Customer Reviews

Samsung M510 Black Phone (Sprint)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The M510 has all the features I was looking for, and nothing to get in the way of basic phone usability. I don't like the usual tiny keyboards, so this one is a treat -- remarkably easy for larger fingers to use, with positive tactile feedback (click). The screen is easy to read, sharp and colorful, and the various screens are straightforward to navigate (although, as with most phones, I'd like to remove some of the screen items I'll never use).

The sound quality is good, and I find it comfortable to hold while talking. Unlike one-piece phones, it's nice that the screen is held away from your face so you don't have to keep cleaning it. The startup sound is loud but short, so I just put my finger over the external speaker.

I've found the software to be nicely designed for usability, with number entry being faster than my previous phone. I'd like to speed up the text entry for names (not using T9), but that's partly my fault so I'll not nit-pick. Navigation around the screens is pretty simple, with either the nav arrows or Back getting you there with a few clicks. Some of the standard ringtones are dorky but that seems typical for phones.

The packaging is sleek, thin, and yet feels solid. I like the two-tone black with the band of blue (also inside) and silver -- it's a clean design. I was concerned about the more exposed hinge on other phones (such as the Razr), and know they take a lot of hits, so this one is more sensibly tucked away from the corners and should be more robust. The shape is comfortable to hold and the cover provides a bit more grip than the typical glossy finish.

The SD card and power/interface jack covers are tiny, but they do work and so far I haven't had any problems. The SD card is tiny (!) but comes with an adapter for normal SD slots, so for me that lets me offload photos directly without having to go through the phone connection. The power adapter is small (about 1/2 the size of an Altoids box) so taking both on a trip would be easy.

I've been able to turn it on during whole work day and do that for several days in a row without recharging (granted, that's with not many phone calls). The talk time does seem reasonable.

All in all, it's a slick, solid, easy-to-use phone that you can carry without noticing it but works well when you need it. Recommended.

I received this phone as a free replacement for my previous phone which was no longer being supported by Sprint, though it was still under two years old.

I think it is pretty good -not great, but overall a decent purchase. There are a couple of significant flaws that detract from this phone.

Here are the things I like:

Add 1 star. It is sleek, and smooth, and pleasing to the eye.

Add 1 star. The talk time seems fine. I've had no problems there. It works great as a phone. I've had NO problems with hearing people or being heard.

Add 0.5 stars. The speakerphone option is actually on the phone itself (available from a one button touch). This is nice and solves a problem with my last phone. I needed to push 3 buttons to use speakerphone on that phone.

Add 1 star. The camera and camcorder work fine, and I've had no issues there.

Add 1 star. The mini SD Storage card is wonderful. I didn't have this on my last phone. I bought a 2 Gig card for a cheap price and popped it right in. (Typically the mini SD cards also come with an adaptor so that you can plug it right into any standard SD slot -like on your computer- so that you can move information easily).

Add 0.5 star. The charging port is a lot more accessible than on my last phone. Not perfect, but it is an improvement. I don't have to actually tear off the port plastic guard in order to plug my phone in and lay it down to charge.

Here are the things I dislike.

Minus 1 star: The usage ergonomics are pretty bad:

1) The button placement for the scroll up and down keys are way too low on the phone. Instead of being able to use your left hand to automatically scroll up and down pages, you are forced to use your other hand to touch the buttons, or, more realistically, you are forced to twist your hand at an awkward angle to allow you to touch the scroll keys. You can do it, but you have a much more delicate and tenuous hold on the phone when doing so, which makes it much more likely to slip out of your hand. This was a silly design flaw and has been done a lot better on other phones.

2) The keypad is completely flat with almost no texture (which is annoying, but which I can deal with) but the scroll wheel and the main buttons are also completely flat -I mean COMPLETELY flat and flush with each other- (which makes it very difficult to control menus unless you are perfectly still and focused) -especially when trying to move the cursor around when texting.

Minus 1 star:

1) The texting is pretty bad. When I text a message and then hit next (right before hitting the final send) the phone randomly decides to add another word to my text message SOME OF THE TIME, and if I don't go back and remove the extra word, it will send the word with the message. So instead of a message saying "See you at five." It might say "See you at five. Fish" or "See you at five. Don't" And if you are like me, you are trying to text quickly, and don't sit there and wait and analyze the message -you hit the double "send" to get the message on its way. If the extra word appears and is sent then you are stuck sending a follow up message explaining it. Nuts!

2) Furthermore, I am often suggested fake words as suggested words, and this drives me up the wall. Instead of finishing the spelling of a common word, my dictionary will suggest words with accents, latin or foreign sounding words, or just weird spellings. It doesn't happen all the time, but enough that it is annoying -especially when I am trying to spell a common word. "Lazy", for example, might come up as "Lawz". I might think I misspelled the word, and erase it and try again with the same result. It will only be when I choose the NEXT suggested word option will I realize that I spelled it correctly the whole time and it was the phone that was messed up.

3) I am not able to add words to my phone's dictionary. I thought you could do that, but after poring through the entire instruction guide and playing with every option on my phone I have been unsuccessful. So simple, common slang words have to be alphanumerically typed in over and over. This is ridiculous. You could have easily fixed this in the software.

