Siemens S55

Siemens S55 came with the car I bought an unexpected inclusion I didn't pay for.

As the phone is at least several years old it is no longer in manufacture... this by the way is a plus. The most rubbish piece of technology I have ever used.It randomly asks for pin numbers for no apparent reason.

The keys fall out.

I have had my Siemens S55 for about 2 or 3 months and it has been a good phone most of the time. The attachable camera appears good quality for a phone once plugged into a computer. The screen is bad for a camera phone. Its reception, Voice Quality and all the other calls stuff is excellent. I'm not sure if I would recommend this or not as it gets damaged very, very easily.

I've had my Siemens S55 mobile phone for nearly a year. Its a love/hate relationship.

Its an awesome phone, the features are all brilliant, the interface fantastic. The calendar is incredibly versatile (repeating appointments, birthdays, locations, and so on) and useful, the txting interface great (hold down a key for a second and the number appears). Group txting is wonderful too - invite 20 friends to the cinema with one text, and just click through who you want the phone to send it to using your phonebook. I use the countdown to time my cooking and rest periods at the gym. I used the email facility to pick up my work email while I was on holiday in the alps. Amazing! All great stuff. Its more an organiser than a phone. There's more, but those things I use regualrly and would really miss.

It can also be a very frustrating device. The keypad feels cheap and when you're txting quickly letters FREQUENTLY don't appear. This is immensely annoying. If you've got 50 txts in your in&outboxes you get slowdown too, which compounds the previous problem. Sometimes its fine, other times it seems like its out to get you. After 10 months my no.2 key fell off, but I have a spare phone (the excellent Siemens ME45) so I wasn't too worried. It was sent for repair on friday afternoon and was back with me before 9am on monday. Good customer service siemens! Another bother is the ringer. Its bloomin quiet. I miss a *LOT* of calls. I am someone who hates polyphonic tones (I just want it to beep!), so I am using the Siemens downloadable normal ringer tones. It seems the phone struggles to power the ringer and the vibrate function simultaneously. You can hear the ringer fade in and out appallingly. Its a big downer.

Call quality is great, battery life also great. The screen is fine, but not good for viewing photos or pics. But then the camera attachment is pretty naf, so thats no bother. Besides I want a phone/organiser, not a games device/camera. But thats me.

So all in all its a phone with stunning functions and features which looks great. People often compliment its looks. BUT, its hard to remain patient when I miss a lot of calls and mistype every other txt word because keypresses get missed all the time. I love it and I hate it. I would buy the sequel in a heartbeat if it didn't slowdown, miss letters and had a beepy ringer. But I wouldn't recommend the S55. Its a flawed gem, but fatally flawed, which is a real shame.

Siemens, if you're listening - faster processor and better keypad. Puh-lease!

I wouldn't have this Siemens S55 mobile phone if I didn't want a bluetooth that would work with my PDA, it was free with Fresh so that was a good selling feature. On the face of it though I would say that I'm pretty glad that using it for games, sms, or speaking on is not it's main purpose and that I'm doing much of that through the PDA.

The keys are plasticky and small, and the menu system isn't intuitive or easy to use. I would rather have a non-icon driven menu that simply listed the options, instead of a wierd filesystem based thing that doesn't work very well.

Without paying to download any extras the colour screen and polyphonic sounds seem like gimmicks rather than used to their true potential. The colour screen may be good for a phone, but compared to the PDA it really is a poor relation. It seems clear the idea is to sell logos, pictures, ringtones etc rather than make an easy to use phone.

Thankfully bluetooth has been easy to set up. Though it could be this to blame for the battery drain? Why is it that a bluetooth phone without all the extra stuff is so difficult to get?

The Siemens S55 has everything your average user right up to the business user would need, and if it hasn't got it then it can be found and downloaded easily for it. Ringtones sound great and both tones and logo's come in various formats for larger selection.

Bluetooth and Infra red ports are good and connecting it to a computer to manange the files is childs play.

