Customer Reviews

Ultra Thin Power Vision Phone

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Downside:

Battery life is so-so and you have to charge it every night; supplied USB cable doesn't charge phone and you have to get a 3rd party one; doesn't sync with Apple iSync; T9 predictive input doesn't allow you to add words (T-Mobile Samsung phones can -- hmmm); can't change phone fonts so super hi-res screen isn't so valuable and this means lots of scrolling; sending text messages is cumbersome; most sites still detect it as a phone and stories are broken up into chunks for older, slower phones (more scrolling); and the 'Favorites' quick selection key doesn't delve into the phone so you can get at every function.

Upside:

Screen is fab; blazingly fast mobile Web; runs Google Maps (wheee! google.com/gmm); the EV-DO 'modem' is brilliant and very fast; Bluetooth is uncrippled (take that, Verizon) and works well as a modem with MacBooks and probably your Windows laptop; phone is light and fits in that little pocket in your jeans; camera takes pretty good pictures for a phone; ringer is loud and vibrate mode gets your attention; has one single 'beep' ringer mode (great for meetings); audio is crisp; works well in windy environments.

For the really, really busy:

Great phone, so-so text messaging device, built-in EV-DO modem means you're not tied to Starbucks for fast data when you travel.

I'm a big fan of taking the alternate, subjectively more advanced, route to my toys. Creative Zen vs. iPod, Viper vs. Vette, and now Blade vs. Razr. I was looking for something slimmer than my old flip phone, and being an exclusive fan of Samsung, I came to know about the A900 (aka. MM-A900 or SPH-A900) "Blade" phone.

Initially I looked at Samsung's other sexy phone, the D807 "slider" from Cingular. This is an incredible phone, but unfortunately, I can't get reliable GSM service at home, and so moved onto Sprint and the A900. The A900 is a gorgeous phone. I get compliments every time I whip it out. The user interface (partially Sprint's fault) is very well laid out, and superior in every way to Verizon's UI. The phone feels rugged; a trademark of Samsung. I've played with friends' Razrs and have to say, I've never been and never will be a Motorola fan. The flip part of the Razr starts to wiggle and doesn't close cleanly after 6 months of use. Motorola hit the mark with the Razr, but still hasn't improved on quality and durability.

The A900 does everything I want and need. The only minor nits I have are: battery life, lack of flash card, lack of Bluetooth SYNC profile (all other profiles exist and work great), and a funky headset jack. NOTE: The A900 won't work with most 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapters. I've only found one so far on eBay that works well (search "A900 headset adapter"). I've conquered the battery life issue by disabling Bluetooth when not in use, and making sure the phone doesn't try to hunt between Sprint and Roaming (I lock it in "Roaming" mode) while at home. I'm up to three days standby time, which is respectable.

Overall, I love the phone and look forward to using it for the next two years, 'til my contract expires and a new batch of sexy Samsung phones are available.

Okay, I Had this phone since 12/30/2005 so i can honestly say i know what this phone can & can't do.
-Yes it is a nice razor clone,theres more to this phone.It has a built in mp3 player that you can download your own music to instead of paying an insane $2.50 a pop for limited songs.
-Media Players kinda nice,but Once Again pricey mounthly downloads make it hard to enjoy it,unless you watch the free stuff thats comes with your plan(without it more money added on your plan).
-THE BATTERY!!!!!!!!!!!Because of all the stuff(Talk time,MP3,Media Player,Web Browesr(@ high Speeds WoW!)The STANDARD battery Litterly dies quickly(don't know if extended one exsists,but you'll need it).
-Camera is awsome, as well as Camcorder both have a built in light for dark settings & you can also use you're video capture as a screen saver as well.
-The Memory with all that goes on inside you would figure that it would have a memory card slot....But alas it dosen't,so everything has to Share the overall memory in the phone which leaves no room for downloading alot of songs.

Overall it's a good phone but for all the power it has.....Thats the very thing that brings it down in the end,But dispite it's cons the pro are well worth it.

