Samsung s390g Review

Easily the most significant problem I've had is the pocket-dialing. It seems that there is some kind of shortcut key that automatically dials 911. This occurred on multiple occasions for me, despite the fact that I know for a fact that the keypad was locked to the greatest extent it can be without being turned off completely.



I can now tell you from experience that the first time you accidentally call emergency services from your pocket, the officers are firm but kind when they deal with you. When it happens again less than two weeks later, they are far less forgiving. I didn't face any serious consequences personally, but I was left with substantial “egg on my face” in my neighborhood and small home town. And I can promise you that the instant the police knocked on my door the second time was the exact same instant that I carried this phone in my pocket for the LAST time.

I looked all over the phone's menu options, and even showed the phone to the two police officers who “visited” me on the second occasion, and I was unable to find any way to disable the emergency-dialing shortcut key. In fact, to this day I have not even figured out which key it was that was accidentally pressed to initiate the unwanted calls.

The only solution I can see to this serious problem is if you carry the phone in a belt clip, or keep it in some kind of hard-sided case in a purse or messenger bag. And even then, I'd be very cautious to avoid ending up in a similar predicament to me.

Perhaps due to the extremely short “life” of the phone in my possession, I found it very difficult to grow accustomed to the trackball. To me, it always seemed overly sensitive when I needed precision, yet not responsive enough when I wanted to scroll large distances.

The third biggest problem I had with this was the oversensitivity and quirkiness of the keyboard. At first, the keyboard seemed to be a good size and easy to work with. The keys seemed to provide a nice feedback when pressed, without requiring too much force.

However, the space bar often inserted two spaces when I tapped it. That in and of itself might be overlooked, except for the fact that the s390g is programmed to recognize a double-space as the end of a sentence. It then automatically inserts a period and switches to “capital letter” mode for the next character.

As by now you can certainly see, this phone did not “work out” for me, and I recommend that you try something different if you are considering purchasing this model. But if you want to tempt fate and are interested in the few things that I actually liked about this phone, check out my full review on prepaidphoneguy.com