Samsung Galaxy i7500
Stellar Android performance?
Review HTC may have done it first, but now the Androids are starting to come thick and fast. Motorola got in early with the Dext, and all the major manufacturers are planning their own entry into Android land.
Samsung's Galaxy: Android for the mainstream?
The Samsung Galaxy is the Korean giant's first attempt and turns out to be a well specced, slimline, glossy black number similar on the surface to its earlier Jet. It boasts an OLED touchscreen, 5Mp camera, HSDPA 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS and an impressive 8GB of onboard memory.
One of the great things about Android - which, lest we forget, is still in its early stages - is that it should be endlessly configurable. It's fully open for developers to tweak, adjust and improve wherever they feel it to be necessary. HTC has given us a taste of the possibilities with the Sense UI in the Hero, and Motorola took social networking a stage further with Motoblur.
But despite charming us with its TouchWiz interface in the past, Samsung appears to have done very little with the basic Android UI.
There has been no attempt at social networking integration à la HTC and Motorola, though you can of course download apps for Facebook, Twitter and others from the Android Market. All the basic Android elements are present and correct, however, including the varied widgets which you can drag from the menu onto any of the three home pages - you access each by brushing your thumb across the screen - and the drop-down notifications window, which you call up by pulling your thumb down from the top of the screen.
Samsung hasn't customised the Android UI
We rather thought that Samsung would have done a mash-up with its own TouchWiz widgets replacing some of the Android versions, but that hasn't happened. Yet.
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COMMENTS
Is this the first Android phone supporting WCDMA 850?
I've noticed that these reviews never include the supported WCDMA frequencies - OK all phones are now quad-band GSM - but if one is interested in using a phone on a particular network (Telstra NextG / WCDMA 850 in Australia in my case) it is useful to know which frequencies are supported.
In this case, a bit of looking around suggests that this one is WCDMA: 850/900/2100 (Tri-Band) - does this make it the first Android handset supporting 850 WCDMA?
Please add supported frequencies in reviews in future.
Galaxy
I've had one for a while now, and after being a lifelong Nokia user I'm loving it.
To answer a couple of questions, it's Android 1.5. Latest rumours suggest that Samsung will be skipping 1.6 and releasing 2.0 in Q1 2010 (I believe this is the same for the HTC Hero, although there are unofficial 1.6 firmwares available for that so I've heard).
The "sync notification" alert tone mentioned in the article can be turned off in the settings menu, the headphones one I don't know, I've not tried.
Yes the Samsung NPS software is crap and doesn't really work apart from to update the phone, but as someone has already pointed out, contacts and calendar etc. is synced with your google account anyway. So there's no need for the app's sync features. You can of course still access the SD card on your computer as a removable disk too.
Camera crap? Well, yes. But that's the same for all the current crop of Android phones, but I think it's OK, certainly in daylight.
Poor battery life? Not for me, I've had over 100 hours between charging and the phone was still at 30%. If you've got background data syncing, wifi, gps, loads of twittering facespace widgets updating every 10 minutes then yes, it's not going to last long.
One possible cause for the big battery drain is apparently if you're using the frankly terrible case that samsung provide with the phone. It keeps the camera button pressed down and prevents the phone from going to sleep.
Do I regret getting it? Not so far, so long as Samsung continue to provide updates to last my 18 month contract period I'll be happy. The HTC offerings do seem to have better support though.
With more and more manufacturers releasing Android phones I think things can only get better.
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