Samsung Smiley (T-Mobile) – Uncool name
When I first got this phone in my labs it took me some time digest the name of the phone. Isn’t the name ‘Smiley’ a bit gay? They have even put the emoticon on the model name for this. I wasn’t too happy about the name and I certainly won’t recommend this phone to any of my male friends. The Samsung reps told me that there is a guy hired by the company who comes with all these names. If he is reading this review, I would like to tell him to think a bit harder before he comes up with the names.
Other than the name, the phone is quite decent. Samsung Smiley has a slider design and you have to slide the phone up to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. The display of the phone is pretty decent. There is that emoticon on the home screen wallpaper which irritates me even more. I am just glad that Samsung didn’t engrave the icon somewhere on the back or front. The emoticon is there just on a wallpaper which you can change and get rid of it.
Below the screen, there is the navigation toggle which is pretty easy to use because the buttons are adequately raised above the surface of the phone. The QWERTY keyboard is located beneath the phone and you just have to slide the upper half to access it. I wasn’t too happy with the keyboard since the buttons were cramped; there isn’t much space between the buttons. My fingers are a bit thick too so this made matters worse. Slim fingers might find it better to type but I won’t recommend you this phone if you are going to type a lot of long e-mails or messages. There are a lot of other spacious keyboards out there which you can check out. Manufacturers are paying a lot of attention these days to their keyboards and Samsung could have done better here. There are all the buttons that you’d want in such a keyboard. There is also the irritating smiley button and I think Samsung is taking this a bit too far.
The camera lens is located behind the slider and not directly behind the phone. This means that you have to open the phone every time you want to take a photo. There is also a self portrait mirror near the camera lens. The internal features on the Samsung Smiley are mostly message centric. There are also social messaging related apps which means this device will go well with the youth. The young generation mostly buy cell phones for social networking options and usually don’t spend much time on calls or messages. Hence, they also look for a phone which has plenty of such offerings. The manufacturers, on their part, are also putting in such apps on their phones. POP3 is also supported so you can directly get e-mails in your phone inbox. There is also Yahoo IM for chatting with friends.
