Bad Bad Donkeys

It’s inevitable; crack open a hundred oysters, you’ll probably find a couple of pearls. Poke around a little, though, and you’re bound to also find some crap.

I’ve owned a lot of phones. It is, dare I say, a mild obsession, and I’ve stopped trying to understand it or overcome it. Like running water, I attempt to gracefully flow around my strongest urges and regroup, unscathed, on the other side once the divisive influence passes. Most of the time I do okay. Most of the time.

Every once in a while, though, I get scathed. Hard. Last week’s sojourn into the Land of Sony-Ericssonia was harrowing, what with the rebellion and all, but my misguided apprehension was put decisively to rest by the realization that the W580 is one of the best phones I’ve used in the last two years. Yesterday, however, I embarked on the Tax Refund Phone Acquisition Tour, Phase II, and got waylaid like a passing Krispy Kreme deliveryman outside fat camp.

As noted a few posts ago, Samsung and LG have their CDMA web-footed waterfowl in a proper column. Their GSM handsets, however, gobble moldy poo.

What do these companies have against me customizing my phone to fit the things that I want to do? Exactly why, on the Samsung A737 and A707 (more popularly known as the Sync), can’t I save my text messages directly to the phone instead of the SIM? Why can’t I assign a message tone outside the predetermined selection of message tones, like, say, oh, from the memory card? (Possible with Samsung, though not LG.) Why can’t I customize the 4-way toggle to function in ways that I see fit? Why can’t I turn off the data connection when I know that I’m not going to use it, in order to prolong battery life? Why can’t I get a decent signal outside a metropolitan area, and why-oh-freakin’-why can’t LG produce a GSM phone with an earpiece that doesn’t make the person on the other end sound as though they’re gargling ferrets?

So yeah, I bought the stupid Sync, running through my self-determined allotment of phone expenditures from my tax refund. The first one’s screen was DOA out of the box, so I swapped it for another one. That was my first mistake. My second, and probably larger, was replacing the second Samsung with an LG CU575.

As I learned over the past twenty-four hours, the CU in LG’s nomenclature should be followed by “but not hear you.” In a service area in which most Nokias, virtually all Motorolas, and now the W580 perform just swell, the CU575’s radio has the attention span of Nipper on a Mountain Dew-Mochalatta cocktail; once it loses its signal you might as well pack up the sandwiches, fold up the blanket, and put an ad in the classifieds, because that puppy ain’t coming back on his own.

As bad as the CU575 was in terms of reception, its sound quality was worse; I feasted on an appetizer of braised static followed by roast distortion medallions with hollandaise dropouts. Afterward, apple-glazed noise rounded out an experience that can only be described as robustly inadequate. The CU575 did easily outperform the Samsung, though, as the Sync was unable to hold a signal long enough to even test its call quality.

The Sync also took longer than average to receive text messages, even after altering the message center from the default national number to an East Coast center. Didn’t make a difference; text messages took nearly two minutes to arrive, another area in which the CU575 outperformed the Sync, as its incoming texts arrived without delay. The Sync had a better screen than the LG, but came saddled with Samsung’s monkey shit interface, so you’d better be a huge fan of orange and black. It’s worth noting that the Hue from Alltel offers three different color schemes, so perhaps the blame for the Halloween UI should rest squarely with AT&T. The much newer A737 slider shares most of the same faults with the Sync, including the color scheme, though it seems to have marginally better reception in low-signal areas. For what it’s worth.

Samsung and LG make some of the best CDMA handsets out there (the Hue and the Scoop come immediately to mind), but once they step into the GSM arena they get pummeled like critical analysis at an Obama rally.

It’ll be a long time before I take a chance on those two unproven GSM entities again. For the moment, at least, I’m sticking with the familiar.