Samsung t369 - Feature phone - microSD slot - LCD display - 240 x 320 pixels - rear camera 1.3 MP - T-Mobile - black

I am not happy with this phone. I mainly text, so these gripes relate to texting: 1. When sending a text you can't type in the name of the contact and have it looked up. In the To: field you either type the number, or you have to press options, Add recipients, contacts, then you type the name of the person for a lookup, ok, add. 2. It will only store 230 texts despite the user manual saying it will store up to the limit of shared storage. It actually means it will store to the limit of the smaller of those two. Texts are separated in inbox and sent box rather than being sorted by person. 3. The letter keys are squishy and if you don't hit the center the key won't register 4. You have to type alt before each number in a text because there are no dedicated number keys on the keyboard. 5. We bought two of these. My phone won't let me make groups of contacts but the other one will. I have done a master reset on my phone and still no go. I presume it's a software corruption. 6. You cannot download text tones whereas you can download ringtones. 7. The icon which means you have voicemail is almost always on. I call voicemail and there are no messages and the icon turns off for a few minutes, then it turns on again. 8. The sequence to unlock is to push two buttons that are next to each other. Consequently if you put it in your pocket it will frequently unlock itself and pocket dial. I have not found a suitable case that will prevent this.

One on hand, this phone's menu system is easy to get around and the screen is nice and large, with good resolution. Unfortunately, that's where the good parts end. The slide-out keyboard was really nice for the first 2 weeks I owned this phone, until it became unusable. Now whenever I press a key on it, maybe a third of the time nothing will happen, a third of the time it'll enter TWO characters instead of one, and only a third of the time will it actually enter the correct character once. Using this is a great way to get your blood pressure up quickly, so I don't use the slide-out keyboard anymore. The whole phone has been treated very gently so far, so there's absolutely no excuse for breaking this quickly. The next biggest complaint I have is that this phone constantly pocket-dials random numbers. The two keys which need to be pressed to unlock the phone are close together, so it can easily be unlocked by mistake. There's two separate password systems (one which prompts for a password at turn-on, and one which prompts for a password when using the different applications), but strangely, neither of them will require a password for the phone to be unlocked. Even all the not-so-great phones will let you set a PIN to prevent this - it's not hard! - but Samsung has failed miserably here. This might sound like it's not a big deal, but when your phone dials random numbers a few times a week for no reason it's pretty bad. I'm just hoping it won't happen to get 911 one of these times. There are many other more minor problems I have with it as well - there's no way to set the alarm volume (if the pre-loaded sound clips aren't loud enough, then too bad for you)...instead of filling up the internal memory with text messages first and then using the SIM card as backup storage (while warning that the memory's full so you have time to delete your old messages), it places the messages on the SIM card FIRST, then gives no warning about reaching the memory limit until it's full and it starts dropping all new text messages. Honestly, I could put up with all these problems though, if only because my last phone was actually worse (imagine that!), except for the issue of the PC software used to sync contacts, photos, etc. with your computer. New PC Studio is the absolute worst piece of software I have ever used - it's buggy, unreliable, annoying, badly-designed, and just plain doesn't work 90% of the time. Just to get my old phonebook onto this phone, after I had just bought it, took a few hours of re-installing drivers and different versions of the program, being confused by badly-worded and confusing error messages, etc. In fact, what motivated me to write this review is that I've spent pretty much the entire day so far just trying to get all the 70-something photos I've taken with the built-in camera onto my computer. I've had to re-install New PC Studio 1.5 at least 4 times now (after a certain number of uses it just won't start up), and transferring a single photo has about a 10% chance of actually succeeding each time. Short story is, stay away. I haven't used other Samsung phones, so others may be worth buying, but this one definitely is not. It screams of cheap manufacturing and lack of any kind of quality control.

Have had this phone for over a year. Overall, it has performed nicely, except for the power/battery indicator, and the view screen scratched easily...which are my only real complaints. The phone is very durable, and the sound quality is great. I am sure some folks enjoy the QWERTY, but I don't use it...never figured out how to hold the phone and type at the same time. Also, when you switch away from 'T9' to symbol or number, it would be nice if it defaulted back to 'T9', but you have to manually do that. I guess you get what you pay for. This phone is a great value because it is so cheap, so how can you really complain? The fact that I can no longer rely on the battery value indicator is about to make me get a new phone though.

This phone has very good sound and battery life. It's easy to use for phone calls. The camera, video and MP3 player are not very useful and could just been left off in my opinion. The slide out keyboard is great but makes the phone a bit heavy.

I was hoping to upgrade to a phone with an expanded keyboard. I got the expanded keyboard but I downgraded on the phone. Their are only a few fields for contacts. Using Samsung software I cannot transfer my notes to the phone. I can't change the menu items are shown on the opening screen. Overall a bad deal.