This was my first phone that had a touch screen, and it was purchased as a replacement to the W300i.
This phone was my introduction to Samsung devices and it runs TouchWiz 1.0. This was the basis of One UI which is now on version 7 on Android 15. Technically this is where it all began. Launched in 2009 this phone was a budget phone, on a proprietary operating system. It has a resistive touch screen and no physical keyboard. In some ways it looks very familiar to the smartphones we know. However don’t be fooled, this is very much a feature phone with a touch screen. The operating system was very limited, with no method to install any apps other than what it shipped with. You could however set up your homescreen with widgets for the first time, although it’s uses were limited.
My only real fond memory of this phone was the camera and MP3 player. There was still no 3.5mm headphone jack to be seen on this device, but it had the option to expand the storage with a Micro SD card, offering at the time seemingly limitless storage. The camera was much better than the VGA camera I was used to on the W300i, and to this day I still have some memories from around 2010 in photo and video form taken on this camera.
That’s where the good part ends. The touch screen on this phone was a nightmare to use. Being resistive stacked the odds against it but having parts of the user interface requiring you to press and drag (scrolling) was just a recipe for disaster. You would often accidentally click into menus and accidentally call the wrong person, it was haphazard at best. Typing was no better, in portrait orientation the phone would display a T9 keyboard and you had to orient the phone in landscape to get a full QWERTY layout. Neither were fast or accurate and I would often resort to a phone call instead just to avoid having to endure it. The fact that my next device was a phone with a full QWERTY, physical keyboard should speak volumes about my experience with this.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) the device was not durable at all. As a teenager, doing things that normal teenagers do this device didn’t last long at all. When dropped the back cover and battery had a habit of ejecting themselves from the phone, and the soft resistive touch screen wasn’t up to much abuse. I can’t remember the incident that caused it’s untimely demise but it isn’t hard to imagine.
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