Virgin Lobster 544 user reviews
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User reviews7
janln 12 February 2008
Good: absolutely nothing
Bad: does not work
Comment: I bought this phone for my daughter and it lasted about 3 months, it spent most of its time with the tech guys, returned to me twice and still doesn't work. Avoid at all costs.
M Rule 4 January 2007
Good: The price, though for a plastic, unworkable phone it's expensive
Bad: It's crap and doesn't work... twice!
Comment: Had two of these - 1st phone blocked up completely after unblocking codes entered. So I got a replacement which offers sporadic incoming voice-only after unblocking. Ha! Try to phone Virgin after many attempts at the help line to return it... it's hell... hello, hello, hello?! So I picked it up and threw it at the wall... Conclusion: the software cannot handle any unblocking onto other networks, it fries the chips! The camera has terrible light resolution so it warps all the colours for the first monments of a subject, forcing eternal fiddling with contrast. So lots of software that's cheap Korean rubbish. The mp3 is about as accessible as a jukebox... eternal roaming around menus to get it to recognise downloads... Goodbye Virgin.
Dima Nemchenko 9 December 2006
Good: MP3 player, mini-SD storage, micro-headphones jack
Bad: Feels a little bit small and delicate for my mannish hands :)
Comment: A nice little phone -- I mostly wanted a mobile phone MP3 player, and this one delivers. There is a lack of documentation, though, so it took me a little while to get it working:
1) When hooking up using the USB cable, open the phone first. Then when you connect the cable, you will see the "Which mode?" prompt and be able to select the "Storage" mode. With the phone shut, I thought nothing at all was happening and was beginning to get worried that I would have to get a mini-SD adapter to read the card directly. I use Linux, so the user who claims the phone is not Mac-compatible is probably failing at this hurdle -- the phone is *very* compatible as all is done in hardware and no drivers are needed.
2) It took me a while to figure out how to get a decent playlist -- just dropping files onto the SD card and letting the auto-list means a complete muddle of music, as there is no way of sorting it, even by filename or date. I suspect the phone uses the (VFAT) file system's inodes, which basically means the playlist is random! :) The way to get around this is:
i) Store your music in the Audio directory, organised in sub-directories by artist/album/whatever.
ii) Turn off the auto-playlist by selecting List, Option, Settings, List Auto Gen from the MP3 player.
iii) Now you can manually add whole directories to the play list, by selecting List, Add, Select (use Open to browse to your target directory.)
Hope this helps some people! :)
Andrew Ingamells 24 November 2006
Good: Didn't get a chance to find out
Bad: It stopped working after two weeks and MP3 wasn't compatible with a MAC
Comment: I've had three of these in the past three months. They've all had to go back because of problems with charging them. The courier collecting the most recent said he knew of a guy who had to exchange his Lobster 544 EIGHT times in two months.
Catherine Buckle 1 October 2006
Good: For the price, this is an excellent phone. It has all the features, and more, or my old Sony Ericsson K500i, but with none of the joystick problems (there is no joystick).
Bad: I haven't yet got the hang of texting with this phone, as the dictionary is a little confusing, I can't quite work out how to add words to the dictionary, but this is probably due to me not reading the user guide thoroughly enough!
Comment: I bought this phone for £69.99 from Woolworths. This included £30 of airtime, the handset, charger, memory card, battery, handsfree, USB cable, User Guide and the 'PC Sync Manager' CD.
On some websites, it says that this phone has no MP3 ringtones, but if you transfer MP3s from your computer or another phone to the Lobster, you can easily set them to be the ringtone.
It has different 'profiles' like Nokias, and these are easy to customise/apply.
Basically, a nice, reasonably priced and easy to use phone.
Fiona S 27 September 2006
Good: The dedicated MP3 player buttons, expandable memory, price (£39.99 from the Link), flash camera
Bad: Nothing
Comment: I bought this for my son and as I was looking for a phone with lots of features but a cheap price, this certainly fit the bill. He loves the MP3 feature and he and his friends listen to music all the time via the speaker. Battery life is good, even though he listens to music so much and it charges up very quickly. MP3 files can be used for ringtones.
SRSpawn na 16 September 2006
Good: Mainly everything, it doesn't have Bluetooth but I don't really need it
Bad: Wish the build of the phone was a bit stronger like made of some kinda metal, instead the phone is made of some sorta plastic which ain't so bad cos feels like metal. The black Lobster 544 phone does feel cheaper built and totally of plastic. The one I bought is from the Virgin Megastore store, silver with a black strip on the front and it don't feel or seem like plastic and feels of a much better build
Comment: I bought this phone on Wed 6th of September 2006 after breaking my Emblaze Sting 6 phone cos it started acting up and became a real nusisance.
I didn't expect the phone to be capable of so much stuff, but the phone is great. You can use mini SD memory with it and anything can be stored on the card instead of the phone, which is good cos it only has 0.5 available memory to store things.
I bought a 256MB card for the phone and have been able to store 3GP and MP4 videos which the phone can play for me to watch, the phone has a reasonable sounding in-built MP3 player that plays MP3 music over the headphones which I ain't used cos the headphones are a bit too big for my ears, or you can listen to them over the in-built speakers on the phone and they sound ok.
You can save all your SMS texts to the computer which is excellent cos I hate having to delete my texts, now I can without ever losing any I wanna keep. The phone can store a max of 70 SMS texts, (20 on the SIM, 50 on the phone) which for some won't matter since they can backup their texts to the computer before deleting all the texts.
The phone has a very good main display screen and the phone allows for animated wallpapers and screensavers. There is a lot more to the phone but the manual doesn't cover much nor does the Net or CNET review, kinda like the Emblaze sting 6 phone there was practically no reviews of it and still ain't.
The only one thing I wish the phone was, was stronger built cos this phone feels a bit delicate and I'd hate for it to ever break.
Anyway this is my review of the phone and I think for the price it's selling at, it will make a real good and entertaining and useful phone for some people. Add on the fact the phone can be used as storage for any kind of file.
Ron