Other Minor Items:

Negative: There is no flash. My phone two years older had a flash. Not a big deal, I just noticed it.

Negative: I HATE how I am stuck with the lame screensaver. Yes you can change them, but NO you cannot change them without screwing up all your menus. My old phone had 3 themes that looked fine, and I am stuck with the one lame digital clock theme on the outside of my phone that I don't like. I have read all the instructions and pored through all the menus and have given up on customizing the layout how I wanted.

Negative: One thing I miss from my last phone was one button email access. I had set it up where I pushed my select wheel to the right as soon as it opened up my phone and it accessed my hotmail. The software on this phone (2 years newer) is not as customizable and it doesn't allow for 1 button access. You have to go into a menu to do this. It does, however, have a two button push sequence to access your text messages. Not perfect, but fine.

Overall, this phone works great for speaking, and for taking pictures and most people will probably be happy with that. I believe it is a poor choice for texting, and is annoying when trying to scroll up and down web pages. If Samsung or Sprint or whoever were to redo the texting software and fix these issues I would love this phone.

I purchased this about a month ago and really have nothing bad to say about it. The sound quality is excellent, both on the inner and outer speaker. Mp3 ringtones are crystal clear. I have Vision service and it's fast, just as expected. The screen is clear and sharp. The only reason I give it 4 stars is because it doesn't have the 2 MP camera and the screen size of the M610.

Well to sum it up, this is pretty much a basic phone for people who aren't willing to spend a lot of money on a phone. I have yet to have a problem with the phone, and it holds its charge for a long time. I even have good reception in my office building. People forget sometimes that the main function of a phone is not to take pictures, not to play your mp3's...but to be a PHONE. The download speeds on the phone are awesome. For the person complaining about the phone adding words while texting, this is called predictive text input, and the feature can be turned off. One thing that could be improved is to put a flash on the phone. Overall a pretty decent phone for somebody who isn't looking for their phone to be everything under the sun. For those who want better pictures...here's an idea....GO BUY A DIGITAL CAMERA!

I've had the m510 for 8 months now and have had very few problems with it, actually it has proven to be the most reliable phone I've ever owned.
The design is sleek and smooth, stashes in pockets easily although I usually use a belt carrier.
I purchased a 1GB miniSD card which is works flawlessly increasing its storage capacity and allowing me to watch movies that I copy to it, not having to transmit/receive signal.
Speaking of video, the video is pretty good on the device and receives almost anywhere I go.
Unlike reviews, I found that with a little experimenting I was able customize the screen to where I wanted it and while I do not have 1 touch application launches, I do have 2 touch application launches which I can easily live with.
The only problem with the product is not necessarily a phone issue, but a carrier-signal issue: Where I work there is lot of HEAVY electronic and radio interference as well a massive terrain features that cause my m510 to switch over to roam and search for a signal constantly. I can usually only get about 6 hours of battery life from a single charge on the standard battery. I purchased the extended battery, hoping that I can at least make it through a complete work day on a regular basis.

The real bummer though is that there seems to be a complete lack of working software linking a PC to the phone. The software from the Samsung site just does not seem to work well with this phone when connecting via Bluetooth or USB cable. - sigh :(

The phone itself is great, the lack of PC software bites.

this is only the fourth celphone I've owned, so my feedback is relative to my limited exposure. what sold me on this phone was the light weight pebble like good for the front pocket style, and the excellent voice sound quality when listening and speaking during a conversation. when I take it out, people find it to be an attractive accessory. the black/blue color helps keep it masculine enough. I also stuck some egrips on it, because the phones surface is slippery smooth. the top volume on this phone on both the earpiece and speakerphone is lower than I would have liked, so if you frequently make calls in especially noisy speaking areas, or an old moving car or bus, then this would not be a good choice. the camera works well in low light environments, but the low resolution on such a new model was a disappointment. the bluetooth works great with my plantronics earpiece, and phone reception seems fine here in NYC. battery talk time is fine, but the standby time is lousy. on my old phone I could go almost a week on standby, but with this phone dies unused by the third day even with the data services turned off. even worse if when you upgrade from a 700mw to a 1300mw extended battery, you need a special battery cover that makes your phone look like it's pregnant, so you are better off with a spare battery than a larger one. the keypad takes getting used to and should be avoided by Men with large stubby fingers as you will miss dial often, but it's comfortable for text messengers. the display is small but bright, with an extra large font (4 digits by 3 rows) if you have visual problems. I can confirm this phone will handle a good quality 2mb memory card, but access time to your files will slow down as the card fills up beyond the first 1mb. I have not used the data or music features yet, so I can't comment on those, but I plan on loading up my memory card with music soon, and will edit my comments then. Dealing with Sprint single point of contact customer service is a free call and takes a lot of patience, but they are much better than Verizon's fragmented customer service, and in the end Sprint does what is needed to make you happy. I switched from Verizon to Sprint to enjoy Sprint's earlier 7pm anytime minutes. According to JDPowers, T-Mobile is the best for NYC, so I'll probably try them next once my Sprint contract runs out in 2009. Don't believe Verizon's superior network propaganda TV commercials.

