Customer Reviews

Samsung Reality SCH-U820 Phone, Piano Black (Verizon Wireless)

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

 

 

I got this phone thinking that it was just going to be a normal phone. But it's not! This phone is amazing! It's keyboard is nice and spaced, It's screen is a good size, And the touch screen is nice and responsive. I have no cons as of yet and I've had the phone for about 2 weeks. I would definitely recommend this phone!

Before I bought this phone I checked the reviews on both the Verizon site and Amazon. The only bad reviews I could find seemed to be either user error or phone malfunctions(always a smart move to have the $5 a month phone insurance for any phone!). My opinion is that this phone is fantastic. It does everything it says it does. I must admit I didn't buy it to have full access to the internet and browsing away from a full functioning computer (can't afford that plan!). It has limited access on my plan to facebook and myspace, bing and others, and any google searches. I wasn't looking for much more than that.

The touch screen is great. Clear and easy to use (I do have fingernails and that helps. My husband does struggle trying to use it with his fat fingers). The internal user functions (ie card formatting, moving pictures, text & pic messaging etc) is extremely user friendly. The phone even comes with a tutorial for special features (for those who never read the manual :-)) and a callibration unit for the touch screen (for fat finger users I assume).

I've never been happier with a phone I bought, especially for it's price. It does everything it says and is easy to use. I would recommend it to any friend.

I was going to write a reasoned, thorough review of this phone, but now I see there is not much point. After introducing it just a few months ago with much fanfare, Samsung has already pulled it from the market. But just in case they try to inflict it on us again in an 'updated' version, let me tell you why it's so awful. The worst thing is that even if you lock the phone, it turns itself on and does whatever it pleases, including modifying your data, connecting to the web, and placing calls. I have repeatedly heard voices from my pocket and found that it had dialed one of my contacts without me even knowing about it!

Other bad points include (a) a touch screen so bad that you can't touch the screen to scroll a list without opening the item you touched, which makes it nearly impossible to use the contact list; (b) a lousy menu system that is so confusing it must have been designed by a sadist, (c) a screen that scratches much too easily, (d) a nearly useless web browser, and (e)games and applications that aren't even sized to fit the screen and make you navigate with arrow keys rather than use the touch-screen feature.

Samsung, could you have done any worse? You owe every single person who bought this phone a full refund plus compensation for all the time they wasted trying to get the damn thing to work. I won't hold my breath.

I bought this phone for my son and he loves it. It has everything he wants in it. It is a great touch screen phone. But you have to pay for the data package for this phone.

From day one I didn't think my screen was acting right. It would be uneven some times but when I touched it would straighten up. Now after only having it a month the phone is unusable. The screen gets all distorted and unreadable. I keep having to turn the phone on and off after making or receiving call or else I can't read the screen. Verizon is sending me a refurbished phone.
I'm starting to wish I had kept my Env 2 it took a lot of abuse and kept working strong.
I wouldn't recommend this phone. It feels flimsy and the battery life is terrible.

THE REALITY OF THE SITUATION (based on purchase in early August):

I have been a loyal Verizon user since 2001. My plan has me using a phone in the "3G Multimedia" class - it's no smart phone, but I get more use out of it than I would a "feature phone". My last phone was a Voyager - touchscreen with physical qwerty keyboard underneath, clamshell form factor, expandable memory (sd slot), capable of playing playing unprotected mp3, wma or aac audio files and 3G2 video files. I had been planning on moving up to the EnV Touch, but when that proved much more expensive, settled for this.

At the time, I was able to get this phone for $[...] (after rebate, of course). It's slimmer and lighter than the Voyager, and going from clamshell to slider form factor wasn't as difficult as I'd expected (all those bad reviews I'd seen for the EnV Touch didn't hurt either). The Reality plays the same media files as the Voyager with ease, and transferring media back and forth between the phone and a computer is fast and easy - no add-on software is needed. (If you get your videos in avi format, you'll probably need conversion software like Quick Media Converter to convert to 3G2, but that shouldn't be difficult.) In fact, all I had to do was take the card out of the voyager and insert it into the Reality and everything just moved with it.

Calls:
Call quality was good in my area. dialing is easy, made easier by being able to quikly scroll through the directory of contacts (this was a slow moving chore on the Voyager, smoothed on this phone by being able to scroll through letters of the directory). No dropped calls...yet.

Texting:
This was made easier for frequent contacts - the Reality doesn't just save your messages, but saves the last contacts you've either sent or received messages from. This makes it easier to respond or follow a train of thought between texts. On the other hand, the keyboard for the Reality is (unfortunately) clearly inferior to the Voyager - the buttons are spongier and more sunken in than the keys on my older phone.

Camera:
Nobody in their right mind would have chosen the Voyager for its camera, and the 3+ MP on the Reality beats it. It's still no replacement for a dedicated camera (or one on a smart phone) but it takes decent pictures.

