Although Samsung is second largest mobile phone maker, their smartphone market share has a different story to tell. Needless to say, Samsung is serious about gaining on that front too, which is why they’ve introduced Galaxy S. We spent considerable time with the device and this is what we think.
Galaxy S runs on Android and if we go by its specs, it blows most of the current breed of smartphones off its feet.
Some of its distinguishing features are its 1GHz CPU, 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, 5MP camera with 720p video recording.
Package Contents
Galaxy S’ package contents include the handset, an AC adapter, USB data cable, a 3.5mm headset, warranty card and a quick start guide.
Design and Construction
The Galaxy S could be easily termed as one of the best looking phones in the market. The first thing that attracts is its huge screen and when you get over the awe of the 4-inch Super AMOLED display, the next noticeable thing is its weight and thickness. Despite packing some serious hardware components, the Galaxy S is 9.9mm thick and manages to keep the weight down to just under 120grams (118grams to be exact), mainly due to the usage of plastic. Now we don’t mind the high-quality plastic found in the Galaxy S but a bit more of metal (and few extra grams) wouldn’t hurt. Also, the plastic is glossy, which means it’s a fingerprint magnet.
Overall, Galaxy S’ design is clean with very less physical buttons on the phone. The only buttons you’d find on the phone are a center menu button with two touch-sensitive buttons on the front side, a power button on the right and a volume rocker button the left. There’s also a 3.5mm earphone jack and a USB port on the top side.
Display
Galaxy S’ display is one of its unique selling points. It’s the world’s first phone with a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen. Super AMOLED screens are said to be superior than AMOLED and conventional TFTs and integrates the AMOLED display, glass and the touch sensor on a single sheet, making it cost effective and power saving. Super AMOLEDs are also touted to have an improved readability under direct sunlight and has a color reproducibility of 110% with a contrast ratio of 10,000:1.
Galaxy S’ display supports a maximum resolution of 800×480 (WVGA) and produces rich colors that not only works great indoors but under direct sunlight as well. The screen supports anti-smudge technology that keeps the touchscreen display free from fingerprints. Now it may sound more of a marketing gimmick but the anti-smudge does work. No matter how much you use the screen, the fingerprints are hard to notice (unless you see it directly under light).
The screen supports multi-touch input and as far as screen responsiveness goes, the capacitive touchscreen is very sensitive.
Check out the pictures (more in the gallery below) where it goes head-to-head with an LCD-equipped iPod touch. Despite a change in viewing angle, Galaxy S gives the same level of viewing pleasure.
We also tested the screen outdoors and it gave decent readability although with some color loss, which is understandable.
User Interface
Samsung Galaxy S runs the latest version of TouchWiz aka the TouchWiz 3.0 and frankly, it is much better than the previous versions. You shouldn’t be surprised if you think it reminds you of iPhone because some of the design elements are similar to Apple’s offering.
Nevertheless, a user can unlock the phone by a single swipe across the screen or if you’ve got some pending SMS or missed calls, a jigsaw puzzle forms on the screen allowing you to fill in the puzzle piece and take you directly to the SMS inbox or call logs.
Galaxy S supports multiple home screens and Samsung allows you to keep up to 7 different home screens. One good thing about home screens is that you can delete additional home screens if you want but the bad thing is that if you use many home screens, you’ll have to side-scroll many times because the extreme left home screen acts as a default one.
Just like every other Android phone, users have the liberty to add an application shortcut onto the home screen by long pressing the app icon or users can go with interactive widgets.
Galaxy S gives users to install Android or Samsung widgets. Eight Samsung widgets come pre-installed like the Daily Briefing, Buddies Now, Feeds and Updates etc. Daily Briefing is a mash up of four things – weather, news, stock and scheduler. Buddies Now give a nice carousel-like interface showing your friends from contacts, displaying their latest status message and allowing them to call or message. Feeds and Updates works in a similar way to Buddies Now but takes all social networking updates from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace and show in a unified way sans the calling option.
Social Hub as the name goes is a centralized area to organize all your social networking accounts. It brings all your Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, email and SMS accounts under one window for easy access. However, unlike bada that opens a dedicated app while accessing Facebook and Twitter from Social Hub, the Social Hub on Android redirects it to their respective mobile sites.
On a positive note, accounts synced on the phone retrieves all social networking contacts and displays their recent social networking activity while calling them. The calendar from social networking sites are also synced with the phone.
Calls
Receiving and making calls on Galaxy S wasn’t much of a hassle. The audio quality was great and the interface makes it really easy for users to connect. For instance, swiping on the right of a contact would instantly dial the contact or swiping it on the left of the contact’s name will allow you to type a message.
Performance
Galaxy S’ another highlight is its choice of processor. It features Samsung’s in-house developed Hummingbird CPU running at a clock speed of 1GHz and PowerVR GPU. Galaxy S is zippy most of the times but in some cases, the phone lagged before executing the next command.