Unfortunately it is let down badly by the screen. The camera that comes with it is pretty good and if the pictures are downloaded to a computer they look great but on the phones screen they look worse than awful, barely able to make out what is displayed. Texting is made easier with T9 prediction technology but is still a pain when you think you have pressed the tiny, fiddly buttons only to find you have missed a couple of letters in a long word. If you get the handset Sim-Free your going to struggle to find a pay-go network that supports all the features such as MMS.

Finaly, the battery is poor. Even with bluetooth and other features switched off, and although the manual reckons 300 hours standby, you will be lucky to get 6 days unused out of it. Start texting a lot and the time is halved or worse. I know about 12 people with this phone and although many like it none can get more than a week out of the battery.

I brought the Siemens S55 mobile phone on contract and was a bit omninous after reading the reviews about the bad quality of the screen ect, i must say i was very impressed with the quality of the screen for the price it is a little bit grainy but all together much better than i was expecting.

Also the battery life is great it lasts me about a week left on all the time, and is really easy to use once you get the hang of it overall a very good phone at a good price

Main point: if somebody is accustomed to sophisticated Nokia phones (7110, 6310i), before switching to more light and small S55 (with almost identical technical features) think carefully.

I have been using Nokia phones for more than 6 years. Visually and on a paper S55 looks very impressive almost same capabilities as Nokia 6310i (except battery life and color display). However, when you start using it, you miss a lot of advantages/comfort you are used to.

Software (Data suite) is very slow not working in real time mode (as Nokia data suite) you need to read out and transmit every time you make changes to your contacts or SMS.

You can not enter several mobile phone numbers in the address book (similar to Outlook where there is only one field for mobile) though you can mark several mobile entries as office/home/fax numbers and still use them.

It is more difficult to make conference calls (or Nokia users need long practice to get used to it!) or browse phonebook.

You can not any more use/retrieve phone numbers received via SMS (only senders number, but not the numbers contained in the SMS body text).

When you use T9 input, you can select a right word only moving forward, but can not roll back to previous

You can not send SMS directly to the number you selected in the address book, you need to go to messages first, write something and then select the recipients phone number

I didn't find so far capability to send SMS to a group of recipients (it may exist but I don't know how to do that).

It is not easy to select and setup ordinary ring tones if you are not excited with polyphonic tones.

For a new user to mobile phone market this small disadvantages may seem insignificant, however again I want to stress that my comments are for those, who are addicted to Nokia phones

Of course, former Nokia users wont face only disadvantages. You will like very much auto key lock feature (especially after using Nokia 6310i). S55 is very easy to carry in a pocket. Speakerphone makes your life easier when your hands are occupied while working at a PC.

Finally, I decided to wait for a new Nokia phones (e.g. 7210i) to switch back and give cool S55 to my family members with less technical expectations/demand

When i first bought my Siemens S55, i thought, great, just what i need!! I bought it sim free and Ive had all sorts of problems with it, I bought myself a vodafone sim card, and try to access the wap, it wouldnt let me, I try sending picture messages it wouldnt let me, so I phoned the network provider, they couldnt help me, and guess what, I just gave up in the end and gave it to my 12 year old daughter, Im sticking with Nokia, better resolution, better control on everything!! try again siemems, maybe one day you might get it right!!!!!!!!

Inability to download ringtones. I have spent six months trying to acquire ringtones - even those from the Siemens website for this specific phone will not download. Having purchased the phone from Phones4U stating that I wanted one which enabled me to download ringtones, I am disappointed to find that Siemens have a very poor reputation in this respect !

This phone has all of the features expected with a modern phone including a clip on camera. But to be honest with you I do not think you should buy this phone if you are going to use it for media messaging because the lowish resolution 256 colour screen cannot really hack it however uploading the pictures to your computer shows them to be of decent quality for a phone camera. There is a large amount of gaming software available for this phone but (and this might just be me!) I have found the joystick to hurt my thumb after a while. The phone seems to have a great reception and a long battery life and for the price you could not ask for much more.