Samsung A800 Review
First Impressions
I could not believe how small and dinky this model was when I first saw it. It was really compact and instead of the flimsy build I assumed it would have, was surprised to discover just how solid this little phone felt. It fitted into the palm of my hand perfectly and at just 68gm it was as light as it was small.
What's In the Box
- The handset
- Battery
- Users guide
- Hand strap
- Travel adaptor
- Ear microphone
Size & Dimensions
- Dimensions
- Length 80mm
- Width 40mm
- Depth 22mm
- Weight 68gm
- The screen is a 65k colour 128*160 colour display
Features
- Voice dialling
- 3 onboard games
- 16 chord polyphonic ring tones
- Voice memo
- Scheduler
- Calendar
Construction
The A800 is made out of plastic which is silver coloured. The top flip houses the outer screen and directly under this is a small LED panel, which wraps under the screen. This LED will flash in a choice of seven colours to alert you to incoming calls. The colour choices are, white, yellow, orange, green, sky blue, blue and violet. The colours are vivid and can be set so that a particular colour flashes to assigned phonebook entries, this is also handy in the dark. There are volume keys situated on the left hand side of the body for ease of use. The construction of this phone despite its size is that of quality, the hinged flip feels secure and doesn’t wobble and the whole thing feels really well made.
Keypad
I loved the keypad on this phone, it was easy to use, the keys were flush to the body, and they were of a nice size, they were well spaced out and they didn’t feel cramped together. The central key features the wap key, with an upper 4-position navigation key, 2 soft keys one for each side and the lower three keys, which were the End key, Send key and Clear key.
Menu Structure
The menu is split into eight sections, each menu then featuring a sub menu. The main menu is as follows:
- Messaging: Inbox and outbox and general messaging tools, with space to store up to 300 text messages
- Call records: Missed, received and dialled calls, also call timers
- Voice functions: Voice dial, command and memo
- Sound settings: Ring tones, message tones and key tones etc
- Phone settings: Greeting, display, service light, auto redial and security
- Organiser: Memo, calendar, to do list. Clock and stopwatch
- Network services: Call diverting, waiting and barring
- Fun box: The browser. The media box and games, which consists of three games, Fortress, Space War, X-Fighter
Phonebook
You can save up to 2000 entries on the handset and each entry can hold five numbers, there is also a space for such info as email addresses and web pages. There is also caller group, which will flash up one of seven reinstalled images and also allows you to personalise the colour of the LED. There is a facility of voice dialling, allowing you to store up to twenty voice tags, the voice dialling worked perfectly and unlike some phones recognised my voice each time without fail.
The Display
The A800 features two screens, an internal one and an external one. The external screen is 80*48, while the internal one is 128*128, both screen have a vivid blue backlight but no colour display as such. The external screen displays such things as caller id, signal strength indicator and battery life. It’s a really small screen and only has three lines of text. The internal screen has the main menu functions grouped together, which were quite hard to navigate until I got the hang of the menu structure. The internal display can also be customised with pre-installed wallpapers, which were rather boring as most of them were signs of the zodiac. Personalisation of the screen is hard as there is not much content to download for this particular model.
Ringtones
The A800 supports 16 voice polyphonic tones, which were very loud and clear. The Samsung ring tones are very distinctive and this was also the case with the A800. For such a small phone the volume on the ring tones was really impressive. Additional tones are available to download via wap but with the exception of the Samsung fun club, these tones are hard to come by.
Battery Life & Signal Strength
The battery is quoted as 110 hour standby but I found it be significantly less. Only using the handset lightly I found the battery to last for no more than two days, very poor in my opinion. The same goes for signal strength; even though the phone has an external Ariel I found the signal strength to be very weak and poor. The phone didn’t keep a consistent signal and a couple of times found the handset to be displaying 999 calls only. I can only assume this is a particular weak spot with this model, the same sim was put into another phone and I had full strength signal. Clarity when voice calling was average although the speaker volume was low and when I turned it up via the buttons on the side the sound distorted somewhat. The handset was really uncomfortable to hold against your ear as the hinge felt as if it was being bent backwards.
Summary
The features on this handset are low compared to others but if you want a really tiny basic handset just to call and text on then this model could be for you. This phone is certainly a worthwhile candidate if you’re after something that’s considerably smart and just the right size, and being a clamshell adds to the appeal.
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