I bought a Corby SCH-F339 CDMA today. The operator is Reliance (another BIG Sucker :)
The package came for Rs. 8885/- + 100/- sim migration charges for reliance.
The out of box experience was magnificent. A stylish mobile pouch(yellow/black) , 3 color backplates (yellow, white, black) to change color of mobile daily to suit your dress :) a black stylish hands-free , data cable, A/C charger, 2GB MicroSD (not sure if this was some offer but it came inside the box) software cd...quite a mouthful(I don’t think nokia will give all this in default package, atleast not the data cable) !!
There is a touch screen and response is good to finger tips. The Qwerty keyboard buttons were tiny for my hands but still manageable and there is no other keyboard(physical on the phone I mean). Functions like silent mode just requires a drag from top of screen and it pulls a quick menu. There are quick buttons on the sides for camera activate, vol control, lock the phone(though you have to get used to this important button’s location as its frequently used, I would suggest a distinct color like orange/ yellow for this lock /open button since it shares space with the camera activate button). The usual buttons for call pickup/drop are there in usual locations below the screen. The speakerphone is quite loud as is the reception via normal headpiece and is good.
There are a couple of widgets which are like windows gadgets in vista which enables to put shortcuts of orkut, Facebook, picasa etc on the main screen. No idea where to get some more free widgets(though I managed to get some apps from Imserba.com and opera website. I searched all net without any success for any officially provided one’s. Maybe they will put some website later(they do provide sdk so if you are a programmer you can make one :). You’ll find quite a few apps like calculator, media player etc which are found in mobiles so nothing much special here. The wallpapers /sounds that come by default is quite vibrant and impressive like all Samsung defaults.
While connecting the phone it gives options like mass storage device/media player compatible mode or Samsung studio mode. The mass storage mode gave good transfer rates on 12 MBps Full speed USB on the system. The media player mode enables you to use windows media player to sync files with the phone which is good and people who use iPod touch will find this feature familiar and useful. It has some advanced features like Mobile tracker for security but I have not tried it yet since it involves some passwords but looks great.
Now the issues, I tried to use the phone book transfer app of Reliance with no success. The sim that corby uses is different from the other reliance one’s hence transfer in that way is impossible . So usage of RWorld is a total trouble in this mobile, and reliance customer care have no idea about this phone even though they sell it in web world.
The in ear headphones provided as handsfree looks stylish but is only average in quality and comes no where near Sony / Nokia/ of this price range. I think the issue is that the headset is in-ear bud type and corby has srs surround chipset which makes sound quality to be not so rich when srs is enabled which looks like a poor design from the part of Samsung. They could’ve avoided in ear if they wanted surround effect because such fx requires headsets with bigger cones.
Display is large but the image display quality is average compared to other phones. Except for the default images in the phone all others looked not so great. I tried playing a few mp4 files that were used in my ipod touch but it failed so I believe it has to be really small(whats the use of a big screen then ?? )
The camera is supposed to be 2 MP but no flash or autofocus and quality is poor / average with grains in low light. But it does come with interesting functions like on the go re-size , timer shots, multi-shot, collage functions etc which are fancy but I believe even a Nokia 6275 cdma has better quality if you spend a few hundreds more.The keypad is versatile i.e you can make it look like a normal phone keypad/ qwerty type (a little small but ok). There are predictive text( can manually add to it), symbol table etc which are quite good & easily accessible.
FM Radio requires the headset to be present and quality is ok. The interface for controlling FM is also quite interesting and makes use of the touch screen pretty well. The media-player repeatedly crashed on some songs that I ripped using iTunes from a hindi audio cd and once even restarted the phone. This could be incompatibility with iTunes and needs more research to comment further. I have not noticed this with any mp3’s I downloaded from the net. Battery back up is okay because I did a lot of tweaking and last 2 bits are still there, but recharge took quite a lot of time(a few hours), but this could be an individual phone issue as well.
It comes with a bundled phone manager which did not install both on Win7 64 bit (says not supported) & on my XP sp2 machine(direct x issue but os is supported). It reinstalled directx several times and failed. Both downloaded from Samsung website and the one provided in CD failed. I called up Samsung support and nothing good happened. I retried on another XP system and it installed so again this is some bug in the software installation. The software is not 100% stable and each function opens up a popup window. I believe it could’ve been a little more better or simpler by providing all common functions in the same screen instead of popups.
Another issue is that the phone autolocks itself on call very frequently . You have to unlock keyboard so if you are calling any help desk where numbers need to be keyed in frequently its very inconvenient since the keyboard is software based. I disabled all auto-off settings including backlight off time but still the issue persists which is a really stupid bug. Samsung tech support claims its a feature for all their touch screen models...but no explanation as to how it helps ???...and again no option to disable it. One thing that I am confused is how to transfer /conference calls..no options like that appear in the screen when I pickup a call? I called customer care for rectification and they promised a callback in an hour since they wanted their tech desk to involve to resolve these issues and gave me a case number . The callback happened next day and there was not much that they could do about any of the issues
So considering the price I would suggest a Nokia because if you shell out a few hundreds more you have very good handsets of Nokia which are properly tested for usability and its resale price is quite good too. This mobile is for people who need specific features like touchscreen, wap, camera , FM etc. but not very specific about the completeness or quality of the features provided.