Please do not buy this phone. February 12, 2012

Reviewer:  Matthew Madzelan  (New York, USA) -

1 star means "I hate it." I would like to add the word absolutely into that sentence. I still want to tell off the AT&T salesman who told me it was a great phone that he gets few complaints about, I know he was doing his job but if he was honest I would have spent more money on a better phone. In any case, here is my review:

Service: Within a week of having this phone, I found myself consistently having dropped calls. I wanted to blame AT&T but my previous phones with AT&T never had any service issues. This phone loses service in my room, most areas of my house, in the law school, at my job, actually in almost any place with a roof over my head. Generally about once a week to two weeks the phone goes into what I call non-service mode, I attempt to text and it either repeatedly says try again or states there is no service. When I attempt to make a call it states emergency calls only. The only way to fix this is when I remove the battery and sim card and place them back in. How I usually realize the phone is acting up is when I don't receive a call or text for a long period of time and once I take out and plug back in the battery and sim, I suddenly I see 8 new texts and 4 missed calls. I cannot even begin to explain how many issues this phone has caused me due to these problems. Other reviews talk about the phone turning off randomly, I have experienced this problem a few times but my main issues have mainly been those mentioned above.

Battery: When using this phone mainly for texting, I can get about 2 days out of it. However, a 2 hour phone conversation will usually kill the majority of the battery. Further, once the battery goes from 5 to 4 bars, it dies incredibly fast, which is why I have to charge it as soon as I see it decrease to 4 bars. For a phone as low grade as this, there is no reason the battery life should be so short for conversations.

Interface: The interface is basic and easy to get used to, however, if you are looking for something some more advanced, this is not the phone for you.

Camera: As for the quality of the pictures this phone takes, 'poor' would be a fitting description. I wouldn't put up any photos on facebook from this phone.

Miscallaneous: If there is any positives for this phone, the slide out keyboard is decent for typing. I have skinny fingers so it is not likely as problematic for me as it would be for others with large fingers. I do not have a data plan at this time so I do not know how this phone fares with apps and online features, however I can't imagine it would be too good given the amount of problems with this phone in the first place. One last complaint about this phone is that it does not store many texts and I find myself clearing out my text history about once per week.

Overall: As I titled this review, please do not buy this phone. If you find one laying on the ground and cannot find the owner, use it as a hockey puck or sell it to someone who did not bother reading the reviews.

Nice phone, but a fatal flaw December 20, 2011

Reviewer:  Andrea CHEN  (California USA) -

I liked many aspects of this phone. I already have a smartphone for work and didn't want a second huge phone -- I wanted just the basics. Good clear screen, and the speakerphone quality was good. The keys had a decent tactile response and the arrangement was not messy. Photo quality was good given correct lighting conditions, rather bad in poor light, but that's to be expected from cell phones.

The second day I had it, it turned itself off. It turned itself off at least once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes rebooting, sometimes staying off. After that, I could not get rid of this phone fast enough. It had been something of an impulse buy (my Motorola had taken a 14-foot header onto concrete) and I had selected this one at the last minute because it had an instant rebate rather than a mail-in. I should have read the reviews first as it would have saved me the restocking fee. It's a real shame that this phone hasn't been pulled off the shelves after all these reports of shutoff/reboot problems.

AT&T is selling a lemon phone December 10, 2011

Reviewer:  mugwump88  (Los Angeles, CA) -

After three months, it is randomly turning off and powering down. The problem is that you don't know that this has happened, so important calls are missed.

Is it fair that AT&T sells a phone that fails every three months? And now they have moved onto a different model so new customers will not know.

Poor Call Quality June 6, 2011

Reviewer:  Laura Boggioni  (Chicago) -

I purchased this phone because I wanted a phone with a QWERTY keyboard and I liked that it was environmentally friendly. I am now returning it because three people have told me that they cannot hear me well on the phone. They report that I sound garbled, like talking underwater. The features on the phone are nice - the camera is decent quality, the keyboard functions well, and the interface is user-friendly, particularly for someone like me who isn't very tech savvy. However, the main purpose of having a cell phone is for phone calls and if the phone doesn't do that well then it is essentially worthless. Would have given it two stars, but it gets one extra for being environmentally sound.

Best of all worlds June 4, 2011

Reviewer:  wlh1115 

I do not like touch screen keypads. I do not like hitting a seven when I meant to hit a four. That is why I was looking for a phone like the Samsung Evergreen. As the title says, it has the best of all worlds.

It has a numeric keypad on the front for making calls. It also has a slide-out alpha keypad for texting.

It is not too large, and it is light-weight.

So it was everything I was looking for.

