I was supposed to write this entry a day after I bought and played with it, but I got lazy and all. Anyway, last December 18th 2011, I bought myself a Samsung Galaxy W I8150 model smartphone. And I named him Amadeo, after my favorite fictional character, Armand from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Amadeo is Armand’s name, given by Marius after he took him in and turned him into a vampire.
Amadeo is my New Year’s gift for myself for doing my best for the past year. To be perfectly honest, it’s been hard. I’m really trying my best to cope up with a lot of things. Thank you for supportive friends even though I go bipolar on them most of the time with random extreme depression and extreme anger streaks.
Of course, pictures!
 
The entire package is really small. It contains the phone itself, a manual, a USB PC connector, and the headset.
Upon full charge, I started playing around with it. I’ve notice a few things here and there and I’ll probably notice more as time goes, but here’s what I think about my new phone:
On a positive note:
- One thing I love about this phone is the sync feature. I think this comes in with the OS, however. Whenever I add new contacts, it auto syncs itself to my Google contacts. Another thing is that I do not need to download apps directly from my phone. I can just click “Install” from the Market and it downloads itself to the phone.
- Second is the threaded SMS. It’s so much easier to read back on conversation.
- Third is the email. I wanted something with the same feature as the email application I had in my old Nokia N95, and I’m so glad smartphones have them, and it syncs with my Google mail too!
- The same goes with the calendar.
- Another thing I love is the screen lock pattern where I can choose any patterns I want.
- One of my most loved feature is that it rotates horizontally when you tilt it. My old Nokia N95 doesn’t do this.
- I also like the QWERTY keypad, but it’s hard to use. Luckily, you can change the keypad to the usual number-keypad like that of the older phones.
- The default alarm clock is also interesting! I can set different times for each different day of the week!
- The Google Maps helps me a lot, especially the me who has no sense of direction. But not as bad as Hibiki Ryoga.
- Oh and the option to block people/contacts! Thank Android for this! OMG! I have a few cases of persistent unwanted calls from random people I do not know, so I’ve always wanted this feature in my phone. Back when I was using my Nokia N95, I was even tempted to purchase the tool you install in Symbian just for that purpose.
- The best part of it is that you get to play around with tons of apps in the Market, and these apps are handy most of the time.
Negative stuff:
- As every smartphone is, the battery drains easily. I’m always running low on battery.
- I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it hangs up every now and then.
- The  earpiece is VERY low. I can hear calls clearly when I’m indoors but when, such as I’m on a mall or a bus station, it’s very hard to hear the person I’m talking to.
- I’m always using up to 80%-90 of my phone memory, even when I’ve closed all running apps and cleared the memory.
- I can’t uninstall unwanted/useless pre-installed apps! D:
I’ll try to play around more with it and probably root it after a few more months, just for seeing the difference between a rooted phone and not. I heard it’s faster when you root it.
Leave a Reply