Customer Reviews

Samsung t349 Prepaid Phone, Silver/Lime (T-Mobile)

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

 

 

On June 24, 2009, I bought this phone to replace my old tried and true workhorse the Moto Razr V3 phone that I had been using on my T-Mobile Pre-Paid plan. And after much studying different newer cell phones, I wanted to upgrade my tried and true Razr so I could email and text and have more features than my Razr V3 had.
BEST FEATURES OF THIS PHONE:
1) Most important, you can really hear the other person on this phone and they can hear you! Also, on the left side of the phone is a up and down key for loudness in the headset. Very handy! (The reason that I mention this first is many cell phones do not have a built in volume button and some cell phones are just plain hard to hear on unless you put in the headphones or use the speaker phone). By the way, the volume on this phone is very loud when you select the volume button and the speaker phone is very loud on full volume.
2) You can set the left "envelope" key for email or IM, or any message things. I set mine to email.
3) The EMAIL can be browsed for free, however, to view or read or send an email in the pre-paid plan on T-Mobile it is 20 cents per read or send. I found this out the hard way when I got carried away and sent several emails and read several. I learned to open the most IMPORTANT ones or better yet to "window shop" the emails and later open them up on my laptop. However, I did find this feature so handy when I was away from my computer and needed to check my emails in a pinch!
4) EMAILS: You can have more than one email account. For instance, YAHOO, AOL, and more. The set up is easy.
5) INTERNET BROWSER: No, it is not a IE Browser! It is a WEB TO GO BROWSER that has: 1) My account, 2) Downloads (for music and sound effect ring tones and gifts) 3) Web to Go Browser has: 1) CNN 2) ESPN 3) ABC News 4) (Can't remember this one)
6) Camera with 1.3 pixels (so so pictures, great to send and they even let you add a voice to the pictures). You can send them to your internal SD mini memory card (must purchase as this is not included), you can email the picture, send it to the T-Mobile Album in your page on T-Mobile and MORE!
7) Video camera, again this is not a fancy video, however the same applies you can email the video, and more!!!!
8) Voice recorder - I like that because you can record your voice and then email it to someone or just do a to do list in a recording.
9) Very user friendly phone with MANY more features.
10) A great FIRST TEXTING phone that is not that expensive! I bought this to see how I would like texting, emailing etc and found that I really do so this phone is great to have when I am not around my computer at home.
11) The MP3 Player. After I installed the mini SD memory card (which I placed some of my MP3 music collection on), I played the music with and without the headphones. With the headphones, the music is wonderful and a rich sound. Without, not too bad either. Also, in the options, you can set any of your MP3 songs from your mini SD card to be a ring tone. I had fun with that one and added several songs to my ring tones right from my own memory card in the phone!
12) BATTERY LIFE: Just to be on the safe side, I charge this phone every night and then the next morning, I take the phone with me. After heavy usage, texting, talking, browsing and learning the features, listening to the MP3 player in the phone, etc, after about 4 hours of doing the things, I still had 4 bars on the battery! And to remedy the battery situation back to 5 bars, I quickly placed it on my car charger and after driving around just 30 minutes, the phone's battery had 5 bars once again (full battery), so that quickly fixed the problem until I could arrive home and place it on the home charger. My old Razr V3's battery lasted longer (both in talk time and standby time - just about double the time of the Samsung T349), however, I also did not use the Razr except for just talking once in a while.
All in all, this is a SUPERB phone with lots of great features and it is very easy to learn to use this phone in my opinion! I am very glad that I bought this phone, I highly recommend this phone!

I've had this phone for two months and can attest to it's good reception, exceptional call quality, and awesome, text-friendly keypad. This phone is not only very reliable, but fun too, because the camera takes decent photos that are easily shared via MMS with voice memo. I also love the photo enhancements, cropping, framing, and creating and sending "postcards" with the photo shop that is already loaded on the camera. Of course you can use photos for wall paper, and slide shows, too!
Besides using this as my only phone, the other features that I use the most are the ones that help me stay organized, informed, and on-time. There are several alarms, a timer, a fantastic calender with many scheduling options. I have my weekly volunteering scheduled to remind me for a whole year! I work the first weekend of the month, and I can schedule my calender to sound the alarm the rest of the year, or however long I want it to. I put all of my families appointments on it, including phone numbers so I can call if I'm running late! I set it for a reminder, of course. Contacts have more than enough info including picture ID, dedicated ringtone, group, birthday, email, and several phone numbers. I now have no excuse to forget birthdays!
I use the dedicated e-mail button all the time to check email. The phone notifies me everytime I recieve an email message. I also have a quiet tone notification, too. The volume is variable for all tones and alarms. There are also three different tones to chose from. All day long I use the web-to-go to check my yahoo! mail account. It is pretty fast (EDGE) and I can read and manage my email, though I cannot read attachments. It is an abbreviated version. I check local weather, local news, CNN, and email all day. I even check maps and traffic. There is a Yahoo! web browser that you can use to browse the web. There are many sites to go to, but they are abbreviated versions of the real web site, but you get alot of info, and many are being added every day. You just have to do a search on the browser and then you can bookmark your favorite sites. It's that simple.
I never play the games, but there are some already preloaded, and many to download. You can download music, too. I even loaded a Spanish language translator for $2.99. I use that at work because I work in a hospital in Central Florida and I need to speak Spanish! The mp3 player looks like it will hold about 100 songs, and it is easy to add a memory card on the side, not under the battery like some other phones. I guess the sound will be good because the audio on the phone calls sound so good.
I really love this phone. It feels really good to hold, the keypad is very easy to use because the buttons are raised, well lighted, very resposive, and the partial qwerty keypad is fantastic for texting, making to-do lists, writing memos, or tasks to complete. I love to type on it, it is so fast!
I bought this as a prepaid phone, but I use my regular t-mobile sim card in it. So I pay for my family plan with 5 faves, unlimited family texting, and $9.99 for unlimed web access.
I highly recommend this phone for everyone, especially texters, or anyone who needs to stay organized, needs lots of reminders, or likes to show off photos of their kids!

