Monday, April 05, 2004

Samsung A610 Mobile Phone


One of my new toys has been the Samsung A610 camera phone. It's very nice and is a complete change to my old Kyocera 2235.

The thing I noticed first about the Samsung A610 was how bright the screen was. It looks very clear and my first thought was that it would drain the battery fast. But the first few days of messing with the camera portion, proved me wrong on that one. I probably don't use my phone as much as most people do, but I found it to (as yet) never leave the fully charged stage. Although this could point towards a wildly innacurate battery meter... time (and probably an emergency) will tell.

The whole camera thing was why I got it. I see a ton of stuff out and about I want to snap. The digital camera is not something I readily keep to hand, and so this is ideal. I can at last use a lot more of my own images on this here blog.

One BIG issue before you rush out and get that swanky new phone you have been promising yourself, is that by design on Verizon's part, you cannot simply attach the phone to your computer and suck all the pictures out. You have to send it to your email, or your online album for a price! There is no other way of doing it. I looked into this unholy crime and found a little thing called GAGIN.

You see the phone (as I use it here in the states) has what is called by my provider "Get it Now" which sort of translates into downloading ringtones, or games, for an unbelievable amount of money each time! Come on chaps, isn't there nothing that they will not tempt the kiddies with these days? You have to incur airtime while browsing a selection of goodies to download to your little phone. GAGIN stands for Get Around Get it Now. Clever stuff eh, which seems to be a way of attaching a cable to your phone and having the software to browse the phone, and replace files as you want to. From what I gather it works well with ringtones and images, however games are entirely different. I will let you know how this goes as soon as I find the elusive USB connecting cable to go with the software I already managed to grab.

The rest of the phone works wonderfully well. Polyphonic ringtones, and selectable niceness on the screen. One thing that I used to use my Axim and digicam for, was to take images of things I needed to the stores, so I could show the people there what it was, my strange Aussie/Brit accent couldn't quite get across. Now I simply snap with the phone, and show them when I get there. The Axim is good if it's something I don't currently have, but a few trips lately to Home Depot have been revolutionized by my little Samsung A610.

One difference I can compare to the Kyocera 2235 as it had so few features in comparison, is that the text entry is totally different, and much easier to get into. I also have the good fortune of having a Kyocera SE47 to mess with also. This looks great, but retains the ancient style of text input so I am glad it's not my primary phone! And it has that Captain Kirk thing going on with it's slideyness.

The Samsung A610 is one of those flip phones, which I am not a big fan of. But the phone itself is apparently chunkier than most (chunkier than a molecule!?) so I should not have too much trouble locating it with my fat digits. The camera is mounted on the hinge, and the screen actually swivels and closes again all tablet PC stylee. (OOooOO)
All the usual things are great with this. Nothing simple was annoying, like button fiddlyness, or audio quality, and couple it with Verizons seemingly rock solid coverage, you never have to worry about missing any of your call at all!


All in all I give it 5 out of 5 tivo's




Guess which one is me?
When I can be bothered, I will post some comparison images here to show the quality of the lens of this miniature marvel.

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