Samsung T809 Review

Interface

The user interface of the phone is very simple and not that different as some other menus that you might have seen on cell phones. It has only 9 options in the main menu, which are very easy to assimilate and use. A cool feature in the menus is the numbered list, which means that if you know the number of the menu you are trying to access, all you have to do is just press that number instead of scrolling all the way to it.

Home Screen

Main Menu

Organizer

The phonebook holds 1000 entries stored on the phone and 250 entries stored on the SIM card. The entries stored on the phone could include up to 5 numbers, an email address of up to 50 characters long, a picture id and a ring tone. Every contact can be places in multiple groups, the list of which is editable. The last piece of information that could be stored for a contact is a note of up to 50 characters for any additional information. The structure of the phonebook is fairly simple and any user familiar with a standard cell phone phonebook should have no problem navigating her/his way through this particular one. The phonebook could be browsed by single entries or by groups and features like sending a text message, a multimedia message or a simple voice recording to the entire group are available. This could be confusing for a novice user, but to a seasoned user is an advantage since it saves lots of time and typing.

Phonebook	choose memory	Adding Contact	Picture and RInger IDs
contact options	contact options	Groups managing	groups

As far as dialing goes, a speed dialing list is available and setting the members of this list is a breeze. You can search the phonebook by typing the name of the contact or if you decided to dial a number manually and it already is stored in your phonebook the phone will recognize it and will display the name of that contact. You will not find anything new regarding this section, but it is easy to use and effective, which is acceptable.

			SpeedDial
			CallHistory

The next thing I will discuss in this section is the personal information management. The phone comes equipped with all the standard applications in the section such as alarm, calendar, calculator, etc. In the following paragraph I will get in some more details regarding every one of those.

A very useful feature to me was the “world time”, since I travel all around the world and it is very comfortable to be able to see what time is it in any place of the world, without having to calculate it manually, and it is very well animated, which by the way goes for the entire interface of the phone. 3 alarms are available and you can set the time as well as the days of the week for every one of them, which is always a good thing, because you don't want to be waken up at 8:00 am on a Sunday morning because you forgot to turn the alarm off the night before. A little extra feature that Samsung have added is the “auto power” option, which will power your phone on (if it happens to be off) if you have an alarm that needs to be activated.

WorldClock

The calendar is another one of my favorites and it is very well structured. It allows you a set of different entries (schedule/anniversary/miscellaneous/to do) which come with different details. I find that very useful, since up to now I had to “make it work” with the one and only template for a calendar entry that usually comes with calendars. The calendar can be viewed for different periods of time (month/week/day) and overall is one of the best calendars out there. Another useful feature is the unit conversion option, where you can enter an entire list of currencies and convert them back and forth with little to no effort, which once again underlines the “world phone” idea. Timer and stopwatch are also available, just in case you needed to time a certain operation.

			Calendar
			Scheduling

Another feature available is “voice notes”, that you can record and either send them to somebody or store them on the phone. This feature is for you to use if you happen to be in a situation where you wanted to record something or somebody speaking, singing or making any other kind of sound or noise for that matter.

The Samsung SGH-T809 has about 82 MB of memory which is shared between the picture messages stored on the phone, the installed applications and the instant messengers' logs. Without installing any additional applications or anything else that takes up memory the phone came with about 65 MB of free memory and the rest was taken by the template messages (which cannot be deleted) and the preloaded software and media. Additionally there are about 29 MB available on the memory card, which could be used for additional storage space.