Samsung SGH-G800 Review

Interface:

Like other Samsung phones in the past few years, the G800 runs on a variant of the manufacturer’s operating system. Although personalized and  different from the interface of the rest of the Samsung phones, G800 resembles that of the Ultra II series to some extent.

The home screen has three variants for wallpaper: standard image, “Living world” and “My screen”. “Living world” is the name of a feature we’ve seen before, one that detects the cellular network you are in and visualizes matching image (animation) of the location. “My screen” is something we wish we had seen when we saw the “Random image” option for wallpaper of the G600. The “My screen” will create a slideshow out of up to nine images with three options for duration and eight transition types. A variant of these features is also available in other high-end Samsung – the F700.


The main menu is either a grid of 3x4 icons with a large banner at the top or a list. Its look cannot be personalized due to the lack of both themes and color schemes. This is perfect example of how Samsung targets its phones to different customers. They guess that the users of the stylish G800 won’t need such things, while the G600 targets a larger audience and has excellent themes, including the option to create one on the phone. The sub-menus are visualized as list and as in other models, option to display even the next step (when you select a field with sub-option) is available. Typical for a modern Samsung, the menu has “memory” and will select the last used option by default.


As in the G600, F700, F500 and a few other recent models, real phone profiles are now available with the G800. In addition to the Normal and Silent, it has one for Driving, Meeting, Outdoor and Offline which will turn the phone functions off. Each of them personalizes the phone sounds for incoming call, messages and the phone operation and features fields for Call alert type, Tone and volume for each of the three.


Phonebook:

As we’ve used to see when it comes to Samsung, the phone is different than others as a whole, but uses software modules from different models. For example the Phonebook is the one from the U700 Ultra 12.1, which is actually the most advanced one we’ve seen in a non-smart phone from the brand. It is also available on the F700 but with optimized interface to match the touch-sensitive screen.

Total of 1000 contacts (each with multiple numbers) can be stored in the internal memory. Adding a new one will show you a few fields you will probably need most often, but the "add field" option allows you to put additional information including many numbers, emails, addresses, etc. We are happy that a contact can have a few numbers of the same type, for example 3 mobile-private phone numbers. This is excellent and reminds us of the S60 smartphone system. You can attach personal ringtone and picture to a contact entry, but the image is very small both on an outgoing and incoming calls, which makes it useless. Once again we are wondering why this limit is set.

The phonebook is displayed as a vertical list, and when a contact is selected its number and a small image (if one is attached) show up. Searching for a contact is performed by a first name only, which is an unpleasant problem of most non-smart phones. The contacts can be sorted in groups that allow for common image and ringtone. Pressing right (on the D-pad) will list them with the number of contacts stored in each.


Organizer:

As the F700, the organizer here is also one we’ve seen in the U700. The Calendar and the Alarm field are as separate icons in the main menu, while the others are combined in a sub-menu. The Calendar can be previewed for month/week/day and has settings for Starting day and Default view. An entry can be added as Appointment/Anniversary/Holiday/Important/Private. The fields allow for Title, Description, start/end time/date, Location, Alarm (before XXX min/hour/day) with repeat option.



There are four alarms by default but you can create seven more. Each one can have different time, melody and recurrence options. An option that is common for all is that the phone can be set to automatically power on for the alarm, if it is shut off.

The other organizer functions are in the Applications menu. Here are the simple Memos, limited to 100 characters. A Task can have title, details, start/due dates, alarm and priority level (1-3). The voice recorder can be limited to 1/2/3/4/5/60 minutes or to size, suitable for MMS. It can be used for self-memos, but if you keep the phone at distance bigger than 30-40 centimeters, the voices will be hard do understand. Here also are the World Clock, the Calculator with scientific option and a link to the unit Converter, the Timer and the Stopwatch and the RSS Reader. The last one uses the internet standard RSS to obtain information such as news, from feeds you've added.

The Samsung G800 has 150MB of internal memory, which will be enough for most users, considering that bigger files like multimedia (photos, music and videos) should be stored on a memory card, as the phone has microSDHC (High-capacity) slot.