Customer Reviews

Samsung M520 Phone, Silver (Sprint)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Samsung M520 is a 2008-release for Sprint. It supports 3G data.

If there's one takeaway from this review, it's that this thing has awful battery life. After just two days of moderate use, I felt compelled to invest in a second power adapter and a second battery. While they're not overly expensive, esp. the knock-off ones, the point is that the battery life is very short. It is around 3-4 hours, which means that it won't get you through a work day, let alone after hours. What this means it that you should loiter around a power source, or pack with you a spare battery or two. I just keep it on the charger whenever I can.

To make the matter slightly worse, the battery level indicator is not useful. First of all, it has three bars. Most of the time it shows all three. When you're down to two, you have very little left, probably 30 minutes. At one bar, it's pretty much drained. So, don't fall in to a false sense of security of the full three bars. After a bit of use, charge it!

Now onto other problems:

1. You need to buy a 3.5mm (standard sized) earpiece adapter. It only comes with 2.5mm.
2. There is only one connector port, where the earpiece, charger, and (optional) USB cable connects. So when you're listening through the earpiece, you cannot charge the phone. Which is terrible, since that's probably when you're using - and drawing power from - the phone.
3. The minimum volume is too high. This is especially annoying with an earpiece.
4. It's slow. Not horrible, but nothing comes up immediately. Applications take time to load. Sprint TV takes a good 5-10 seconds.
5. The text input is inconsistent. Some apps insert spaces, some don't, some do auto-complete, some don't.
6. The whole menu and "Favorite" list take some used to. They're pretty cumbersome.
7. The sound settings are all over the place.
8. Music player always tries to connect to the music store first. Very slow as well.
9. You cannot email the pictures you take! You can subscribe to a Sprint service to upload to their server, but you cannot email the pictures. Stupid.
10. While I'm on that, there are lots of places where if you click OK makes you subscribe to new services (i.e. pay for stuff). Be careful when you run apps you're not familiar with. They do tell you, so read stuff before clicking ok.
11. My battery door is often impossible to open. It's way too tight.

Now, onto the great parts about this phone:
1. The screen is excellent. I've come to expect this level of excellence from Samsung. Brilliant, bright, nice and shiny.
2. I think the phone looks great in general. Looks very slick.
3. Super light! This is the main reason why I got this phone, and love it so much. It's extremely light. (Partly due to the small battery, i.e. lack of uptime.)
4. Just a perfect form factor. Small, fits everywhere. Looks nice. Not too expensive, but perfectly presentable.
5. The buttons feel solid. The volume buttons are moving a little though, but nothing to worry about.
6. Good sound quality. No complaints in that department.
7. Has 6 bars for signal strengths. Very detailed. Good reception.
8. Does picture and video. Very easy to use.
9. Texting interface is very nice.

It supports Sprint TV, and flips it sideways in full screen mode, which is pretty smart. It has GPS and BlueTooth. GPS requires a subscription, unless you find the well-known way to work around it, in which case it works well and is free.

Overall, I love the form factor of the phone, and it's perfectly capable to make calls, check my email, do texting, tweet, and go on Facebook. So long as you don't forget to charge the phone, or take a spare with you, you'll do fine with this. Therefore, I still rate it highly with 4 stars.

The phone and the interface is great. Messaging was smooth and easy and calls were clear and never dropped. The camera was also pretty good, you just couldn't zoom while taking still pictures but you could when taking videos. However, because it is a slide phone the screen is doomed to fail anywhere between three months to a year maximum. The sliding causes a bar in the screen to either break or be moved so that the screen goes completely white. Everything on the phone works perfectly still, it's just that you can't see anything. Sometimes it will correct itself and you can see the screen again, but give it time and all you'll ever see when you turn on the phone is the white screen of death. I had my first one for eight months and it had this problem. I got it replaced with a new phone (same model) and it had the same thing happen after five months. I would not recommend this phone to anyone unless they can fix the screen permanently.