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	<title>CTho's Blog &#187; Uncategorized</title>
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		<title>Thoughts on the Samsung Rogue</title>
		<link>http://www.ctho.org/blog/2010/01/thoughts-on-the-samsung-rogue/</link>
		<comments>http://www.ctho.org/blog/2010/01/thoughts-on-the-samsung-rogue/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 16 Jan 2010 06:05:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>CTho</dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ctho.org/blog/?p=103</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A couple of weeks ago I replaced my simple cheap Nokia phone with a Samsung Rogue.  Over all it&#8217;s pretty nice, although it seems to sit in a strange market niche below &#8220;real&#8221; smartphones.  It has an HTML browser, and most of the user interface is pretty slick, but it doesn&#8217;t seem like there will [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A couple of weeks ago I replaced my simple cheap Nokia phone with a Samsung Rogue.  Over all it&#8217;s pretty nice, although it seems to sit in a strange market niche below &#8220;real&#8221; smartphones.  It has an HTML browser, and most of the user interface is pretty slick, but it doesn&#8217;t seem like there will be many applications available.  A few specific thoughts:</p>
<ul>
<li>The screen is beautiful.</li>
<li>The camera seems to be pretty good.  The flash is blindingly bright.</li>
<li>The browser is decent.  It renders pages well; it&#8217;s not as snappy as my iPod Touch (1st gen), but this phone doesn&#8217;t seem to be targeted at smartphone users anyway.  I haven&#8217;t figured out how to remove the Verizon bookmark or lower it in the list, so there&#8217;s one fewer bookmark I can reach without scrolling.  It&#8217;s got some sort of &#8220;lite&#8221; Flash plugin, but I can&#8217;t use Hulu or Pandora so I&#8217;m not sure what value it&#8217;s adding.  I haven&#8217;t tried Flash games.</li>
<li>While I&#8217;m not a fan of resistive touch screens, I got used to the Rogue&#8217;s screen quickly.  I still don&#8217;t understand why Nokia&#8217;s N900 uses a resistive screen, but on a lower-end phone like the Rogue it&#8217;s a reasonable cost tradeoff.</li>
<li>It seems like it&#8217;s impossible to require a passcode every time the phone is unlocked.  I hate phones that butt-dial, and the Samsung Rogue appears to be fully capable of not just butt-dialing but also (if you&#8217;re unlucky) butt-subscribing-to-expensive-features-like-VZ-Navigator.  I honestly wonder what was going through the heads of the people designing the phone lock feature.</li>
<li>It&#8217;s nice how the phone explains some of its features the first time you use them (including Mobile Email, voice commands, the overpriced VZ Navigator, etc), although I found it strange that features tell you what company provided them.  Apple&#8217;s products seem to aim for a relatively seamless experience, but for whatever reason, Samsung or Verizon want me to know that the phone&#8217;s wireless chipset is made by Qualcomm, the Exchange email client comes from &#8220;RemoSync&#8221;, the voice command support comes from &#8220;Nuance&#8221;, etc.  This isn&#8217;t a problem&#8230; I think it&#8217;s just related to my next thought:</li>
<li>While most of the built-in stuff is pretty slick, the Mobile E-mail application looks horribly out of place with the rest of the phone.  It uses a very different interface with different navigation, and an impressively ugly font.  It also makes (loud) beeps even when the phone&#8217;s &#8220;master&#8221; volume is set to vibrate-only.  That&#8217;s extremely irritating.  The application works, but it doesn&#8217;t fit at all with the rest of the phone.</li>
<li>It seems like the backlight will not turn off for a very long time if you are using the web browser and you don&#8217;t quit (e.g. if you are looking at something on Google maps every few minutes and don&#8217;t want to waste your battery or navigate back to the map over and over and).  Pressing the lock button doesn&#8217;t seem to help.  If there&#8217;s a way to turn the screen off quickly without exiting the browser, I haven&#8217;t found it.  I assume this is the case for other features like Mobile Email, but I haven&#8217;t used them as much.</li>
<li>Since Verizon charges $240 to access Microsoft Exchange emails ($10/month * 2 year contract), I still end up carrying my iPod Touch (the Mail app can access Exchange servers).  The iPod&#8217;s browser is better, its mail client is better, and I also have a free shopping list app called &#8220;ShopShop&#8221; that I really like.  If the Rogue had a decent email client without ridiculous Verizon fees, had a decent free shopping list application, and could stream <a title="Pandora Radio" href="http://www.pandora.com">Pandora</a> radio, I could replace my iPod&#8230; but for the forseeable future, I&#8217;ll still carry two devices.  Fortunately the iPod takes up very little pocket space.  I got the phone fully expecting that I would continue to carry my iPod, so I&#8217;m not dissatisfied&#8230; but the engineer in me is slightly disappointed to such obviously-capable hardware being so underutilized.</li>
</ul>
<p>Update 4/18/2010:</p>
<ul>
<li>I&#8217;ve noticed a few times that I don&#8217;t get enough warning when the battery is low.  I&#8217;ve woken up to a dead phone on multiple occasions even though it wasn&#8217;t beeping on the previous night.</li>
<li>I recently got an update to the Mobile Email application which did not fix its annoying beeps.  The first two times I checked email after the update, the phone crashed; it rebooted itself the first time, but I had to pull the battery the second time.  Since that second time, it hasn&#8217;t crashed again.</li>
<li>When you click a search result on Google, you usually receive a mobile-friendly formatted version of the page, converted by Google.  That&#8217;s really annoying, since it&#8217;s almost always less-usable than the real version of the page (which the Rogue&#8217;s browser can usually handle).  I haven&#8217;t found a way to save the &#8220;don&#8217;t mess with web pages&#8221; setting for Google&#8230; every time I restart the browser, I end up getting mobile pages again.</li>
</ul>
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