Technology for Mortals

I recently fought with AT&T as a carrier and after reaching the end of my 2 year contract, I finally decided to change cellular providers to Sprint. While AT&T has a great reputation elsewhere, in my location, they have failed to provide 3G coverage and even have had outages as of late due to an influx of population related to the annual arrival of college students.

Coincidentally at the same time my contract was just about up, my Samsung Eternity suffered from a flaw in the screen that wouldn’t allow for me to dial from the right side of the screen. When having to dial a number composed of mostly sixes, I decided that my phone could no longer be of use and so I went in search of another phone.

I have chose to look to the Samsung Intercept as the answer to my prayers. The phone has a 3.2” touch screen with a full qwerty keyboard that is easily usable by even my larger sized hands. The Phone features the Android 2.1 Operating System with Google connectivity. Many things about the Android OS makes the phone great. After logging into my gmail account and porting over my contacts, my contacts needed some serious sorting, but everything was there and linking contacts seemed relatively easy.

The phone seemed to be sluggish at times. The processor is noticeably slower than the Epic and other more expensive phones. The phone even seems a bit more sluggish than the older Samsung Moment. Over all the feel of the phone is rather cheap compared to similar priced phones. Part of this could be because of the licensing of Google’s android. One thing that both the Epic and the Intercept seem to have issues with is home row of soft keys. I have seen an Epic which already has these keys not functioning the majority of the time. Although having access to TV as well as several apps from the Android market made the phone feel much more usable, the thoughts that the Android was a mobile internet device first and a phone second was quite frustrating. A few other items that nagged at me was the inability to change to notification settings to include custom ring tones. I could easily assign a custom ring tone to a contact, but when having 300 contacts, setting these up was a bit too much of a task than what I was willing to take on.

One additional feature that I had with my Samsung Eternity that I was hoping to get away from on my Samsung Intercept was pocket-dialing. I would lock the phone and simply by sliding the phone into my pocket, it would unlock and start surfing the web or some other task to which I was unaware of.  Apparently there is a copy of some Armymen game that I have yet to download because of this.

On a much more positive note, the integration of apps where one could easily upload and send off a picture taken by the phone is very much welcome. The Android OS makes most of this possible.  The older propriety OS on the Samsung Eternity didn’t seem to have as much integration.

While the phone has many advantages that make it a great device for connecting to the web and creating a great online experience, putting the phone functionality as a secondary feature makes the Samsung Intercept more of that phone that you want if you don’t care about talking on the phone. But for that web-centric integration device, the Intercept still does pretty well. But on a personal note, I would recommend saving your money for a HTC Evo or a Samsung Epic if you want your Android phone.  My personal bad review of the Intercept is not so much because of the weakness of the phone, but the weakness of the phone compared to the predecessor.  The Samsung Intercept screen is not as clean or crisp as the Samsung Moment.  The construction of the phone feels poorer compared to the Moment.  In fact, the inferiority of this phone almost makes me think that Samsung pushed the phone to keep an option open for the mid-range phone while really driving people to consider the Galaxy S phones.    So while this phone is in and of itself not a terrible phone, the fact that the device is a step down in quality yet in the same tier as the Moment does not please me and that is why I definitely feel that Samsung has lost my business at this time.

One late development that I have had with the phone is that the screen has a flaw and does not respond to touch in certain sections.  This is a second of Samsung’s devices which has me concerned about their quality at this time.  I definitely feel burnt by Samsung in this matter, but fortunately my carrier Sprint was ready and willing to fix the problem and replace the phone without any restocking fee.  So I will be doing a review of the HTC Evo 4 soon.