|
 |
| Hypex |
Member since:
14-Jul-2008 |
|
Is the Samsung SGH-A401 full of bugs?
Category: Question about Samsung A401 Mobile Phone
Posted by: 16-Jul
Hello, I bought one of these attracted by the cheap price. Although my budget was $200 I thought why spend that much if a phone at half the price can take pictures, record video and play mp3s. WRONG!!
I must admit, I am on Telstra prepaid 2G, and was replacing a Motorola E360 from four years ago which latest features it had was a colour screen, polyphonic ringtones, EMS and WAP internet Features already out of date back then in 2004! So I bought an A401 prepaid pack and promptly put in my 2G sim card. It seemed to work fine for a while. I could browse the BigPond internet athough mobile TV didn't work, download ringtones and all else it did.
Then the problems started. I was at Phillip Island one weekend and someone was trying to contact me all day from Melbourne to no avail, being told my phone was off. It certainly wasn't! I only found out when I called that someone. I switched the phone off then on and it seemed to fix it. Until it disappeared again. Then I experimented and set the network mode from auto to GSM 900/1800. It has been fine since.
Perhaps the worse of all is the OS is full of bugs that instantly crash the phone. I can be going through the address book when suddenly it reboots. These guys could have the decency to write an exception handler so when it does crash a message is displayed. No that would admit the phone is buggy and still in beta stage! Once I received a call and the phone just rebooted instantly. I never found out if I didn't want to speak to them. :-)
The most annoying thing to date is that I like to use the WhereIs service. But they have changed some web coding on the site which again brings out the bugs in the phone and crashes it. So annoyingly, go to WhereIs, reboot. I asked a Telstra shop and they said no one has reported problems. They advised me to switch the phone off as it can overheat. A friend of mine said I should just leave my mobile on. My old Motorola could switch itself off at night and turn itself on in the morning--a rare feature I made use of! I actually did a test, I turned it off overnight. Then in the morning tried WhereIs and to my surprise got a message back saying the service wasn't working at that moment. Now, I don't know if the service wasn't really working or if somehow my phone managed to execute buggy code and survive a cooler morning. It still doesn't make sense as the rest of the internet on the BigPond page including YellowPages work fine.
In conclusion, it is possible it's my fault for using a 2G sim in a 3G phone. But, is there any proof of this? I can see that I will need to convert my new 3G sim over to my current prepaid number eventually. In any case, this phone has the buggiest operating system I have ever seen!!
Answers
|
|
|
| Julianne Suanders |
|
Dear Friend, all of us come across some lemons in our life and it seems like the Samsung SGH A401 is one of them. A quick look at the feature list along with the pricing at www.myshopping.com.au/SP--269159_Samsung_A401_Mobile_Phone shows that the phone might be good for a mid-level user. However, like you have detailed so well in your post, this phone should be removed from the store shelf with immediate effect. Not only is it a a bad phone, it makes tall claims of being anything but. If you consider the pricing, you will realize that it is definitely not the cheapest model around and you can get a much more reliable phone from Nokia ( Sorry, Samsung, I have nothing against you....its just that your products are still stuck in a time warp) and Motorola. If anyone else is facing problems with the A401, they should mention it on this forum and we might be able to convince some buyers not to actually buy this imposter of a phone!
Posted by: 16-Jul
|
|
 |
|
|
| Hypex |
|
Thankyou for the response. Yes that feature list does look nice. And as we know it is too good to be true! In a recent JB HIFI publication the A411 is on sale for $149 pre-paid on NextG. It looks exactly like mine except it's black. Personally I think the white looks the best. There is also an A412 on a $20 NextG plan that looks exactly like mine! Perhaps this is the bug-fix release? Unless that is coming with the A413. :-)
My Dad likes the Nokia, having had about four models including that popular one with the snake game. Would you believe I forgot the model number! Wait, it's coming back, 51-10, yes that's it. The Nokia 5110. I consider Nokia to be the Windows PC of the mobile phone world. They are just so common with Nokia even inventing their own standards to make other phones look bad, so IMHO it's a good comparison. I like to play games on them, but the interface annoys me. For instance when I read my messages I like to see the time and date. On both my Motorola and Samsung I can scroll to the end of the message to see it. (Just as well!) But on Dads Nokia I have to select the message, find the menu for time and date, then select it. Argh! So annoying! How have these phones become so popular with such an annoying interface? Perhaps there are shortcuts only Nokia people know. I'm not one of them. (The Nokia people :-) I like mine to work easy out of the box.
Until your post I thought Motorola were a bit behind, because it wasn't a Nokia! And since Apple's were considered the underdog as they used to run on Motorola's. Looking at mine, with the way the interface was made, I used to think it was made for programmers. Anyway I'm going off topic. I am annoyed that my phone has no SD slot and that I can't transfer my media over to my Mac. I don't see why there is a need for software to transfer files, just make the phone into a MSD (Mass Storage Device) and the user can transfer files too and throw using any computer.
For my phone I think all it needs is a firmware upgrade, do phones support this? I once had an old Motorola (my first) unlocked. Usually you fill out all these forms then get a courier to take the phone away, probably at users cost. I found out where the unlocking place was, drove there just before closing time, and told them what I need. They took the phone from the front office out back, spent a couple minutes with it, then came back and gave it to me! No cost! Now that's service.
But can the same be said for my Samsung?
Posted by: 17-Jul
|
Answer this Question
|