Overall, this is a good phone. The camera has very high quality, and the battery life is not that poor. Compared to the Motorola Razr, it feels a lot more durable and is a lot simpler to use. Sprint also has some more reasonable plans than Cingular, aside from free mobile to mobile and roll-over minutes. No qualms on this phone, except that you can't use your mp3's as ringtones. Oh, and lastly, you CAN use music and pictures from your computer as screensavers and playable mp3's. After you hook up the USB, all you need to do is access the menu, go to tools, then mass storage, then connect to PC. Once your computer has recognized the phone's hard drive, all you need to do is drag your music into the Media folder of the phone's hard drive (:E drive on PC, ejectable disk drive on Mac), and drag your pictures into the DCIM folder to use them as screen savers, you then eject (or safely remove, as they call it in Windows), unplug the usb and you have all your stuff in the phone. I hope that helped the last reviewer with that problem.


Oh, and all the extra features are charged to your monthly bill, which makes them almost pointless.

I just turned 15 and got this for my birthday, I've had it for a month and so far no problems. It's way better than the Motorola razr. My friends with razrs have played around with mine and told me it's better than theres.

Reasons that it's better than the razr

1. The screen is brighter and more colorful.

2. It's more durable. My friend broke her screen on the front by dropping it. I've dropped mine plenty of times and there has been no damage besides a few scratches.

3. Camera is amazing for a camera phone, the razr's camera is pixilated, it's really just bad.

4. It has better features, such as sprint tv, mp3, bluetooth, and more.

Although the razr still looks was sleeker than the samsung, it's just not as good. But if you're still haveing doubts on which one you want try going to the cingular / t-mobile / or verizon (them being the only carriers of the razr so far) and try getting your hands on one and play around with it a bit. Then go the sprint store and do the same for the samsung. I hope this review is helpful

I love this phone. I've dropped it so many times onto concrete and it doesnt even phase it. Sure my phone has some "battle scars" because of it. One of my friends has this phone. She dropped getting out of a taxi cab and it went under the taxi cab. It got run over by a taxi cab, and it didn't phase the phone at all! This is very VERY durable cell phone!

I love that you can hook up the phone to your computer via the usb cord that is included with the phone. I don't like paying for the picture mail service so this was perfect for me. Not only can you save your cell pics onto your computer, you can delete them off the phone(of course) so you can take even more pictures and save them onto your computer again.

Another plus to the cell is the speakers. You can actually hear your phone ring! Its nice and loud. Of course you can make it lower, they have silence all, vibrate all, ringer off,1 beep, and levels 1-8. On every ringer option except for silence all and vibrate all, you can select if you want the phone to vibrate or not to vibrate. The versitility of this is great.

The screen size is nice and big and clear.

Oh, and as a tip, if you do buy this phone and you go to use the camera and everything is upside down, just hit the button that is on th e left side of the screen and it will correct itself

I've had the phone now for about 2 days, so far so good, here is my honest review of things that work and things that i am not so sure about...The only thing i'll say before i start this is that i got this phone for next to nothing so i cant really complain, but for all those interested in purchasing this phone this might serve as very useful for you....

The phone as awhole is made very well, the material feels very solid with the flip down and open...It is a clamshell phone so opening the flip to use it will always be the case but it does not feel as if the brackets are cheap so you prob dont have to worry about that (i broke my mm-7400) that way....

I do have to get use to the wideness of the phone, coming from my insurance sent mm-8300 which is def more compact, this phone seems very enlongated and wide when fully opened and in use...def not a problem just a my personal issue..

Havent had any issues with the internal antenna yet which is def a great thing, my mm-8300 never had the best reception in my house for some reason, and the A900 hasnt been a problem yet...also holding the phone more towards the top and less at the bottom (where the antenna is embedded is another thing i must get use to) but not a major problem at all.

