Review by L. Salazar for Samsung S5230 Tocco Lite Unlocked Phone with Quad-Band GSM, 3 MP Camera and MicroSD Slot – International Version with Warranty (Noble Black)
Rating:
I completely disagree with other reviewer. Once you learn the basic functions of this phone, its as intuitive as any other gadget. And the term intuitive, at least to me, is based on what each person determines it is. Anyways, one of my favorite features of my phone is this has 3 home screens which you can place different widgets on, and scroll to them when you wish. On the main page I have time and date, my secondary I have alarm, music player, and phone mode, and third one I have my fm radio dialer, facebook, and birthday widget. The screen is gorgeous and the colors rival my ipod touch. The camera takes good pictures, and so-so video, but then again I rarely use it for that anyways. You can save either to the phone or the the micro SD card. Another great feature is that while typing text, when you turn it sideways, it automatically changes to a horizontal qwerty keyboard.

There are other great things about this phone, and all-in-all, a very good deal for the cost. Any web capable-video and photo camera-a wide variety of widgets-you’d be hard pressed to find a comparable deal for what this one sells for. A strong competitor if you ask me.

Review by Eduardo Nietzsche for Samsung S5230 Tocco Lite Unlocked Phone with Quad-Band GSM, 3 MP Camera and MicroSD Slot – International Version with Warranty (Noble Black)
Rating:
Perhaps I’m spoiled, coming from a Nokia phone with its incredible ease of use interface, but this Samsung has been a total nightmare to figure out…and this is me being a longtime gadget geek who usually doesn’t even bother to read owners’ manuals for anything—TVs, computers, audio equipment, DVD players, MP3 players, VCRs, digital cameras, etc.

This phone gets two stars mainly for its looks—the case and the screen. It seems to have been designed mainly for the bimbo market, people who just want to have a pretty phone in their hands. The owner’s manual is a thin and horribly useless joke, most of it is about how to use the web browsing, mp3 player, and camera. Simple basic phone functions, like how to access the keypad during a call (for navigating voice menus) are totally ignored.

In fact, when I first turned on the phone, it was in German—and there is nothing in the damn manual about how to change the language. I had to go to Google Translator and translate each and every icon and menu heading in order to figure it out! At least they could have been bright enough to have the default setting on English, which is after all THE international language!

Similarly, there are no instructions on how to turn off the annoying keypad tones. I just kind of stumbled across it.

I bought this phone mainly for its PDA functions, which are passable at best. I do like that it’s much easier to do texting on this since you can get a full QWERTY touch keyboard when you turn it on its side. But overall the basic phone functions are severely neglected and ease of use is abysmal. I will give this phone another couple of days, if it doesn’t finally “click” it’ll be going back.