Korean Job Discussion Forums

[FistFace]

Just a warning to avoid dropping 380,000 to 500,000 won on this phone until they work the kinks out of it. They sell it as an LG or an SK version. The SK version may be fine -- the LG one, however, is NOT.





Perhaps you've seen Jeon Ji Hyun in this TV commercial...





The main purpose of a phone is to be used as a phone. Samsung (or perhaps LG when making use of this phone on their network) seems to have forgotten this.

I purchased one of these last weekend, and fell in love with the huge feature-set, and the minor features I care for: great looks, free terrestrial DMB with built-in expandable antenna (works virtually everywhere on the subway), clock on the outside which shows up at all times, or quickly after a 2 second button push (I hate wating 4 seconds as with some models). Bell ring was loud enough. Vibrate was medium-strength (I prefer strong vibrations so I can actually feel it). Micro SD memory card slot (makes transferring pics much easier). There is an English/Korean dictionary inside... I can go on. It does .mp3 as well, but it's deceiving -- only their proprietary .mp3s -- unless you figure out the buggy Korean software to decode them. (That pissed me off, because the way they did that extension cheat obviously was to fool people into thinking actual .mp3s would work easily).

The problem I had with this phone is that I went through 3 of them in just a few days. First phone never made it out of the store. My gf couldn't get my phone to ring but 50% of the time (she's on SK) when she called me. She would get a message that I had my phone off, after it rang for 10 seconds or more. After messing with this for 20 minutes, the store ladies gave me another jacket phone. I'm so glad we tested it.

After getting a new phone which seemed to work fine, we left. The next day, however, proved that the second phone had another problem. When people called me from an LG-network phone, it sounded great. When someone with a KTF or SK phone called me, however, it was awful. Especially if they talked slowly, and spaced their words out like Koreans often do in a 2nd language.

The phone seems to have a problem with either packet sending, or with noise reduction issues. To describe the problem... it's like the first few letters of the first word in a sentence was "cut off" of the conversation. Almost like in the old cassette tape days when you used "Dolby C" to reduce background noise, and it ramped the sound up and down so much to cut out background noise, it would chop off the front or back of the sentence. That is what this phone was doing.

I kept having to ask people to repeat themselves, and it was driving me insane. Of course, when people talked fast -- like in Korean -- in one long sentence string, the problem isn't so much of a problem. But slow-talking... pure hell to understand. The phone also chops words up every so often, but not always. This can be heard in any language or speed.

After convincing the LG people that there was a problem (they finally heard it too), they let me try another in the store. Same issues... again, only with non-LG phone network phones.

I forgot to mention that I had also stopped in at a Samsung Anycall Service center earlier the day before, and they heard the problem too, after I explained what was going on. I'm sure a software fix of some kind can take care of this issue one day. I really loved this phone -- sadly, it didn't work well as a phone!!!

I ended up going with another Anycall model, which sounds fine.

I've been an LG phone network user for a few years now. It's not the best when compared to SK or KTF, but it is slightly cheaper, and I've had few complaints over the years. Reception with LG is much improved these past few years.