but at a glance is what you *want* for the time.

In response to SaraBellum's comments, you can do a fair number of things without opening the phone. To prevent accidental key-presses, you have to press two different function buttons in sequence to "unlock" the phone when it's closed, but after that the menu and phone-book buttons work, as do the "My Faves", call, and hang-up buttons. From the menu you can see how many of each type of messages you've got -- text, IM, e-mail, voicemail, etc. -- and can then access whichever type you select.

Although I haven't tried it yet, I believe the phone has Samsung's usual voice-recognition capabilities that allows you to record names as shortcuts for phone numbers and then "dial" just by activating your headset or the phone and then saying the name.

My last phone was a RAZRv3 so, I am not that phone hip and maybe things have gotten a lot better since then. However, this phone is appreciably better and it delivers on the holy grail, free(ish) email. While I definitely have some gripes about user interface (UI), in general it delivers as promised. I am checking Gmail on it now so what the other reviewer says isn't quite true. You do have to tell it the domain, it isn't built in like AOL and Yahoo, but it was trivial to do. I managed to burn through the battery in about a day but I was playing with it quite a lot, seems like it could have lasted longer. All in all, this is the best bang for buck phone I've seen in a long time.

In answer to the woman who can't get off Predictive Text....the right soft key changes it. Hit it repeatedly to change to All Caps, Capitalize first word, 123, and the punctuation pages. The left soft key (under Options on text screen) allows you to change the font style and size.
My complaints with the phone (I've sent back the first one already):
I had a problem with Text Messages....some arrive at their destination, others do not. Very random. They all SAY they are sent, but about 1/3 of them never reached the intended party. Service on the phone seems to be very weak...I'm thinking the internal antenna isn't very powerful. I always had 4 - 5 bars of service with my Nokia phone at home, with the Blast I'm lucky if I have 1 or 2. Can't find an apostrophe anywhere in the punctuation (although there are about 5 pages of punctuation) and I use apostrophes a lot! You cannot dial a phone number that is given to you in words....for example 1-866-IDOLS 01 (or whatever!). With the QWERTY keypad (which is nice) those letters and numbers don't correspond correctly.
It's a nice phone, good pictures and video, I just hope they work out some of the kinks. You probably shouldn't buy a phone the day it comes out!

Pros-
-mp3
-bluetooth
-longer video time
-easy use keyboard
-1.2megapixel camera with special effects.

Cons-
-little memory*
-The stupid thing that happens while texting when it thinks it knows what you are thinking.

*Can be fixed by buying a microSD. can be found for around $8-$50+ depending on capacity.

Great cell phone for teenagers. Easy to text with. Strong. Light. Large screen, a customizable button. I really like this phone.

I'm a text junkie but I don't exactly need a blackberry (might upgrade to one in the future) and the Sidekick doesn't have all the features I want. Here's the solution: The Samsung Blast! Since I was used to texting on a traditional phone keypad, the Blasts QWERTY keyboard took me a couple of days to get used to. After that initial adjustment period, it was a wrap! People are always commenting on how fast I'm texting now. Love the T9 predictive text!!! When I type a word/name that's not in the predictive text dictionary, it's very simple to manually insert it (right soft key until you see the "A" to disable the T9). Once you do that, it's in the phone's dictionary. I would like to know how to delete words that have been erroneously entered into the dictionary. If anyone knows how to do this, please lemme know. TIA. Instead of pressing the right soft key 3-4 times to get to the symbols (e.g. commas, asterisks, "@", parenthesis, etc.), just press and hold the "sym zx" key on the left side of the phone's keypad. I think it's totally lame that you have to go to the symbols menu to get a comma when they provide easy access to the exclamation point, question mark, asterisk and apostrophy. What were they thinking!? Personally, I'd swap the *, ?, or ! for the , any day.

I haven't stored any music on it yet, but might like to at some point in the future.

