Samsung Jet S8000: second round

Wow, brilliant! But who put phone features on this media player device?

Well, I can't resist. After having the phone for about 3 months I have to share what are the most common and unbelievable annoyances with the model (Firmware: S8000XPIJ7)... Let's get started:

Phone:

• My oldest phone (Siemens S35i with B&W LCD) performed better than this phone. I have switched off the 3G connection because it makes it worse, so the comparison is fair - only GSM connection. I have mentioned already that the phone (that is smarter than smart phone) can't recognize the phone numbers correctly if the country code is included.
• During the call there are 6 buttons on the screen (hold, mute, hang up, speaker...). If your ear touches by mistake one of the 6 buttons (well, you have to admit, that the probability of your ear to be found in this vicinity is quite high) the call will be disrupted or it will be put on speaker if you are lucky. New firmwares have moved those six buttons on the bottom of the screen... - very smart.
• If somebody calls you, there is a dial-pad button on the screen that if you mistakenly press (I have done it on the very first day) you will find yourself in a situation where you can't do much but cancel the call because the answer button does NOTHING. Well, the proper actions are to push back symbol on the screen and answer the call the usual way.
  
• If this was not enough - can you believe this? There is a call answer lag (delay between the moment you push the "answer" button and you actually receive the call) ... and the fix for that - reduce/delete all call logs!?!?!? Link to DF forum: Answering lag
  We are 2010! What kind of software designers are working on this phone?
• Nowadays, you have some decent number of contacts in your phone, aren't you. With respect to that, I usually buy phones that a bit more advanced, so I can manage the contacts from a PC. I would rather save my keyboard than commenting on the official bloatware you are offered from Samsung. Well I will only summarize: in 279 MB (not including the drivers) you get limited possibility of editing your address book, calendar, notes, alarms etc. BUT you can't backup your phone!? You can't update the firmware, can't synchronize SMS (only to copy them to your PC). BUT you can covert and upload any video format to your "phone". Wait a minute - the last has nothing to do with the phone...
  Update: latest NPS 1.5.1 was able to update my firmware - I have to admit - that was incredibly easy and simple!
  
• Something that also miss badly on this phone. When the phone is locked, single push brings the light ON on the locked screen. But that's all. I can see what is the time but not a single chance to peek on the battery or signal status... or the bluetooth is still connected - nope - nothing.
  

Music player:

• Well the sound quality turns out to be related to the quality of the headphones you use - not very surprising. What is annoying is that regardless that you put your song in a separate folder and your ring signals in the RingSignals folder if you don't play your songs from a playlist (in other words - preselected the songs) your songs are mixed with the ring signals. And yes this is not a bug it is a feature and the only fix is to use playlists... Again, what year we are?

Wifi:

• Here I am impressed. The phone connect easier to some particular protocols than WinXP... For example "eduroam" hot-spots connection that needs special software under WinXP. But. There is but again. If you have connected through wifi, the internal "Dolphin" browser will use this connection before the WAP even if WAP is set as default in the "Connection" profile. This is good but it is not the case for Java applications or the GPS+ update features... So, every time I manually switch between the connection profiles to make sure that I use the one I want. Again - was it smart phone or smarter than that?
  

GPS:

• It features Route66 LSB software. Free maps, fast fix on open space, accurate and very expensive navigation fees... So, I found myself using the navigation as an "off line version" of "Google Maps". Well, not bad for free service - indeed, it has very good features. Reading trough the DF forum I could not find anybody who has payed for the navigation service... Perhaps I am not the only one that thinks it is a bit expensive...
• WHAT!?! I can't upload custom list of points of interest (POI)? Nonsense! Please, make sure you understand how seriously bad is this. 
• Update, June 2011: A year later, there are still no updates for the maps!!! Pointless...

Touch screen:

• I can't just skip this. No, really I can't. On the box it says "Brilliant Touch Performance". Here I don't know - shell I laugh or shell I cry!? I haven't tried that many other touch phones, but I cant imagine worse performance than that on the Jet. My colleagues were simply lost with my phone responsiveness while I kept repeating "wait, it will come... wait..., no, no you didn't push... well not that hard... it gets better once you get used to it..."
  Well, honestly, I will rather have high or fast touch performance than brilliant...
  Update: latest firmware S8000XPJA1 performs slightly better...
  

Here is the place to mention some other, less important to me.

• Widgets - don't know what to say? None?
• Games - I am not really interested but the situation is not very bright there as well.
• Additional software limited to J2M, virtually no support from Samsung.
  

Smart phone:

I think you got the picture until now that there nothing smart in the phone. Actually it as a brilliant mobile device besides the phone and touch screen features. Perhaps I can formulate it this way "Wow, brilliant! But who put phone features on this media player device?"

Concerning the proprietary OS, the opinion of most of the users in the Net can be summarized in one sentence - 'anything else but "TouchWizard"'. I don't need to rephrase it for you...

If you continue reading and still have the passion to know more let's mention very briefly the positive features: The "phone" has excellent media features, very nice form factor (dimensions), reasonable battery life, excellent connectivity, document viewer - very nice features that barely compensates for the annoyances mentioned above and as it appears I will be stuck for some time with the whole package...

Here is also my first impression review on the device.