I used to be a big fan of Samsung sliders. I owned the D500, D600, D900, and now this S8300. I think the styling of the phone is excellent. The functionality is terrible.

Pros: The screen looks amazing. The touch screen sensitivity is good. Voice quality is good. The size is perfect for my pocket.

Cons: The software! The phone is always doing things I don't want it to do. I use the button lock feature all the time but still I find the button volume is always changing. I like to have it set to zero, but I have the impression that Samsung really wants you to have sound effects for all the buttons. Whenever I pull the phone out of my pocket I find that he button volume has been turned up. There is no way to control how sliding the phone during a phone call effects the call. The phone automatically ends a call when the phone is slid down. I do not want this to happen, but there is no way to change it. In order to use the loud speaker you must slide the phone up. Then if you are finished with the loud speaker, if you slide the phone back down it will end the call, very annoying!

The worst is the texting functionality. The use of apostrophes with T9 is almost impossible. For almost all words you must manually insert an apostrophe, which requires 4 keys.

The side menu is nice but always gets in the way when trying to view an incoming text message. The phone also always goes to function to add a photo contact for some reason.

Software is terrible. this phone is only nice looking not good to use.