Minireview of the PM-325

So I've been playing with my PM-325 for about 3 days now and I've noticed a few things here and there both pro and con.

Pros:

  • Really nice 128x160 screen. It's also much brighter than my N400.
  • Compact. The slide out keypad makes it easier to handle. It's still not as easy to hold has my N400 was, but it's not bad.
  • Decent VGA Camera. Nothing spectacular, but I'm excited to have it.
  • Clear ringer speaker. Not distorted at high volume like some other phones.
  • Bluetooth. Currently supports the Headset, Speakerphone, and Dial-up Networking profiles.
  • Voice memo. It's kinda nice to have. Has a 3 minute total storage.
  • Compatible chargers. I can keep using my Samsung N400 chargers.

    Cons:

  • No speakerphone. There's only a "Monitor" (one-way speaker) function, and it's not really loud enough.
  • Custom ringers are ignored in Roam. When I set a custom ringer for someone, I'd rather that I be allowed to decide if I want a roam ringer to override the custom ringer. I've got a pretty good roaming plan. I don't really care to be notified if I'm answering a call in roaming.
  • No Bluetooth OBEX profile. It'd be nice if I could sync and share my contacts wirelessly.
  • Paging through SMS messages is slow. You click the next button to move to the next message and there is a .5 to 1 second delay.
  • When the cover is slid shut, the screen shuts off after only 3-4 seconds. There's no option to have it stay on for X amount of seconds. So if I get an SMS, I have to check the sceen quick before it goes back out again.
  • Speaking of notifications, after the screen has shut off, there's no visible indication that there's an event to respond to. What if I walk out of the room and don't hear the voicemail or SMS notification? I'd have to open my phone just to check if I missed something. It really should have the red LED flash until I acknowledge the event.
  • The service notification sound is so quiet it's nearly silent. The same goes for the call connect/disconnect sound.
  • Insufficient ringer looping on alerts. If I get an SMS alert, the ringer only plays once. On my N400, the ringer would loop for about 15 seconds. I have to choose longer polyphonic ringers to ensure I hear the alerts when I'm sleeping.
  • Ringer looping isn't seamless. On my N400 there was about a 1/4 gap in the ringer loop. I accepted it because I figured that the N400 was a poor quality phone (and I've come to accept that Samsung products in general are low quality), and therefore I simply figured a new phone would fix the problem. But I was way off. The PM-325 has HUGE gaps in the loop, and the gap lenghths vary, so you can't really work around them. It's really disappointing.

    I'm sure I'll have more comments to come.