This phone looks nice. The exterior is OK, although it seems to get chipped easily, and the clamshell is hard to open with one hand. My previous phone was an LG, which had neither of these problems.

Picture quality in the camera is decent, but it needs an ungodly amount of light in order to use a reasonable shutter speed. This means that your pictures come out blurry unless they're taken in bright sunlight.

The directional pad and action buttons above the phone keypad suffer from an extremely poor design. The whole area is one flat piece of plastic, so it's hard to tell where the boundaries of each button are. Since the action and menu/OK buttons are larger, you'll often hit them by accident when you meant to use one of the directional keys. This is very frustrating, and brings me to my next point.

The Achilles heel of this model is its texting capabilities. First of all, accessing your inbox from the homescreen is awkward (even if you've assigned it a shortcut like I did, it still takes several button presses). I can't possibly explain in detail everything that's wrong here, but the highlights are:

-- The T9 engine is predisposed to stupid suggestions (today it proposed "can'v" before "can't").
-- You cannot hold the BACK key to delete word-by-word: instead, it deletes to the start of the message, so you lose everything.
-- If you type a custom word, it seems to forever appear at the top of the suggestion list. So the one time I typed "8mm" has made it precede "too" forever.
-- Emoticons always appear as pictures, so I'm not sure what characters it's actually sending.
-- T9 is too eager to add additional words. It's very frustrating to have the phone add a superfluous word just as I'm sending a message. I have to be careful and delete these words before sending, or I look like an idiot who can't type.
-- Scrolling is extremely error-prone due to the flat directional pad-- you will frequently hit Next or OK when you're trying to scroll through a message, which brings you to a different screen.
-- The SMS Inbox is limited to 100 messages, and displays an annoying warning message when you have 10 or fewer slots remaining. There's no way to disable the warning, and to clear out your Inbox, you have to select each message one-by-one. If you press the wrong key while you're doing this, it kicks you out of selection mode and you have to start over. What were they thinking???

And here's the remaining bad points of this phone:
-- It's too hard to hit the volume up/down buttons on the side of the phone. If I just want to activate the screen to check the time, I have to blindly mash the side of the phone, which (I haven't figured out why) often leads to the clock going away and the screen showing only the cryptic message "Key Guard: Off". Whatever that means.
-- Activating the camera is slow. If you need to take a quick snapshot of something, don't bother.
-- The battery indicator is unreliable. It will often stay at 100% for days and then quickly drop to nothing. This remains even after I make a point of fully draining the battery, which is supposed to help.
-- The font size is unnecessarily large. I would prefer to see more of my message on one screen than be able to read it from 3 feet away.

In conclusion: it sucks.

I've been using this phone for 6 months on Sprint's network with mix results. Here's my short list of plus & minuses:

The Good:
+ Supports just about anything you want: text, photo, web, video, music, bluetooth capable.
+ Battery lasts 3-4 days if just used for talking.
+ SD slot for extra memory for music and photo files. This was a must for me.
+ Very sleek, flat design. Great for pockets.

The Bad:
- Speakerphone quality works best only at lower volumes. It gets heavily distorted at higher volumes.
- Not designed for texting. It works in a pinch but is not handy for heavy texting.
- Battery life lasts only a few hours when using any web capabilities such as browsing or streaming audio/video.
- Web browsing is often very slow and clunky. Don't know if it's a problem with the phone or the service provider.
- My biggest peeve: can't listen to any streaming audio/video via bluetooth. Though they will work off standard earphones.

Overall a good basic phone but wouldn't recommend it for heavy text or web users.

I just got this phone and, in general, find it fits my requirements.

My main issues with the phone are as follows:

1)The power connector is really awkward. For some reason Samsung has been un-improving its power connectors over the years. My first Samsung supported a cradle which was ideal. The next had no cradle available but required inserting a 3.5 mm plug on the bottom. Now it gets its power from a mini USB connector which must be inserted with a particular orientation unlike the 3.5 mm plug. The connector is covered with a very flimsy plastic cover that is hard to open. Additionally its on the side making it a two handed operation to disconnect. I am sure the plastic cover will break off one of these days. Perhaps that will be for the better.

2)The phone is really small for my hands. Some may consider this a good thing but the previous models were small but still easy to manipulate. It's hard to flip open, especially with a single hand. Once opened however, the size doesn't bother me.

3)Lack of a way to change themes or ring tones without using the extra wireless services. I'm not one of those willing to pay to use internet on my phone. The screen is too small and the keyboard too limited to make surfing the net a worthwhile experience for me. However, this phone requires you to use these extra services for simple things like uploading a ring tone or changing the theme. I should be able to do this over USB from my laptop.

Some have also complained about the flat keypad. I see their point but found that after a while, I could click the right button with reasonable accuracy.

Bought this for my wife who will mostly just use the voice features, but I occasionally use it for everything else, so this is a perfect hybrid phone.

Fits both large and small hands perfectly, great sound quality to calls, highly configurable and fun to use. Battery life is fair, good if you enable power saving option, and excellent if you disable auto-updating of web content and bluetooth.