OSNews

Bluetooth worked extremely well here and during file exchange it maxed out at 120 KB/sec! This is the fastest Bluetooth file exchange I ever had. We also had the phone successfully pair with A2DP headphones, while there is BT printing support for some files only. The phone by default "masks" your videos and images and doesn't let other paired computers to browse your phone's files. You have to manually mark files as "public" in order for Bluetooth to make them visible. One thing I really loath though is the fact that Samsung phones do not "recognize" java games or applications when sent via Bluetooth or USB. Only Java binaries downloaded via the WAP browser will be executed and installed (heavily involved workaround exists). This seems to be Samsung's way of playing ball with the carriers' wishes, but for an unlocked phone like this is, it is unacceptable.

The file manager is pretty good, although its usability is not as good as SonyEricsson's. There is 60 MBs of storage free on the phone after you delete all that weird videos of Korean (or was that Chinese?) pop boy bands that Samsung has stuffed the phone with... If you leave these video files in (as the phone came by default), you will only have 18 MBs of internal storage free. A cool thing is that when you transfer on your phones PDF, XLS, PPT, DOC, TXT and HTML files, the Picsel Viewer is able to view them and function as an Office format viewer. Unfortunately, it does that for HTML files too, which means that you can't setup a specific HTML file as your portal with the phone's web browser. Picsel Viewer will load it instead and there is no way to change this behavior.

The phone supports MMS, SMS and POP/IMAP email. I successfully configured and used Gmail with the phone. It proved to be a bit slow, but it works. One thing that I really did not like though is that the phone does not have a universal GPRS profile screen, so each time you setup either the web browser, or the email or the MMS, or your Java apps, you have to retype your GPRS settings over and over again (apn, username, passwd and maybe proxy/IP addresses in some cases).

The "Planner" side of the D900 includes an Alarm application with a recurring ability. The Calendar application allows for more alarms to be set and with more options. There is also a memo application, world clock for 2 cities, a calculator, a unit converter, a timer and a stopwatch. I am very satisfied from the PIM functions of the phone. While the font used is a bit too big sometimes and takes too much space the actual functionality is all there.

Regarding the web browser (a 2+ year old Samsung-modified Openwave UP.Browser 6.2.3.3), I found its integration pretty poor. There are no browser preferences to allow for cookie clean up or page language prefs or to tell it to not load images, or anything like that. Additionally, small images on *mobile pages* will take minutes to display, even if the main page would be fully loaded pretty fast. For the osnews.com mobile page for example, which is just 28KB (code+data), the page is rendered in just 10-15 seconds in full, but the (small) images render all of a sudden only about 2-3 minutes later! The browser can deliver WML and HTML pretty well, it has support for basic CSS but no javascript.

More over, the GPRS/EDGE stack seems to crash frequently. I would have 4-6 GSM bars (very good GSM reception performance btw), but when it comes to GPRS I would get random "network request timeout" and similar errors all too regularly for my taste (the EDGE icon disappears when this occurs). This seems to be a phone bug and not a reception problem. Opera Mini did not fare any better in this issue either, many of its network requests would just time out.

If that was not enough, there is a Java bug in the HTTP session request module that affects both Opera Mini and Google Maps. Each time the Java application needs to connect to a server the phone will repeatedly keep asking you if you want to allow the app to make the connection or not. It just doesn't "remember" the setting for "once per session" like other phones do. Apparently this is a bug specific to the D900 (or my firmware version) because other Samsung phones don't exhibit this behavior. Changing the "permissions" settings on the Java apps does not fix the problem.

The phone does not have profiles all in one place, but they are scattered in several places. If you want to go offline for example, you find this option under Settings/PhoneSettings. If you want to go vibrate-only, you find this option under Sound Settings (or you press-and-hold the # key). There are quite a few setting options to explore.

1. "Samsung D900, Page 1/3"
2. "Samsung D900, Page 2/3"
3. "Samsung D900, Page 3/3"