The screen is amazing, the colors and vividness is stunning and makes the menu screen and everything else a pleasure to view. This was the first thing i really noticed that really got my attention when i started the phone. The external screen isnt bad either, it tends to be alittle grainy but im sure thats only due to its size, but none the less no problems with either.

The camera is pretty good for a 1.3mp..I took some pictures while messing around and they came out pretty clean with minor blur to them...You really do have to keep this phone steady to take a pic bc i noticed they tend to blur easily but its a phone not a digi camera. The coolness of the camera is being able to rotate the lens from the back to the front and vice versa, havent really had much use for it but its a neat little feature. The camcorder is def blurry but this i already knew going into it being that i havent had a phone yet with a clear camcorder picture when filming. Again if you want to record stuff buy a camcorder and dont rely on your phone.

The Music player is an amazing thing on this phone, i have an ipod nano so i really didnt need this feature but to say the least i can now store mp3's and other music formats on my phone which is very useful bc my phone is always with me, so this feature with def come in handy. I havet maxed out the memory in the phone yet but from what i hear you can fit about 15 songs on full length in MP3 format or you can compress the songs using a program like DPpoweramp in AAC format and get like 40-50 on there or something, will try that soon and repost with results. *One problem i had was that the manual for this phone has nothing written about putting files onto the phone via the included usb cable which dissapointed me. Being tech savy myself i knew i could find it online (which i did) and i worked out and is fairly easy, but for someone who has no idea how to work things of this nature i could see it being a very frustrating ordeal. I took me about a half hour to figure out how to put photos and music into the phone with the usb cable, the trick is to connect it to the phone and comp, than go into your tools and mass storage and find where it says connect to pc and from there once your connected all you have to do is drag and drop files into there respected folders (which you can also customize). You also get a subsciption to serius radio which is very cool which i just used this morning for the first time. Havent had much use for the external media buttons just yet, but im sure they will come in handy once i get more music into the phone. The included headphones are pretty good, as good as an ipod set and to me are pretty comfortable. They also work as a headset for using the phone.

The internet is fast now with the EV-DO tech but i was on the phone with Sprint for more than an hour prior to activating the phone trying to deal with the added $10 a month thing for having this new tech in the phone. Since its an upgrade on the current internet they try and get you for that with the $10 more. I was not happy with this and expressed my concern. If you dont opt for that in your plan, the other way to go is the 2cents per KB of transfer which i thought was crazy because that could rack up very fast.

The menu of the phone is very convienent and easy to use, i had to get used to the back button being under the scroll circle, i also tend to hit that back button more when trying to scroll down which gets annoying at times. The volume buttons are also in a diff spot on the side of the screen near the the top which is also kinda diff from my old phones, just takes some more getting used to.

The charging of this phone i dont really like, its reminds me of the my old nextel where you have to flip out a piece of rubber and plug the usb sized cable into the phone. Same with using the car charger which actually gets in the way of the use of the phone if you use it in the car while its plugged in. With the antenna being at the bottom i guess this part suffered alittle in my book.

Lastly the battery which everyone seems to hate on. Im not goin to say its the best or the worst, but i will say this and you can make your own decesion. I charged my phone the night i got it for 3 hrs just like the manual says. It was done at 3am charging for the first time. I took it off the charger and left it until about 2pm the next day when i noticed i was down to 1 bar on the battery. Now from what i understood that last bar is equal to 2 bars time when depleting its charge, so i did not worry. I did however buy a car changer right after that and charge it for about 20mins on my way to a party. By 10:30pm during the party it notified me of low battery warning less than a bar left....So in conclusion the batter lasted me about 11hrs with mim use before getting down to 1 bar. With 20mins of charging in the car and some fumbling around of the features to people who wanted to see the phone it than lasted me another 8hrs before charging was a must. I dont think this is to bad, but i do recommend a travel charger and not the extended battery bc 1. they are hard to find. 2. expensive 3. youll ionly get another hour talk talk added.