THIS PHONE IS BEAST!!!! February 20, 2012

Reviewer:  n@+@l!e 

Like ohmigawd this thing is the bomb!!!!!! Only it turns on by its self and its not that loud during calls but its a beast! You have to buy this phone my friend you wont regret it!!!!!! And 14 year olds are really critical about phones so take some advice from me!!!!!!! A must buy!!!! I can get signal where my dad cant, and he has an iphone!!!!!!!!!!!!

stop reinventing the wheel! March 9, 2011

Reviewer:  Allan MacInnis  (Vancouver) -

Have been using a Samsung Intensity with few problems - occasionally it would mysteriously flatline and I'd have to pop the battery in and out to get it back up, but otherwise it's functioned just fine for around a year and a half and become a trusted and useful companion. When the internal speaker malfunctioned, I took it back on my extended warranty to the shop and "traded up" to the new Samsung Evergreen, which, unlike the Intensity, has a video camera, takes much larger pictures, and has a sim card, which I gather is useful for storing contacts and transfering them from phone to phone. I was excited to try this new phone; I expected that perhaps some of the weak points of the Intensity would be changed, a few cool things might be added, and the many useful functions would be respected and preserved. Logic, right?

What I discovered was very near the opposite; at least for someone who has been using an Intensity, this is an ANNOYINGLY COUNTER-INTUITIVE PHONE, with many previously useful functions reconfigured in strange and frustrating ways. You notice right away that it feels flimsier and cheaper than the previous model. The next glaring change you'll notice is that the slide-out keypad eliminates the top row of numbers, embedding them as alternative function keys in the pattern of an actual phone in the middle of your keyboard, while moving the various keys to select the function (numbers, caps, etc) all to the right side. Several punctuation keys that were, in the Intensity, placed to correspond to their location on an actual keyboard are now moved elsewhere, too, with for me useless functions like a 'smiley face' key being added. The ultimate effect of all of this is that the keyboard is no longer CENTERED; the QWERTY keys have been shifted UP and to the LEFT, corresponding to neither a computer keyboard nor the previous keypad model and forcing you to hold the phone in a non-centered way. Even the spacebar is now a frustrating length away from the right thumb, slightly offset to the left, not at the center of the bottom row where it should be. After nearly thirty years of cultivating typing habits, and over one year adjusting them to the Intensity, I resented that I was being asked to have to relearn how to type, just to use this phone! (It was kind of like moving to Japan again, and discovering how different the keyboards were there; THAT I couldn't do anything about, but this... Jeez...). Bottom line re: the keypad: SOME THINGS SHOULD BE KEPT UNIVERSAL, especially if there's no good reason to tinker with them: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Other dumb "improvements" on the Evergreen included a teeny tiny time display up in the top left corner, so you have to squint to tell what time it is (compared to the nice large display on the Intensity); a "vibe on/ vibe off" function that I couldn't actually find (which is very easy to find on the Intensity); an apparently absent "speakerphone" key, which I did occasionally use when I got set on hold, and had come to like; a "contacts" function that no longer takes you directly to your list of contacts, but to an extra menu that I suspect I would NEVER use; when I hit the "contacts" key, what I'd really like is to just SEE MY LIST OF CONTACTS, thanks! The photo files, meanwhile, are stored largely by text description, rather than by - as the Intensity does - thumbnails of the photos, which makes a lot more sense. Worse, the camera function makes it needlessly challenging (as opposed to the Intensity) to take more than one photo in a row - which you would normally do on most phones by just clicking the big button in the center again; here, you have to stop shooting after one pic and look at the camera to get the right key, since it's off to the side and smaller, while the big button seems to be reserved for IMMEDIATELY accessing a function to send the photo to someone else - as if that's how people use cameras! (Not me, anyhow - the most likely thing I'm going to want to do after taking one picture is to take another, if there's something interesting to photograph; I don't want to have to pause to look at the phone to find the right key. Furthermore, if you DO happen to want to send someone a photo, selecting this option no longer directs you to your list of contacts (as the Intensity does), but (apparently) makes you fill out the contacts' phone number or email addy, EVERY TIME YOU DO IT: you're directed to blank slots, and if there's a way to automatically fill these in with the numbers you've stored, it's not obvious. I imagine there IS such a function, but the very fact that I have to go looking for it means this feature is nowhere near as elegant as it was with my other phone. And why did it need to be so different, anyhow? Things have been moved that were JUST FINE where they were, in terms of user function; even where the recharger plugs in has been relocated. What would be so bad about preserving some CONSISTENCY BETWEEN MODELS?

Possibly a few of these issues could be resolved or "adapted to," if I wanted to spend a few hours reading the manual and a few weeks adjusting, but ultimately what owning an Evergreen for a few days taught me to do was appreciate how well designed, relatively speaking, the Intensity is. I genuinely think, in terms of typing, texting, and navigating menus, the older model has a FAR superior design... And ultimately, after three days, I took my new phone back to the store and downgraded and just got another Intensity. True, the video function (which has sound) and the improved picture size & quality on the Evergreen were both cool, but I'd rather be able to text and send messages without wanting to smash my cellphone against the wall every fifteen minutes. I can live without shooting videos on my phone. If you share similar priorities - caveat emptor, eh?