Very good sound quality. Nice external sound controls. Cool looking phone. Takes a lot of time to get used to the letters. They are not the traditional, but set up like a keyboard. Must look at phone to hit select button--too small for casual use. Super battery life! Must purchase USB cable and sd card. Phone came with a $50 rebate. But must purchase unlimited texting at $15/month for two months. Thus the net rebate is only $20. I will probably exchange for the NOKIA 5310 music phone. It looks easier to use.

I love this phone.
It's a great deal for someone who just want a phone with several basic funtions.

I have had this phone for almost a year now, and I'm not very pleased with it. I initially purchased it because I was ending my contract with another carrier, and decided to save some $ and go with T-mobile prepaid. Overall, I'm very happy with T-mobile service and prepaid options, just not thrilled with this phone. I thought the phone looked nice, it was a good price, and seemed to have decent features. The call quality is ok, but doesn't have strong signal strength. Most features of the phone (i.e. camera, mp3, volume, screen clarity) work fine, but there are 2 things in particular which didn't seem like big deals in the beginning, but now are annoying me to the point that I'm considering purchasing another phone.

The first, and probably the most important if you are considering this phone, is the fact that the battery meter is not accurate. It will stay in the "fully charged" mode for a while and then suddenly drop from 4 bars to 1-2 bars after 1 call. I'm not the kind of person who likes to charge the phone every night...I find it annoying and unnecessary. This phone has no touch screen and I don't use it for anything other than calling and texting so the battery life should remain pretty strong for a few days, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Because of the lack of accuracy in the battery meter, there have been a few times where I go to use the phone (having not charged it because the day before it was 3-4 bars) and it is dead. So far this has been an inconvenience, but it could potentially be a safety issue if there is an emergency and your phone is so unreliable.

The other feature that drives me nuts about this phone are the buttons. It does have a non-standard keyboard in order to have only 2 letters (instead of the typical 3) per key to facilitate texting (having come from a phone that had has slide out full QWERTY keyboard, I'm not fond of this format) which takes some getting used to. The issue, however, is the buttons' responsiveness. I thought I was going crazy with this phone until I read some reviews of others who have the same problem. Basically, sometimes you press a key and it reacts right away and other times it takes longer, causing you to hit the key multiple times (which may or may not result in the letter or number appearing multiple times). This can be super annoying when texting and when hanging up calls.

One other thing that really frustrates me with keys on this phone is that there are 4 dedicated keys (meaning they are preset as shortcuts to features of the phone like messaging or web2go) but only 1 can be reprogrammed to something else. I have never had a newer model phone where you have to stick with these presets, most other phones allow you to customize these keys. You might not think that's a big deal, but consider that one of these non-marked but dedicated keys is web2go which when pressed once (which I have accidentally done many times), launches you into the web browser (which has the potential to cost big $ on a prepaid plan).

Overall, I would just not recommend this phone. There are many other, better options out there for a few more bucks. Trust me, the little things that annoy you only slightly with this phone in the beginning, will only get worse with time!

this phone is the best prepaid stuff ever! nice looking and half QWERTY keyboard satisfied me. The keyboard is not small to push even though i have BIG fingers.
I strongly recommend.

the phone was recieved in time with all its item intact.good work i have not unlock the phone as yet but will give another review if the phone is worth the buy.

Henry Thomas

I bought this phone after the one I using broke, and before I was up for contract renewal. It had a nice sized screen, and the display and looks of the phone were great. My only real complaint is that the keyboard wasn't at all good. I like the half qwerty part of it, but the keys were sometimes hard to press, and all of a sudden letters would be appearing twice, or spaces weren't being inserted. It had a very slow response and it was just super annoying to type with it, because I always had to make corrections. For what it was for, it was good, but I couldn't use it for any length of time.

This is a great phone for small hands and basic phone use. The keys are really small and I might get a better phone to trade this for.
I didnt think this phone was okay for me.
I like the sound and the quality of music, and basic of the how much does it have.
I like to give it back and make into a bigger phone so I can type more.
Thanks

Samsung-t349 is a nice-looking phone. The product description and customer reviews have already covered many important topics, therefore I will focus on a few issues that I had no chance to learn about before I purchased the phone. It is very important for me to be able to connect a cell phone to a GPS device in my car via Bluetooth to talk hands free. My old cell phone (a cheap Motorola phone) was perfect in this respect. After pairing it once with my Garmin Nuvi 660, it connected automatically to the Garmin every time I turned the Garmin on. Unfortunately, Samsung-t349 cannot do this. Every time I turn on the Garmin I have to pull the phone out of my pocket and manually confirm that I want the phone to be connected to the Garmin. It defies the purpose of having a Bluetooth-enabled phone. Once the cell phone is out of my pocket I can just as well talk on the phone without a Bluetooth car kit. Moreover, when I don't bother to connect the phone to the Garmin for a short drive I cannot use the Garmin either. Why? Because the two devices try to connect unsuccessfully and the "Phone disconnected" message keeps popping up on the GPS device blocking the map completely. Also, the Samsung-t349 phone book doesn't sync with the Garmin phone book. Maybe I was spoiled by a cheap Bluetooth-enabled Motorola phone but I find the Samsung Bluetooth performance unacceptable. The Samsung technical support did not offer any solutions when I contacted them.