Final Conclusion on the Sprint Samsung A900 is an 8.5 out of 10. With the minor details making the phone use annoying at times and the 2 frozen screens i got (which i forgot to mention) randomly while on the web. The battery also im still on the fence with, with more use i will be able to say better. Other than that this phone kicks every phone i have ever used ARSH ... And the fact that so far everywhere i go people wanna know what kind of phone it is and when they see it they say wow this looks so much classier than the RAZR, i like this, makes me feel as if i picked a winner.

Charged the "extended battery" last night all night to initiate the charger sequence...Today am pleased to announce the battery lasted all day without giving up one bar (there are three bars in the battery column for those interested) .....Usually by the end of my day at work there is only 1 bar left barely, and thats without using the phone ....

Problems?
The battery is alot bigger than the slim battery the phone came with, bigger yes which means the backing sticks out and makes the phone no longer a slim phone when looking at it in that view. It does come with an oem metal backing so it disguise's it to a degree but the sticking out part i am gonna have to get used to...but all in all if you want normal battery life on the A900 this is a must have if you can find it.....

Hope this sheds some much needed light to anyone interested in this phone!!!

1. Extremely short battery life (need to charge it every night after minimal use), and when the battery is low, the warning sound will literally interrupt your conversation every 45-60 seconds (the beep will resonate as dead air to the listener). I can not stress how much this will be irritating
2. Poor antenna reception - in comparison to the Sanyo MM8300, there can be a 2 to 3 bar difference. Also, I often receive text messages and pictures days after they were sent.
3. Terrible mouthpiece - if you are not talking directly into the mouthpiece, your listener will not hear you. Also, the clarity is awful with a constant staticy hum in the background.
4. Dropped calls - I've owned three top of the line Sanyo phones for Sprint. By a large margin, this phone drops more calls than any I've ever had
5. Software Freezes - If you are trying to make a call, and an incoming call comes in, the screen will freeze and will force you to take out the battery and restart the phone. This will also happen occasionally during text messaging. Also, the phone will not receive calls during web surfing or music playing.

Overall the bells and whistles that come with this phone are unparalleled, but if you're looking for a performer, do yourself a favor, save your money and look elsewhere.

Forget your silly loyalties and let's be honest.

>Motorola's menu cannot compare to the idiot-friendly menu of Samsung phones

>The letters and numbers are large, and clear, the screen is beautiful, colors are vibrant

>The camera is amazing, it swivels up and down unlike the Razr

>U can customize the numbers when you dial so they can be different colors or styles such as post it notes

>The case is sturdy and metal-like, it's very hard to scratch

>ringers are loud and clear thanx to the external speakers. Samsung for awhile suffered in this category

>u can set the phone to vibrate even at the lowest ring setting, and u can select "vibrate all" or "silence all" to avoid any embarassing interruptions by texts and voicemails set on different ring levels

and yet:

>The speakerphone sux, the Razr's is so much better, louder, and clearer

>sprint is very misleading, according to my experience and consultation with a sprint technician u can't play mp3s from your computer or use pics u get from ur pc as screensavers. What's the point in having them? Try consulting a specialist just in case. I was told only a phone with a memory card has this capability

>the usb cable is provided but starting up the program is a mission, the razr was alot easier and with the razr you can transfer your own created ringtones from one razr to another thanx to bluetooth

>battery does suck, but if you're a light talker, you'll be alright

I bought this phone as soon as it came out in December. I was dying to get my hands on it! I have been disappointed since pretty much day one and 6 months later I am sorry I wasted so much money on the latest and greatest (which will be obsolete soon anyway).
My biggest complaint is the battery life. I have to charge the battery as much on this phone as I did on a 3 year old phone! Even in stand-by mode it's often out of juice when I go to use it.
The speakerphone function is completely useless. Instead of a button on the phone, you must find it on a menu during a call. Not much help when you're in the car.
Lastly, I have found the bluetooth technology to be unreliable, though that may be the fault of my headset.
On the positive side, I will say that it takes great pictures, and the moveable lens is pretty cool.