As you might know from my other posts I have a Samsung Galaxy i7500 mobile phone and I have had many problems with it and with the official Samsung service company. Many of the problems I have with my phone are bugs. The phone doesn’t work correctly and they should be fixes. Some of the, in my opinion, are critical and influence the device and its usability as a whole. I have found solutions for of them, for example for draining battery. Some of them have become worse through time or maybe with the firmware upgrades that I’ve done (actually I’ve done only one firmware upgrade).

Here is a list of bugs that I experience on my Samsung Galaxy i7500 smart phone:

1. If I use the the original pouch for the phone the battery drains in less than a working day. I have found workaround for this bug, but it disables me to protect the phone from scratches.

Severity: Major. Embarrassment for Samsung for not trying to solve it or putting instructions on not to use the original pouch.

2. Sometimes the phone’s ringer stops working. I use my phone as an alarm clock and from time to time my alarm doesn’t ring. When I look at the phone the display says that the alarm was silenced after 2 minutes of ringing. When I try to change the ringing volume, the phone restarts. It is a ‘soft’ restart and it doesn’t require me to enter my SIM card PIN number to unlock the phone. If I try to change the ringing volume again, the restart happens every time. The ‘solution’ for this bug is to restart the phone (’hard’ restart by turning the phone off and on again).

Severity: Critical. I don’t know a way to reproduce it if it’s not happening already.

3. Lately (after a firmware upgrade?) I have discovered that many people claim that I was not available (no network) when in fact I was. I also receive an SMS from my service provider that I have had a missed call when I wasn’t connected to the network. I have also discovered that this happens briefly after I was in a call or when I was using data services. The scenario to reproduce this behaviour is something like this: I call someone and I stop calling before he could answer. He calls me right back and gets the signal that I’m not available. The other scenario is that I’m using data services, for example reading (or synchronizing?) e-mail messages. When someone calls me in between they get the message from my operator that I’m not available.

Severity: Critical

4. Not often, but every now and then it happens that when I’m in a call and the call quality is OK, the call is dropped. This can be the operator’s fault or the other call party’s fault, but the fact is that I see this behaviour with this phone alone. When I was using my older non Android phones this didn’t happen to me at all.

Severity: Critical, but it might not be the phone’s fault.

5. Overall low battery life.

The specifications say that this phone can be used for 492 minutes of talking time or 422 hours of stand-by time. In my measurements I get 2-3 days at most, which is less than 80 hours of usage per battery charge.

Severity: Critical

If the bugs were easy to reproduce I would send my phone back to the seller. Since these bugs are hard to reproduce I don’t (or can’t?) do anything. Samsung Galaxy i7500 has disappointed me and I’m not sure what my next phone will be. I have a feeling that I won’t stick with this one for long time (or other way around, the phone won’t stick long with me).