Galaxy S comes with PowerVR GPU and it arguably produces the best graphics you’d see in a smartphone. The phone handles graphic-intensive games with ease showing no signs of dropping frames. A small test by Neocore proved that it gives about 55fps, higher than most Android phones in the market today.
Keyboard
I type a lot on the phone and thus, prefer a phone with a physical keyboard to a touch-only one. Now Galaxy S does not have any but it does have Swype. Swype is an on-screen QWERTY keyboard that allows users to type by swiping on the touchscreen. If you’re wary about such a keyboard’s typing functionality, let me acquaint you with this Guinness World Record created by Swype on a Samsung device for fastest typing on a touchscreen.
Here’s a short video about how I type swype with just one finger.
Multimedia
Let’s talk about Galaxy S’ multimedia prowess. The phone has a built-in music and a video player that played most of the files we threw at it. The music playback quality is good when heard from the loudspeaker present at the back and even on the in-ear earphones. One advantage listening from earphones is that it gives the option to activate 5.1 surround sound.
One eye candy feature of the music player is that when you hold it horizontally, the accelerometer detects the orientation and activates an interface showing albums (or songs) on a music CD. Think of it as Cover Flow for Galaxy S. However, if music CD interface is not your liking, tap on the top of the screen and you’re greeted with a jog dial showing songs A-Z.
Another good thing is that music can be controlled even if the phone is in a locked state. The volume rocker can be used to adjust volume whereas dragging down the half-visible CD reveals the current playing song along with music controls to pause, rewind or play the next song.
Galaxy S has a video player that handles all the leading formats with ease. It supports DivX, Xvid and MKV out of the box, which is a huge plus. It plays 720p HD videos without any issues.
Camera
The phone comes with a 5MP camera and frankly, there isn’t anything astounding about it. It captures decent still images in appropriate lighting conditions but whip your phone out in low-light, here is when the lack of camera flash is felt the most. There are a lot of different camera modes you can fiddle with – for instance, Smile Shot, Beauty Shot, Panorama (check the last sample image), Cartoon, Vintage etc. It also has touch focus, which means it will focus on a particular subject when touched on the screen and geotagging support.
On the video front, the camera supports 720p HD video recording at 30fps. The video recording quality is great but the video seemed to lag sometimes during playback. This seems to be a firmware issue and should be fixed with the next update.
Oh, and if a dedicated camera key is something you want in a camera phone, you’ll be disappointed to find there isn’t.
GPS
Galaxy S comes with a built-in GPS chip and it took around 6-9 minutes to get a GPS fix. If you’re looking for some navigation goodness, you can buy a navigation app from the Android market or there’s a free Google Navigation app but it works in some countries only.
Additionally, the phone is pre-bundled with Layar, an augmented reality app.
Samsung Apps
If you’re unaware, Samsung Apps is Samsung’s own App Store. It’s a good thing that a user gets another store to download apps from but the Samsung Apps Android repository is pretty dry at the moment. There were only five apps in the store to choose from.
Aldiko Ebook
Bookworms will be happy to know that Galaxy S comes pre-loaded with Aldikoebook application. I’m not an avid book reader but the brief experience with reading on Galaxy S’ 4-inch screen was good. You also get many free ebooks to choose and download from. The app supports ePub format so if you’ve downloaded it from somewhere else just copy the book in the phone and Aldiko will scan the book and import it to its library.
Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth 3.0
Galaxy S comes with the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios that ensures faster data transfer speeds, provided you have another hardware supporting the same generation.
Allshare
Galaxy S supports DLNA, which means it can stream multimedia content to and from DLNA-enabled devices. I tried out streaming movies and songs from my NAS and it worked like a charm.
Hotspot
This is another positive for the phone. Say you need to send an email from your laptop and you don’t have any Wi-Fi connectivity except the phone’s data connection. In such a situation, Galaxy S Wi-Fi AP feature comes to the rescue as it will help you to share your phone’s data connection with laptop over Wi-Fi.
You can also share the data connection via the USB cable.
TV-out
Galaxy S does not come with a TV-out cable but it does support TV-out functionality via its 3.5mm port. I tried out by hooking a Nokia cable and it worked as expected. Check out a small video outputting the phone’s content to the larger screen.
Battery
Galaxy S has a battery rated 1500mAh which has somewhat become a standard for most smartphones today. With an always-on data connection coupled with few hours of multimedia playback and bit of Wi-Fi, the phone lasted for around a day. However, don’t expect a day also if you’re hooked to playing games or continuously watch movies on its large screen.
Conclusion
Galaxy S has almost everything you seek in a smartphone. It gives you great multimedia support with business-centric features. No camera can be a deal breaker for few but you can’t deny the fact that it is one of the best Android phones available in the market today.
The Galaxy S currently retails for around Rs. 28,000 in India.