I love that I can easily access my Yahoo mail and messenger (provided the server's not too busy or there's no other technical difficulty). To get to my Hotmail account, I have to go to the my bookmarks where I have MSN mobile saved.

As far as phone calls, in the beginning it as very annoying as oftentimes the party I was talking to would ask me to repeat myself. Doesn't happen so much now. The speakerphone is WEAK! My previous phone was the Samsung T809. I Loved that phone to death, but had to replace it due to damage beyond repair. Anywho, the T809 had actual speakers hence a speakerphone that could fill the whole first floor of my house. The speaker on the Blast is just a little slit at the top of the phone.

Unfortunately, this phone doesn't have much in the way of memory, so I've inserted a 2gb memory card. I just wish there was a way for photos, texts, etc. to automatically go to the memory card. Until I find a way to do that, I'll just continue to do it manually.

The 2mp camera takes decent photos IF you have a steady hand. I'm crazy about cameras frames and other editing options. You can also record/playback video.

I never was crazy about the look of the phone; still ain't. The front cover looks like cheap plastic to me as opposed to my old T809 which had a fierce, Darth Vader thing goin' on. The T809 is what kick-started my slider addiction. Anywho, once I focus on the features I can get past the phone's appearance. The back of the phone looks cool though with it's metallic red. I'd actually tried out the Motorola RIZR Z3 before getting this phone. I Love the look and feel of the RIZR Z3 as well as the camera that could be used sans sliding the phone open first and the Z3's "flash." But none of that could compare the the Blast's features and numbered menus! Instead of scrolling to my desired option, just hit the corresponding number. I don't think I can ever go back to Motorola...until/unless they get with the numbered menus, then maybe... Time will tell. The battery life is good. I usually turn it off and charge it for an hour or two in the morning and it's good until the following morning and that's with my constant T-Zoning and game playing! Would I recommend this phone? Hell's yeah! Especially if you like to text and instant message.

The phone is great, esp with the expandable microsd slot you can have tons of music to play which also provides a way (free of charge, compared to those you have to use wireless service to transfer data between your phone and online account) for you to transfer pictures/videos you've taken with the phone to you computers or wherever you like it.

Had it not been so picky on memory cards, I would've had given it 5 stars. I bought a Kingston 2GB microSD card from buy.com and inserted it into the phone: it didn't work. the phone didn't recognize the content though it knew it's card or sort. Then I googled all comments on the card issue with Blast and some said his/her Lexar card worked just fine. OK, yesterday I went to buy one at a local store. Voila! It just worked like charm. Unfortunately, I don't have a full list of compatible cards/brands, but let me spread this out: Lexar 1GB microSD does work with Samsung Blast. Of course, Lexar makes no cheap memory cards. The one I bought costed me $20 for 1GB. But it's all worth it:)

Most reviews that gave a lower rating than this phone deserves is probably due to the fact that they didn't learn how to use the phone properly (yet). For example, to the lady that doesn't know how to switch off SureType - hit the right soft key. For the other guy that doesn't know where the apostrophe is, you don't even need to go to the symbols page, just hit ALT + L.

Personally, I love this phone. Of course, I *am* a tech-savvy seventeen year old girl with small hands and can type a mile a minute, so obviously this phone doesn't cater to all needs. But if you can appreciate...

- A slim, light (fashionably black&red) design
- An okay camera (what more can you expect from a phone?)
- A semi-QWERTY keyboard that doesn't take long to get used to
- IM and e-mail, for which you don't need a data plan to use
- myFaves capability and okay service (but T-mobile has been known to suck)
- Clear sound and speakerphone
- Great organizational functions
- Alright music player

...then this phone is for you.

Of course, not everything can be perfect. It doesn't come with a data cable OR a microSD card OR stereo earphones - which is why this only got 4 stars - so I had to get my own. Some microSD cards have been know to have compatibility problems, but if you do your research before you get one, you're good to go.