Touch screen and general interface:
Nobody will ever confuse the touch screen on either of my Verizon phones with the iPod Touch. the screen on the Verizon phones are cranky - they don't do what they are told to. You need to know how the screen likes to be touched. Samsung put a lot of functionality onboard, and that's probably more than the phone's feeble processor can take. There's a widget menu (pull off from the side) from which you can quickly check calendars, listen to music, look at pictures, check the weather. Don't like the widget you've pulled, just dump it back onto the widget menu. On-screen widgets don't move around that easily though, making it easy to clutter the screen up. Add to this the fact that your home screen comes with three wall papers and it's easy for your home screen to become harder to navigate.

Internet.
Let's face it, the carriers want you to move to a smartphone, and they've probably decided that phones like this will be needed to remind subscribers what they get when they pay for a more expensive phone. While the phone brings up web pages quickly, navigating those pages is a chore. The weak memory of the Reality means that there's just so much your phone will display before running low. Scrolling can take forever, and just trying to zoom in and out is needlessly complicated - no "pinch & zoom" here. It helps to have a few simple pages to go to (weather, news, maybe your transit c carrier) but mobile surfing is out of this phone's league.
The reality of the situation is that the Samsung Reality is a great phone for users who don't want an expensive phone and plan. Once you kniow it's limits, it's very handy and reliable. While you may opt for a smartphone in your future, the Reality is enough of a multimedia device to make your standalone music player obsolete.

I got this phone yesterday and spent 6 hrs on the phone with support, trying to get the screen to work and to add Gmail. I unloaded, reloaded, set and reset, booted and rebooted, as the Vzw support seemed unusually confused. They had to get a phone, get the manual, ask their coworkers, and escalate multiple times. Finally an unusally surly Vzw service rep who handled the escalation had me wipe out the memory of everything I had done so far, change my Gmail P/w and when that didn't work he blamed me and Gmail.

I did some research before purchasing this phone, including talking to several Verizon Wireless reps. Two of them told me that the phone has a calendar scheduler which can sync with the google calendar (as well as other calendars such as outlook calendar), which really got my expectations up. After I purchased the phone, I found that its internal calendar wouldn't sync with google calendar--although google calendar has a way for it to be displayed on the cellphone.

Then, for some reason, I started hearing loud static noise when I made any phone calls. Several times people told me that they couldn't hear me. They would try again and it still wouldn't work. This was really annoying so I went to a verizon wireless store and exchanged for another phone (and lost all my saved notes, calendar items, etc), also Samsung Reality. Now the static noise is gone, but the phone often freezes--after some time the phone would turn off by itself and restart again. This happened several times after I used the "search" function (within the phone, not online), and when I touched a calendar item matching my search term in the results. I don't know what's causing the problem and am beginning to wonder whether I need to take the phone back for another one, or should I get a different phone.

With all the wonderful features of this phone: large screen, nice keyboard, touch screen, internet access, etc., it's a real shame that they made the music player so limited! You have no choice but to listen to your songs alphabetically. Now, if you want to go in and manually change all the MP3 tags so that the song name within the MP3 file has 01.., 02.., 03.., 04.., etc, added to each file, THEN you can listen to your songs in their original order (the order they come on the CD), but otherwise you have to listen to them in ALPHABETICAL ORDER (one of the most useless orders I can think of -- almost as bad as RANDOM).

And it doesn't matter if the actual ripped file has 01.., 02.., 03.. prefixing the filename; it'll just ignore that!! It has to be done inside the file's MP3 data, or within Windows Media Player's "Advanced Tag Editor" (the pop-up menu you get when you Right-click a file name). Very time-consuming.

Maybe I just missed the easy fix for this, but I have searched and searched and searched, and other than manually changing all the ID tags, you're just out of luck. Sadly, One Star removed for this bungle on Samsung's part.

Otherwise, an excellent phone with a great look and feel and functionality.

I've had an issue with this phone as well, but it had nothing to do with the phone breaking (had it for a little over a year & nothing has ever broken on it), for me it has more to do with the mobile email setup.

I have several email accounts set up through the phone, at least 2-3, so that it notifies me when new emails arrive to these accounts, the problem is that every once in a while it won't let me log into a particular account (usually a yahoo or msn associated account). I have even tried deleting an account off the phone and re-adding it, or turning the phone off & back on, hoping that would fix the issue..sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. I go through this at least once every 2 weeks. It's frustrating having a phone that's unpredictable (well I guess it is predictable now knowing it's gonna act up every so often).

I have a facebook account and it's gotten to the point that I have to change the primary email every couple of weeks all because the phone won't access whatever email was the primary one before. In fact, I had to log into my facebook account to change the primary email again minutes before writing this review.

So if you want a phone where all you want to do is just make & receive calls and not use any email features, then by all means feel free to go for this one. But if you're a person like me who checks emails regularly through your phone, you might wanna pass on this one and look elsewhere.