Customer Reviews

Samsung D807 Phone (Cingular)

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

This "star-trek" slider style phone just came out in Cingular stores last week. I went in looking for the ultra slim Motorola RAZR flip phone or its cousin the "candy-bar" SLVR and walked out with this brand new Samsung instead. The rebate deals that Cingular had (as does Amazon) were also a factor. I paid only $[...].

I have been using it the last few days and wow!! A great phone. I've owned several phones and never one like this. Some quick observations:

Its about as small as it gets and still is a usable size. Its also clearly going for some design awards like its Motorla competitors. It is probably one of the smallest phones out there and not as "flimsy" feeling as the Motorola minis.

Fine voice reception and the "WAP" data reception is great (I live in a fringe area).

Great screen, in fact when the slider is closed... its all screen (and the phone works just fine when its closed by the way).

Its got a great speaker phone and also fine voice recognition... you know say "ET call home" ..and it does. Also it has a tape recorder. All are accessible with one button (even with the phone closed).

It has an unbelievable number of features like most other high end "bluetooth" and web enabled phones. I've never surfed the web or checked e-mail with my phone before. But it was pretty easy with this one. (Be sure you get a Cingular data package...the kilobytes add up, even at a penny a unit).

The camera at 1.3 Meg is about as good as they get with these phones. I haven't tried the video yet.

It has room for a micro-SD card - I just ordered a half a Meg card for about $[...] on Amazon to store pictures, files, and maybe music.

Speaking of MP3s, after reading the documentation (which is poor by the way) and after calling Samsung tech support (which didn' yet have an info on the new phone) I still can't figure how to (or whether)I can play MP3s with a stereo headset. There is only a proprietary plug on the phone and no Samsung headphone accessories as of yet (thought the box says one "is available".) If that's your goal, buy the RAZR or maybe the Sony Ericsson w600i.

The phone is a quad-band and can be used globally. A great thing about Cingular is you can use their phones abroad for no extra fee (and with a fairly reasonable per minute charge.)

I haven't come up with any negatives yet (though one of course needs to be patient with all these features). I don't know about Samsung's reliability track record with high end phones, we'll see. Be sure to understand the warranty you're getting and how to handle tech support if there are problems.

I could make a few comments about the pros and cons of Cingular, but the wireless companies all have their ups and downs and this review is really about the phone.

So bottom line... great phone! You may want to go to a store to see how it feels in your hand, but my guess is you will really like it.

P.S. 6 weeks has gone by since my mid-June review. I still love the phone, the voice-recognition is the best I've ever seen. I rarely use the key-pad to make calls (its adequate...but not great). I've bought standard Samsung dual ear-buds (with a mike)and the stero MP-3s sound just fine (and it can be used for calls as well).

All in all, very good phone. It's sliding face is very slick and sure to be eye-catching. Sizewise, the samsung and the motorola razor is almost identical. The width of the samsung may be a bit (and I mean a bit) smaller. Height is exactly the same. The thickness of the samsung is a bit larger. Here are the gists of pros and cons:
Pros:
- very cool looking
- the all-black-look may be more geared towards men then women but who knows, they may come out with different colors.
- the slider face feels sturdy enough not to worry about breaking it or anything
- you CAN make a call without fliping it up using voice-dial, recent call, or phonebook (with minor caveat. see below)
- the display is BEAUTIFUL. Better than anything else in this class phone. (meaning better than razr, slvr, or equivalents)
- the photos taken are very good. However, don't expect too much from the zoom. If you want a really good phone with camera and nice zoom, go for the nokia6682 which is on sale at the same price right now (june, 2006)
- the video is pretty good and crisp for this size phone. It is hard to say what the limit of the video recording time is because I do not have a miniSD yet. On the phone memory, I let the video do its thing and then it quit after 1min7sec but it didn't use up all the memory (not even close). I'm guessing if I got a miniSD, it will record a lot more. (I think it only records a pre-determined ratio of memory that is left to prevent too much memory loss)
- The best feature of this phone is the great voice-dialing software. The voice dialing is very good. My relatives with heavy accents are able to call all of the entries in the phonebook without any problems. The best thing about this thing is that you DON'T HAVE TO RECORD THE NAME. The program estimates what you are saying without pre-recording anyone's contact name and does a darn good job at that. really cool.
- battery life seems pretty good.
Con:
- not much here. But there is one thing that REALLY bothers me. This is the caveat that I mentioned above and the reason my personal rating is 4.5: While you can make calls on the phone and answer calls with the face flipped down, the phone automatically locks the keypad on the face. Because of this, you have to UNLOCK THE PHONE by making two keystrokes before doing any calling with the face down. This includes calling on voicedial, phonebook, recent calls etc. I find this to be highly annoying and it seems that this function can not be turned off. Surely a glitch by samsung programming department. If there is a way to correct this problem, please post somewhere.
- The directional keys are very small and can cause problems if you have thick fingers.
Conclusion:
the only reason the phone got a 4.5 is because of the requirement to unlock the keypad each time you want to make a call with the face down. Seems like a very stupid thing for samsung to do. Otherwise, the phone is very slick, beautiful and full of decent features. The screen is large and beautiful. The voice-dialing is superve. All in all, I recommend getting this phone. Now that this phone is out, I would definitely recommend AGAINST getting a razr. I've had both and the samsumg d807 beats the razor in style, functionality, and pretty much everything else hands down.

