Yesterday a package arrived with two Samsung T401G phones in it. Both are Net10 phones. I was able to activate them without any major issues other than they only received 10 minutes each when they said on their website at “Getting Started / Activation/Reactivation” in the FAQs. “Q. Will I receive any free minutes for Activating a Net10 phone? A. Yes, when Activating your Net10 phone you will receive 300 free minutes and 60 days of active service.”
Because of that in the FAQs I called them up to talk to support, which I’m afraid was sent to Mexico or they hire people who speak English as a second language with Spanish as their first language. At first they said that the 10 minutes is the way things were, but I pointed them to the FAQ that I just mentioned. After pointing that out they talked to a supervisor, after which they decided that they should see that I get the minutes that I was promised. They had me enter several codes into my phone, but none of them did anything that I could tell. So for both phones she had to add the minutes from their end.
While I was annoyed that I had to talk to them I was glad that they were willing to correct their mistake. So I did give her a nice review when we finished as she fixed the issue that caused me to call up.
On to the phone itself. Sorry but I thought I needed to included the earlier stuff as it does relate to this phone.
- The phones had the SIM card already installed in the phone. (This was easier than my first Net10 phone as I had to find & install it myself.)
- The battery was not installed in the phone. (I expected this as there are laws causing this to happen.)
- They had a paper with the number from the SIM card on it in a font size that you could read.
- I had to activate the phone online or over the phone. (I activated the first phone online & the second one on the phone. Trust me do it online if you can, unless you speak fluent Spanish that is than you might be just fine on the phone.)
- Proprietary charging port instead of the common USB connector on most other brands of phones. (I expected this issue as Samsung is known to do this.)
- The port for headphones & hands free uses the port I just mentioned so you need an adapter if you want to use the port or a device that supports it.
- It does have Bluetooth. This allows you to use a Bluetooth hands free device as well as send various other items over Bluetooth. Just remember that when you have Bluetooth enabled you are using more battery.
- It supposed to have approximately 15 days of standby & approximately 5 hours of talk time. (I just got it so I can’t say on that one yet.)
- It has a mirror just above the lens so that you can have an idea of what your self-portrait will look like. (My wife thought it might be a flash when she pointed it out to me.)
- It is thicker than my last phone which was the LG Glance. (This is because it has a “QWERTY” keyboard that slides out.)
- It has a port for a Micro SD card on the side of it, which means you don’t have to remove the battery to access the card. (Since it doesn’t support SDHC you are limited to 2 GB SD cards, which unfortunately the only cards we had were either to large or only 512 MB. So we may have to get new cards at some point.)
- It is supposed to have a speaker phone, but I haven’t found that yet. (I saw one comment on a blog mention that you had to be in a call to use the speaker phone.)
- The camera is 1.3 Megapixel with no flash. (If you need a flash get a camera if you are going to use this phone.)
- Also because it has such a low resolution for the camera I don’t expect it to have decent video output. (I’ve seen complaints about this, but I haven’t tried as I’ve never worried about taking video with a phone.)
- You only have about 40 MB of internal memory. (So you can’t have all the apps, pictures, & ringtones you want on it without a SD card.)
- As should be expected if your ringtone is larger than 300 KB you can not use the MP3 as a ringtone. (For me this has been close to 20 seconds, but at higher bit rates it has been shorter.)
- In the calendar you can set up “Anniversaries”. (I was able to enter my birthday, my wife’s birthday, & the day we were married. What I liked about this is I was able to enter the years for out birthdays, while on my last phone I could only get a recurring event on those days as I couldn’t send the phone back to when I was born.)
That’s all that I can think of so far. If I find anything else out or make a discovery about these phones I’ll make another post.
3 replies on “My thoughts on the Samsung T401G so far”
The manual shows the max micro card is 2GB, but I’m currently using an 8GB card and it works fine.
i agree with the above. im sending this from my t401 wishing i wouldnt of bought it. cant use internet accessing apps like google maps or opera mini. says you need to grant it access but there is NO options for that.
I know this is old, but I’m getting ready to order a card for mine, so I thought I’d toss in some info. First, the downloadable manual states support for up to 16Gb, which means that it does support SDHC, at least according to sdcard.org and other sites. It seems, as usual, that companies don’t care a bit about sticking to standards, so when they say microSD in this case, they actually mean SDHC, as SD only goes to 2Gb’s.
So, they make it as confusing as possible.
Something else I didn’t know when buying, was that in order to do a USB file transfer to my PC, a memory card is required! It won’t transfer from the internal phone memory! I don’t know yet if files already saved internally can be transferred once the card is inserted, or if they are just ‘stuck’, with no choice but to delete them.
If you’re going to buy a card, take note of the camera resolution. At that low res., you’ll need a zillion pics to fill up a high capacity card, which is why I’m ordering a cheapy 2Gb, as there’s no way I’ll ever take that many pics with my cell phone. You’d be better off taking the savings from buying a cheap card, and putting it towards a bona fide camera.
I’ve been pretty happy with the phone, overall. I don’t text much, but the slide out qwerty keyboard is awesome for texting.
One thing I strongly dislike off the top of my head, though. I have had issues with my bluetooth randomly connecting, even after manually disabling it. That really drove me crazy for awhile. There were a couple of times where I’m talking on my phone without the bluetooth, and all of a sudden it connects and the audio cuts out of my phone! So then I’m scrambling around my room, trying to find my bluetooth, yelling, “If you can hear me, hold on, cause I can’t hear you….my phone’s screwed up!” Oh man, did I want to strangle some engineer over that! Haven’t had that glitch in quite awhile now, though.