So don't let the tone of this post fool you, I really like the Vibrant hardware and even several of the Samsung apps. Smart Life (people like to call it TouchWiz) however has a number of problems that make using this phone quite frustrating. In an effort to get some dev attention, I propose we collect all our UI whines here. My list follows.
I'm not completely sure where Smart Life starts or ends but it looks like the SMS messaging, contact manager, calendar, and parts of the browser UI are all part of Smart Life...
Messaging
1) TouchWiz message balloons do not have enough contrast and this makes them very hard to read in sunlight. I'm not crazy about the colors chosen for the balloons either. Please give the chat UI several style options. It would be great if we could choose our own foreground and background colors and a special font for messages that is separate from the system font. I would like to have a couple of conversation stytles to choose from.
2) I prefer to see the entire message on the "balloon page". Having to flip to a second page for long messages is annoying. Why can't the URLs, phone numbers, and street addresses have links on the "balloon" page as well? I think the second page needs to go away completely.
3) Touching and holding an HTTP link currently does not offer a "Copy to clipboard" option. This is desperately needed to share links via email or other message threads.
4) The messaging code cant send Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or even Korean!! Verified that HCT EVOs can send Vietnamese text to each other with no problems, but any message with "foreign" symbols from my Vibrant gives me an immediate error message (ie. the txt does not leave the phone) from the recipient(!) that says: "Free Msg: Unable to send message to <phone number>. Please try again without a symbol in the text."
Contact database
5) Please, we need a way to assign a special ringtone (music/audio files) to each contact (stock Android has this)!
6) Contact groups which are newly created do not appear in the group list. But they apparently are created because trying to create the group a second time returns the message "group name already in use". So here the UI is totally failing to provide proper feedback. Worse is that I can see no way to add contacts to the new group; thus I can't use the feature at all.
Calendar
7) When a calendar appointment which has an address in the location is displayed, we cannot tap on the location to bring up the map/navigator. This is the obvious thing anyone would want to do... get directions to their appointment, right?
8 ) When creating an event we should be able to add an address from the contacts list, or add one from the maps app.
9) I need a calendar event reminder times of 30 mins and one for 2 hours. (actually a customize option letting us choose which values are in the list would be much better)
10) Google calendar supports bi-weekly events (eg: every other Monday) but this event frequency cannot be set on Smart Life..
11) If a recurring event is created on
www.google.com/calendar and then (after a sync) edited on the phone, the recurrence is lost leaving only a single event.
Browser
12) I use the Choco cooky system font; when using the browser, the space behind all the apostrophies (') is about 3 times the width of an average character. The font table is wrong for this character, but only in the browser.
13) I hate the vivid red "bookmark ribbon" icon. The icon for a WEB PAGE bookmark needs to match the browser icon. I don't mind if there is a *little* red ribbon in the bottom corner of the browser icon that makes it special, but it needs to have a globe on it with the same color scheme as the browser icon.
