Samsung i500 Is it a PDA? Is it a Phone? Is it my life? (B.A.R. rating 3 out of 5)
When I put this site together, I thought that part of the goal for any aspiring bad ass was to find those must have things in life: love, liberty, and cool stuff. In the spirit of this pursuit, I present to you a pretty remarkable piece of technology that I have come to love (and detest) for variety of reasons. The single best quality of this phone is that it marries a phone with the full blow Palm OS 4.1 Palm’s latest and greatest OS is up to 5 and soon around the corner probably 6. But Palm 4 still continues to be the dominant OS of the PDA market (I could be wrong on this, but I don’t think Windows CE is quite there yet, and Blackberry is well.. that’s another story). Essentially, this PDA allows you download and install from a collection of thousands of software titles. Check out Palm Gear). If you ever wonder if there is something you wish you could use to track, organize, reference, play with, learn from, at a bus stop on cold winter day, you can be assured someone’s already thought of it and made it available at Palm Gear. “My Treo 600 also does that, what’s the big deal?” What Treo users, and essentially all other PDA/Phone users can’t do, is look good using their PDA’s. “Form factor” is the term given to a device’s design, and how much space it takes to be a functional piece of equipment. The Samsung i500 has the single best form factor of all other PhonePDA’s. Most of the PhonePDA’s on the market look like heavy soap bars, some of them like the Treo’s have a tiny keyboards mashed in, with badly beveled buttons that require some getting use to. Samsung’s i500 does away with all this and leaves a simple writing area that you use a Palm style (also snuggly available on the phone) to write into the system. This is not for heavy email users! If you need to send emails/messages back to the office on daily basis, you’ll probably need some more functional than aesthetically pleasing. But this Phone/PDA rocks, looks good, and is an easy conversation piece at the bar. Never mind the fact that it has a stylus that doubles as a pen. You just don’t see too many people with this thing, do you? We rate it a of 3 out of 5 B.A.R.s
Insider Info This phone is offered by Sprint for and astounding rate of $500 new. You'll be able to find it on ebay for around $200-$300 depending on how used it is, what accessories come with it, and if it fell off a truck in Jersey or not. My recommendation is to pick one of them up from ebay. This phone is constructed very well, and I have dropped and it has survived couple times already without any protection. Sprint. By far and away, Sprint continues to be a promoter of pioneering technologies, at the same time, crippling them of the basics. The single largest issue with this phone is that SMS messing service that Sprint has neglected in providing. In order to actually use the SMS system on this device, you need to purchase and install i500SMS v0.31. According to some users groups, you can call Sprint, complain and have them purchase the software for you (check out PDAPhoneHome)Not So Cool Still, anyone SMS messaging you, better enter their name or initials to the message, because unless they are on the Sprint network, you will not be able to know what phone sent you that message. This is just one of those things where the rest of the world seems to have a good grip on, and we in the U.S., the greatest country in the world, are still struggling to figure out how to deliver it. Technology does move like molasses sometimes. We still thing is the a pretty cool phone, despite it's short comings. |
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December 23rd, 2004 at 4:16 pm
Full blow palm os. I WANT ONE! HEHE!
December 27th, 2004 at 6:59 am
We still haven’t hired a copy editor.
;)
December 28th, 2004 at 6:21 am
I’ve seen it and it seems like a pretty good phone, but if you are a heavy Palm user like myself, the Treo 600 (or the new 650) is for you.
December 28th, 2004 at 8:43 am
Yeah, there are some limitations to this phone, namely the OS version is getting old (Palm 4.1). Furthermore, if you’re a heavy email user, you’re probably better off with a full keyboard instead of the stylus pad.
January 8th, 2005 at 10:39 pm
I want one too.
Seriously though, the Palm OS doesn’t do it for me.
January 18th, 2005 at 8:48 pm
I’m really impressed by this phone. I am a big Palm fan as I have Tungsten T3. However, the Graffiti Pad is a great idea for a V-type cell phine.
January 19th, 2005 at 8:26 am
Jano - When I saw this phone, honestly, it felt like humanity as a whole has finally progressed one step futher in the future. Ok, maybe not so dramatic. But the idea of being able to squeeze a PDA into phone, that’s the just the same size of the average cell phone out there, is brilliant.
The “form factor” is what drew me to this thing. No more PDA and seperate phone. No more clunky pda-phones like a Blackberry or Treo’s.
This is prefect combination of style and utility. Not for heavy email use, but I’m always able to send an email or two if I absolutely need to.