About Had It With My Samsung ATIV S Windows Phone 8

Here we are a number of months in since purchasing the new Samsung ATIV S to replace my ageing HTC HD7 phone.

The major killers at this time are:

• Bluetooth just cuts out. Period.
• I’ll be on a call when Bluetooth on the phone will seize up. No sound or voice in/out.
• A full power-down and up is required.
• I’ve taken to hard power cycling the phone once every three or four days to avoid this.
• Go figure, Bluetooth just died. :P
• The camera takes _ages_ to focus and shoot the first time.
• Can’t count the number of shots missed because of this.
• Taking video is hit/miss with focus.
• This one is a real pain. There is no way to focus like the HD7 had by touching the screen. Screen touch is start/stop on the ATIV S.

We’ve seen it said that it is a phone and not a camera.

Well, in my case I use the camera on the phone almost all of the time here in the shop to take product shots, screen shots, build process pictures, and so much more.

The above is a shot of our yard after having 5 or 7 centimetres of snow fall a week or two ago.

This shot is sunrise over the city of Edmonton on my way into the shop.

The camera takes pretty decent pictures though the size of the sensor really limits the quality of the shots.

Call quality wise the phone has been pretty good though at times it takes a long time to pick up LTE from our provider’s tower here at the shop even though there are five bars. This seems to be a regular experience where the phone will show 4G instead of LTE.

Some pluses that Windows Phone 8 does have despite problems with this particular handset:

• Organizing the tiles by size makes at-a-glance for important items simple.
• Voice recognition for in-vehicle hands-free is excellent for calls and hands-free texts.
• Any vehicle that has the ability to tap into the phone’s address book has been flawless to date.
• When bonding the phone to a rental I use “Delete Me” as a tag just-in-case I forget to remove the phone.

So, while overall Windows Phone 8 is a good step forward this particular handset is a real dog. Whether this is tied to the hardware or the platform has yet to be determined. Since the provider’s warranty is 30 seconds or 30 feet, whichever comes first, we are left to Samsung’s warranty support.

Now we get to see how Samsung performs in the RMA department. :P

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
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Windows Live Writer