Regarding the ability to use the underscore and other symbols while entering text, you only need to press the lower left (star/asterisk) key a few times when in text edit mode, and you'll eventually get to the large symbol palette that has dozens of symbols, including the underscore that a previous reviewer thought wasn't available.

Second, I've downloaded and installed many 3rd-party, non-Cingular J2ME java apps to this phone with no problem - games, email utilities, browser, Google Maps, whatever - so the comment that only Cingular-branded apps will work is incorrect. I used both the Cingular MediaNet browser and Opera Mini to download the apps.

Finally, I've also installed many of my own photos for wallpaper and quite a few of my own sounds for ringtones, mostly by emailing them to my phone as multimedia messages (I haven't received my USB cable in the mail yet, so I have yet to try that method). The process was smooth and speedy. I emailed the photo or ringtone as an attachment to (my number)@mms.mycingular.com, and then when viewing the message on my phone I just hit the "options" softkey > "save media" and the file was saved to the appropriate folder automatically (sounds, photos, whatever). It was virtually instantaneous.

By the way, for those who are dying to have something other than the awful Cingular homepage in the MediaNet browser, it's as easy as going into settings > connection settings and changing the "home URL" to whatever you want it to be.

One more thing. Yes, the camera leaves something to be desired, though it's quite a bit better than the unbelieveably bad one on the Cingular 2125/T-Mobile SDA. However, you can improve the images quite a bit just by upping the brightness level in the camera settings (just hit the "up arrow" on the d-pad when in camera mode). I have mine set at 5 or 6 most of the time, and it makes a huge difference for some reason.

I've only had this phone for about a week and I love it for the most part. Aesthetically, this phone is by far #1 and far ahead of its top rival, the RAZR. It's all around a great phone as far as functionality goes. HOWEVER, on the 7th day of having this phone, I dropped it on the ground accidently (but I've done this many many times to my past phones and they've been fine) and the screen cracked in half making it impossible to see anything on the screen. Therefore, I was unable to dial anyone's number from my phonebook or to see who was calling me among other things. On most other carriers I've had, this wouldn't have been so bad because I would've just filed a claim against my phone's insurance and for a $50 deductible would have had a brand new phone. But, Cingular does not offer insurance on this phone (at least not as yet, though according to them, they plan on offering it in the next 6 months). So this changed the entire story. Thank god my credit card has insurance on it that covers my cell phone otherwise I would be stuck with a $300 bill for a new phone. Also, I recently googled this phone and found several posts on websites from people whose screens have cracked from dropping their phones on the ground (an extremely common occurence) and since this is not covered under the phone's warranty everyone has been stuck buying new phones. I think the problem is the fact that the phone itself is so thin especially the top part with the screen (much like the controversy with the iPod nano). So, all in all, this phone is by far the best on the market in terms of applications and looks, BUT please make sure you have insurance on this phone thru other means than Cingular otherwise you will soon be stuck with a hefty bill to replace a broken phone.

I really like this phone. It looks cool, the sound quality is great, and unlike my husband with his RAZR I haven't had any dropped calls. I like the slider design. The screen is large and bright.
A few quirks: I can't feel it vibrate. I can *hear* the buzzing, but I can't feel it. That's inconvenient and annoying. Also, as someone else mentioned, you have to 'unlock' it if you wish to use it without sliding it open. Now, that's good for avoiding accidental button-pressing, but it should be user-configurable. Lastly, there is a limited number of menu items that can be assigned to the 4 user-defined keys. I wanted to assign one of the keys to To-Do application, but was unable to do so. Calendar, yes; to-do, no.
That being said, I highly recommend the phone.

