Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Samsung Glyde

I had a Samsung Glyde for one day so here is a mini-review of it.

The phone feels and looks great and I really loved it at first. The slide-out keypad is really usable and the
touch-screen is vibrant and can display a nice range of colors. But unfortunately that's where the good news ends.

The screen
is too small to easily browse web pages and the links on the pages are next to impossible to hit. The normal buttons would be no problem to accurately press but often the software just doesn't register the correct touch. The phone vibrates when touching the screen for a nice tactile feedback so I knew my touches were registering but the on-screen button wouldn't respond. I tried to go into settings to calibrate it but the only options were low, medium, and high sensitivity - none of which helped. In some cases the on-screen button would actually change state but the software wouldn't act on the press. After some time I learned it was better to hold your finger on the button for over a second which really made the phone too slow to be functional. I also noticed a similar problem with the case mounted hardware buttons such as the camera button. Pressing it often did not result in the phone going into camera mode.

If there was one word to sum up my experience with the Samsung Glyde it would be "unresponsive." Which is unfortunate because it's a great looking and feeling device. It's possible I had a faulty unit but when returning my phone for the LG Dare I asked the Verizon representative if she had received other complaints about the phone's unresponsivness and she admitted that she had. Perhaps this is a software issue which they will be able to patch but for now I'd steer clear from the Samsung Glyde.