Samsung has delivered its own little green robot into theworld. That's right, smart-phone fans, the company's first Android handset, the Galaxy i7500, has been born. Samsunghas given it some of the features it does best, like a vivid AMOLED screen anda good-quality camera, but it's left Android pretty much alone. The result is aphone that feels like an improved version of the HTC Magic, but doesn't flywith the eagles like the HTC Hero.
Samsung Galaxy I7500
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Galaxy is only available on a contract from O2. You can get it for free on a £44.05-per-month,18-month contract or a £39.15-per-month, 24-month contract. You can also pick it up for around £440 SIM-free.
Look into my screen
The crowning glory of the Galaxy is its screen, which is brightand vivid, with satisfyingly deep blacks. Unlike with the Hero, whose screenseems to sit slightly below the surface of the glass, the Galaxy's display iswonderfully in-your-face. The colours are so bright and saturatedthat they sometimes seem slightly inaccurate, but we'll trade accuracy forblinding good looks any day.
We only wish Samsung had stuck the beautiful screeninto a better-looking body, although, at 12mm thick, it is pleasingly slim. For us,the layout of the keys, with their thin, chrome trim, looks old-school --and not in a good way. The all-over black plastic is pretty boring. We also found it odd that the menu key is labelled with a cryptic icon rather than the standard 'menu', and the home button is small and wedged between the back and end-call keys.
The five-waynavigation key isn't as groovy-looking as HTC's trackball, and takes up moreroom, although you may prefer it if you have big, clumsy, sausage-like fingers. It alsodoesn't glow and flash seductively like the trackball, but maybe thistoned-down appearance will appeal to users with more conservative tastes.
AMOLED screens are meant to suck less battery juice than LEDscreens, and Samsung promises up to 390 minutes of talk time with the Galaxy. The company doesn't specify whether it means 3G or 2G talk time, though. The Magic claims to provide up to 450 hours of talk time on 2G and 400 hours on 3G, but, in our long-termtest, we found the Magic barely makes it through a day without requiring charging. Stay tuned for our long-term test of the Galaxy's battery life --we'll find out if it's really worse than the Magic or if it's just more modestwith its claims.
Flash and go
The Galaxy is the first Android phone to offer an LED photo light, to go with its 5-megapixel camera. It's the best camera we've seen on an Androidphone, but it's still can't compete with that of a great camera phone, like the SonyEricsson C903 Cyber-shot. In good light, its photos are sharp and clear,although whites look rather grey. The LED light makes a brave stab at illuminating dark shots, but it only works well when objects are close byand you keep a very steady hand.
We weren't as impressed with the video taken by the Galaxy. It looks jerky because of its low frame rate and bright lightisn't handled well. But most mobile phones suffer from these problems, so they certainlywouldn't put us off choosing the Galaxy.
There's plenty of room for photos and video on the Galaxy's 8GBof on-board memory, with support for 32GB more via a microSD card bay. You canalso stuff music on there, and the Galaxy has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack,so you can listen to your tunes on your own cans -- something we always love.
Keyboard complaints
We're not fans of Samsung's keyboard design in general, and the Galaxy'sis a disappointment. We'd rather use the keyboard on the inexpensive,pay-as-you-go T-Mobile Pulse Android phone than the one on the Galaxy. Asusual, Samsung has stuck in too many rarely used keys, like one for switchinglanguages, and the keyboard covers much of the screen. But Samsung hasn't includedeasy shortcuts for entering numbers, such as the Hero and Pulse benefit from.
Nevertheless, compared to its Android competitors, theGalaxy's soft keyboard isn't difficult to type on, although it's not asresponsive as that of the current king of on-screen typing, the iPhone 3GS. When wetyped very fast on the Galaxy, it did a good job of reading all our keystrokes,and the predictive text is accurate and helpful. It's too bad that the keyboard's so ugly.
The responsiveness of the keyboard is echoed throughoutthe phone's user interface, which is snappy and a pleasure to use. The brightAMOLED capacitive touchscreen is a delight to tap, and menus and applicationsall pop up promptly.
Untouched Android
With the keyboard leaving us cold, we're happy to see that Samsung hasn't tweaked the Android operating system in any other noticeableway. The Galaxy may not have the social-networking bells and whistles of the Heroor MotorolaDext, but the user interface of vanilla-flavoured Android is good enough toget us through the night.
If you crave more than the features that come in the box,you have access to the Android Market, which is packed with great apps that cangive the phone new powers, from harnessing the infinite jukebox of Spotify to becoming a Skypephone. Many of the apps are free, and, although they don't tend to be quite asslick as the apps available for the iPhone, the Android Market wins points forgiving developers more leeway for creativity.
Unfortunately, Android doesn't support multi-touch withoutsome tweaking, and Samsung's done no tweaking in this regard. That means Galaxy dwellerswon't have the pleasure of pinching their fingers to zoom into a Web page orphoto, as you can on the Hero. Instead, they'll have to tap at zoom-in and zoom-out buttons on the screen, which isn't as instinctive or as accurate a method.
Conclusion
The Samsung Galaxy i7500 can march down the main street of Android Ville with its headheld high, thanks to its stunning AMOLED screen, 5-megapixel camera with LEDlight, 8GB of on-board memory, and snappy, responsive user interface. But, withthe bog-standard version of Android on-board, we missed the HTC Hero's bells and whistles, such as multi-touch capability. Based on the poor keyboarddesign, though, we're probably fortunate that Samsung has pretty much left Android alone. The Galaxyfeels like a tricked-out HTC Magic with less attractive looks, but it's a solid smart phone that we'd be happy toshow off.
Edited by Charles Kloet