I just got this phone today, and have seriously only used this for about an hour or two but I've already figured out most of the pros and cons...

The MECHANICS of the phone:
Pros:
**The screen is obviously big, so viewing pictures and texting is very easy.
**The buttons are located under the slider so dialing Mr.333333333 won't happen again.
**The Camera takes lovely pictures... although actions shots are still not an option (but that's what digital cameras are for)
**Has great voice recognition if you'd rather use it instead of dialing...

Cons:
** The phone volume SUCKS. It only goes to a 5 when CLEARLY it should go up to a 10. Who can hear Jack on level 1???!!I live in a very quiet place... and it's hard to hear. I can't even imagine what it'll be like trying to hear someone when I'm in Target! I have perfect hearing, so no... It's not a user problem.
**The phone comes equiped with... 10 rings or so... 4 of which are cheaps Ring ring tones and at least one of the dopey Cingular ring.
** The buttons are pretty small for texting. I'm a small girl, 130 pounds, so I don't huge Andre the Giant hands.
**The antenna is on the back of the phone so if you're in a LOW reception area, you have to place it face down as to not OBSTRUCT the reception, and that will just eff up the screen.
** IF you're big on cleanliness, the screen will become messy with ear-grease - funk after every conversation.

On Asthetics:
The phone is beautifully made. Light weight. Great looking. and easy slider (I hate flippy do-dahs). They should redo the model (like how Nikon made a D70s)improving the obivious, more neede features like hearing (since that IS the point of a phone).

I'm usually a Nokia user and was very leary about switching over. If you're a Nokia fan as well, I would not recommend this.

What really drew me to this phone was the screen quality. With a 1.3 megapixel camera built in, the images could pass for ones taken on a camera. The sound quality is also excellent, and there's a built in mp3 player i'm still trying to work out how to fix.
The only downside to the phone is that all numbers from my old phone are stored in the SIM card, and in order to use many of the features involving placing or recieving calls the numbers must be transferred to the phone memory, thus taking up more of it.

Pros:
- Great looking phone
- Great sound/video quality. Excellent speaker phone
- Voice activation/recognition ... best I have used.
- Contact list ... multi-number per user, picture and custom ringer.

Cons:
- Ringer volume -- way too low .. my wife and I both miss calls constantly
- Vibrate alert -- way too low .. constantly miss calls on vibrate
- LCD screen -- cracked after 3 months .. $119 to fix.

I wouldn't buy it again and won't repair it.

I've had this phone for several weeks now, and I like it quite a bit. Most of my thoughts are covered pretty well by the other positive reviews below, but I wanted to clear up a few misconceptions.

1) You can use a >512Meg MicroSD card. Not sure about 2 Gig, but I'm using a 1 Gig card and it works fine.

2) Inexpensive adapters that let you use any headphones with this unit are readily available if you look around (try google).

3) Sound quality is quite good, but this phone does have some limitations as a music player, mostly because of the design of the player software itself, notably:
a) You can organize songs into folders on the SD card, but the player will not let you add songs in folders to a playlist.
b) The length of a playlist is limited.
c) The player will only play MP3s at 192kbps or less, and the filename can be no greater than 28 characters (why, I have absolutely no idea). You can get resampling and renaming software for your PC to help prepare tracks for these limitations.
d) The player does not understand track tags, so you can only browse for songs by filename.

Although these seemingly unneccessary limitations are frustrating, I still find that the phone makes a useful media player when I'm travelling. It's not an Ipod substitute though by any means.

First of all, poor reviews like June 20th, 2006 stating "Can't Keep Phone Number" should be removed from this post. The rater complains about the carrier's service problems but fails to address anything regarding the functionality of this wonderful phone. I shopped around alot before choosing this--my first samsung--after many different Nokia models. I was reluctant to change to a new brand with different accessories but it was worth it! The Samsung D807 works great in almost every category. The menu screen is gorgeous and scrolls with ease. I learned most every function of the phone without having to refer to the owners manual.

Photo quality is terrific and 1.3 is plenty of pixels for average user. I have no problem with the default setting for picture brightness and there's no need to adjust it before each photo. I've read that the new Nokia 3.1 cameras (N90, etc.) are not producing better pictures than this one. I have yet to try the MP3 or other internet features. My phone reception is just as good as my last Nokia 6230--which was great. I love the slider feature and am happy that I did not choose a flimsy flip phone like the upcoming Razor V3i.

The speaker phone is extremely loud and the ringer is too. My only complaint is the standard sound volume is a little low even when turned up to 5(of 5)