Smartphone Review: Samsung Galaxy S

Shooting to a promising start

THE Samsung Galaxy S looks like the Apple iPhone. It has a curved back, a silver lining around the screen, and rounded squares framing each icon on the app pages.

But this Android 2.1 device can hold its own against the competition.

For starters, it's fast. The capacitive display is very responsive, and apps launch with minimal delay. Though there's a slight lag when loading photos, it still feels zippier than some other Android phones running on a 1GHz processor. At 9.9mm and 119g, the Galaxy S feels really light, too.

Though its huge four-inch screen means you need big hands to be able to hold it comfortably and deep pockets to tug it away snugly, it does improve the typing and web-surfing experience. The Super AMOLED display is gorgeous - sharper and brighter than other screens I have encountered.

Besides the roomy 16GB internal memory, most of the other specs for the Galaxy are standard smartphone fare - a 5-megapixel autofocus camera that can capture high-definition 720p videos and a microSD card slot (supports up to 32GB).

Samsung has made an effort in customising the Android OS for the Galaxy S. Besides the usual tweaks to the onscreen keyboard and adding icons for various connectivity options to turn them on and off easily, it has included things like the Daily Briefing feature. This compiles weather information from AccuWeather.com, AP Mobile news, stocks from Yahoo! Finance and the phone calendar. You can add a widget to one of the seven home screens to see all these updates at a glance. But the lack of customisation is disappointing - you cannot change or add any other service provider for these information.

Your communication with each person via various channels such as Facebook, email and SMS, as well as their social media updates, are integrated in the phonebook. A useful feature is the built-in Swype text input service, which allows you to glide your fingers across the keyboard instead of typing. It made messaging on the onscreen keyboard more fun and less frustrating.

One gripe about this handset is that the proximity sensor doesn't seem to work very well - there are buttons like "mute" onscreen when a call is in progress, and I have accidentally ended or muted a conversation more than once.

The phone comes preloaded with quite a few apps. Besides the usual Google ones like YouTube and Gmail, there is ThinkFree for editing and viewing Microsoft Office documents, a pretty ebook app called Aldiko and a file manager, among others.

The Galaxy's battery life fared well in tests - it lasted right about 15 hours when I had WiFi and Bluetooth on, music playing on loop, push mail and a Twitter client updating feeds in the background. The phone had enough juice to keep going for an impressive 24 hours with normal use - I left the WiFi on, surfed the web and posted status updates on social networks, on top of the usual calling and messaging.

The Samsung Galaxy S is available exclusively from SingTel at $0 to $768 with contract, depending on the type of plan. MAY CHUA


Smartphone Review: Samsung Galaxy S
by May Chua
05:55 AM Jul 02, 2010

http://www.todayonline.com/Tech/Techreviews/EDC100702-0000046/Shooting-to-a-promising-start