The LG Electronics RD2030 phone experience
If there was ever an un-user-friendly phone ever made, this is it. Lets face it, why would we buy a cell phone, to make and receive calls and send and receive messages. So I will be covering the phone in respect to those usages as well as the general feel of the phone. First of all, the phone is extremely delicate. It is very light (which is a good thing) but at the same time it feels like its got “Handle with Care” written all over it. The buttons are extremely hard to press and your fingers might feel a little numb after typing those long SMS messages. Hence, being hard, the buttons can at times feel unresponsive when compared to maybe let us say a Nokia 3310. On top of that, just within a week of getting the phone, it switched on by itself (it was off!) and started vibrating!
The Message sending procedure is extremely clumsy. After typing a message, you have to presses 11 (yes, eleven times) some or the other button (Send, Phone Book, etc) to just send one single message! And to top it off, there is no “Send to Many” button. Also, the T9 dictionary in the phone does not auto capitalize the first letter of the first word of a new sentence. That means if you want to write, “I miss you. Call me”, you would have to type “I miss you” followed by the “Shift” key and then type “Call me”. This becomes very irritating if you type many sentences in one single SMS. And to top it off, there are no Smilies! In order to create one, you would have to go to the “Symbol” menu and create one. So for creating a ;-), you would have to press “Symbol” “;”, “Symbol” “-“, “Symbol” “)”. Whew! One more thing to keep in mind is that the “Change” button (to change a word in T9 mode) and the “Space” buttons are in different places than a Nokia. So if you are used to a Nokia, it will get very frustrating for you to SMS, but don’t worry, you should get used to it. Also, the message alert sound (when a message comes in) is so low that you miss it most of the time.
This phone can store upto 5 numbers for each individual (Cell, Office, etc) but the user manual says nothing about how to actually input the 5 numbers. I did some R&D and found out how to do that. In case you need help, let me know. But now comes the biggest flaw in the phone. When receiving calls from any of the cell networks like Orange, BPL, it prefixes a “0” to the number. So you will see on your screen (when a call comes in) 09820577889. But when you receive a message from that same cell, it prefixes a “0091”! So the message from the same cell above will come as “00919820577889”! So if you have store your friend’s name (Say – Rajesh) with a simple 9820577889, when he calls or messages, it will not show his name on your cell! How do you fix it, well, you have to store both “00919820577889” and “09820577889” with the name Rajesh and then when he messages or calls, his name will flash on the display. Silly, but true. I do not know whether it’s a flaw with the design of the phone’s software or the Reliance service but this is definitely something they should fix.
A few good things about the phone though. The ringer is polyphonic and is actually quite good. But the ringtones would not satisfy a young person who listens to English music more. Most of them are in Hindi and the English ones that you can download from R World are laughable to say the least (You cannot download ringtones from anywhere else!). It stores quite a number of messages and has a nice feature wherein if the phone is unable to send a message due to a network error it gives you an option to try in 3 mins again. The scheduler function is also quite easy to use and the screen is quite big, but not in color though.
In short, I would not recommend this phone. But I do not know about the Samsung phone, so you pretty much do not have a choice. :o(