Sprint Samsung SP-i600 Smartphone on a Mac

For the last couple of years, I’ve been wanting a cell phone and PDA combo that still had a phone form-factor. I also thought I wanted to move onto the Windows PocketPC operating system mainly because it seemed like there were a lot more applications available and with greater functionality than those for the Palm OS. I was waiting for Palm to release their Windows powered Treo, but that was before my wife and I went phone shopping and I saw the Samsung SP-i600.

It wasn’t a big deal for us to switch wireless carriers to get it. Our Verizon contract had expired; and, indeed, an overzealous Verizon sales representative opened the door to our leaving her company when she extended out contract for a year without letting us know that’s what she was doing. We got the contract rescinded but also had to turn in my wife’s replacement phone to make that happen. If you’ve been reading my blogs, then you know her purse was stolen out of one of our vehicles a couple of weeks ago. Her cell phone as well as a couple of iPod’s where in there. So, the whole contract rescinding deal left her without a phone. But there was still no way I was going to sign onto anything without examining my options first. As we were looking online for phones and plans with different carriers, I stumbled on the Samsung SP-i600. It was love at first sight.

I am an ex-Sprint customer. We left them because of poor customer service and inability to get Sprint coverage at her parents’ house in Missouri or a good signal at our house in Texas. We looked into whether that might have changed and found that Sprint now covered her part of Missouri and we could get a good signal at the house. As for customer service, that remained to be seen. After spending 90 minutes in the Sprint store (and at least 30 minutes of that was just spent waiting for service), we’re not sure about the customer service part but decided to risk it.

The Samsung SP-i600 looks like a phone and works like one. Text and command inputs are made using the phone’s keypad. No stylus is available. It uses Windows Mobile 2003 as an operating system, and the phone comes with a leather case, an AC power adapter, a USB dock that synchronizes and can charge the phone if the power adapter is plugged into it), a headset, a CD containing Outlook 2003 and Microsoft’s Active Synch, and a couple of small user manuals. Of course, the Mac platform is not supported, something stated on Samsung’s Support website.

I bought and downloaded a copy of PocketMac for Smartphones and used it to synchronize the phone’s Contacts with Apple’s Address Book and its Calendar with the Calendar in Entourage 2004. The one shortcoming of running Windows Mobile vice Palm on the Mac is there is no good way to synchronize Entourage’s Notes with phone, no matter which Mac based synchronization utility I run. I worked around that problem by opening up new address entries in Apple’s Address Book using the “company” moniker and copied and pasted the information from the Entourage Notes into the Notes field in each entry. (I could have done the same thing using Entourage by pasting information into the Other/Notes field in Entourage Address Book entries.)

So far, I really like this phone. It wasn’t cheap, costing $350 after discounts, but I intend to keep it for a while, so I believe it will be worth it. It’s a joy to carry around clipped on my belt, unlike the big clump of a phone and PDA I used to. And its battery life seems to be really good. I’m not recharging it as much as I did my regular phone. All in all, it was a good buy.