Samsung Galaxy S I9000 Review

Hey Guys,

This is my first Review on TE, so pls pardon me if there any mistakes or goofups. :eek:hyeah:

Samsung Galaxy S or HTC Desire or Google Nexus One ? ooops..... after all the confusion and long wait, finally based on reviews and other users experience and feedbackS I decided to buy a Samsung GALAXY S and thanks to a friend, I manged to get hold of the phone for 26.5k in Bangalore. :D

Package and Contents :

with all the excitement i unboxed the Galaxy S package and I noticed that the phone looked really thin. I held the phone in my hand and it felt incredibly light. the phone

weighs 119g and for such feature packed phone it is shockingly light weight.

What's in the box:

* Phone

* Battery

* Charger

* USB Cable

* User Guide/Warranty

* Headphones

* Leather Pouch

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Design and keyboard

The hardware design of Galaxy S, reminds me of the iPhone 3G. It looks similar in some ways. On the top you will find the USB charging port and a headphone jack. On the left you will find the volume slider. On the right you will find the power button. On the front of the phone there is a secondary camera (for Video Calling) on the top, and three buttons on the bottom. The first button is the context menu button, the second button lets you select or exit an app, or multi-task, and the third button on the right is the back

button.

Galaxy S doesn't come with a physical keyboard but the Onscreen keyboards are really great, typing is a treat on this phone, Samsung has included a QWERTY Keyboard along with the new SWYPE keyboard which is amazing. You will never use any other keyboard after you start using Swype.

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Display and Camera

As soon as you turn the phone ON the Captivate’s 480×800 Super AMOLED Display will blow you away, the sheer contrast and brightness of the screen will amaze you,c the Super

AMOLED screen on Galaxy S is one of the brightest and clearest display that you’ll find on any smartphone currently, I have no idea how it fares when compared with the iPhone 4

Retina Display since i havent used an iPhone 4 but trust me Super AMOLED screen is Fantastic, and it also reduces battery consumption by 20-30%. Watching movies, photos and browsing web on this phone is a visual treat. Even with the lowest brightness settings display is crystal clear and very much visible outdoors.

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The Galaxy S is equipped with a 5 Megapixel camera with Auto-focus, Touch-focus, smile and face detection and Geo-tagging. Shockingly the camera does not come with a flash, which is one of the major drawbacks of such a great phone. The photos captured under daylight were pretty impressive but not great, however for outdoor daylight shooting this phone captures excellent photos.

Another major highlight of Galaxy S is the 720p HD Video recording, You get 720p footage with 30fps video recording, which is pretty nice and comes out very clear. Checkout youtube for sample videos.

Multimedia

The Galaxy S comes with a huge 16GB Internal memmory and also supports utpto 32GB External memory which is a great option to store all your fav Music Albums, Videos and Movies.

During video playback the contrast ratios are deep, the fluidity superb, and scrolling through the video at high speed is a breeze thanks to the 1GHz processor. Samsung has included its SRS virtual 5.1 Surround Sound on the Galaxy S and this improves sound quality noticeably when switched on. This phone support most of the video formats including DivX, XviD & mkv. 720p HD Video playback is flawless and a pleasure to watch.

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The Audio output and quality of Galaxy S is downright impressive. music playback on loudspeaker was pretty loud, however i was not happy with the In ear headphones included, so i switched back to my iPod headphones with this phone.

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Samsung has also included a FM radio with RDS, user interface and setting up channels were pretty easy, however Unfortunately, the FM radio tuner is mono-only no support for stereo playback.

Operating System and Battery

Galaxy S comes with pre loaded with Android Eclair 2.1 operating System, however i decided to update to 2.2 Froyo firmware which is even better. The OS performance is very smooth and stable thanks to Samsung's ARM Cortex A8 1GHz processor. The device comes with the Samsung's own TouchWiz user interface which not as bad as people project it to be but still not as good as HTC Sense UI. The Android Market is already very popular which is very similar to App Store and has tons of Applications and Games for download. Setting up your Email, Contacts, Calender is very simple as u just need to Sync your phone with Google server and google will take care of the rest. Since i don't use GPS did not get a chance to test it, Wifi and Edge connectivity was top notch.

Battery performance and backup is a huge concern among the smartphone users, most of the Smartphones have great features but battery consumption gets annoying most of the time, however Galaxy S comes with a 1500 mAh battery which does a excellent job and it did exceed my expectations. with Two hours of Calls, One hour Video and Music Playback, One hour Browsing on Edge and Wifi, running few games and Application for an hour the phone still manged to hold 35-40 Juice at the end of the day which is very impressive.

Drawbacks and Conclusion

Such a brilliant phone does come with few drawbacks which Samsung missed on releasing a near perfect phone, One of the major drawback which i have already mentioned is NO Flash with the Camera (i still cant figure out why Samsung decided not to include flash with the Camera :( ), another disappointing factor is the build quality which could have been much better for such a expensive device.

Overall this phone is very impressive and I am very much satisfied with the Purchase and infact this is the best Smartphone I have used after iPhone 3Gs and undoubtedly the best Android device out there in the Market.

Checkout the Detailed Samsung Galaxy S Specifications here :hap2:

Samsung I9000 Galaxy S - Full phone specifications

Thanks for reading. :)

please do leave your feedback.
 
Very good review. Just saw this Galaxy S the other day with my friend.
Besides being thin, it is also wide. Kind of resembled the HD 2. And yes
the screen was super sexy and the capacitive screen was very
responsive.
 
Good review...short and to the point :)

You could also mention about the lag and GPS issues...both of which are solvable using third party hacks.
Lag - definitely - GPS - not so sure..anyways I don't use the GPS very much so didnt find it much of a trouble yet.
 
arvnd said:
Good review...short and to the point :)

You could also mention about the lag and GPS issues...both of which are solvable using third party hacks.

Lag - definitely - GPS - not so sure..anyways I don't use the GPS very much so didnt find it much of a trouble yet.
yeah as i mentioned in my review, even i dont use GPS so was not able to test... infact i am not sure how to test GPS accuracy and performance...

very rarely i use Google maps which does a pretty decent job...

yes there seems to be lag with GPS location locking
 
Only thing missing in review is the information about web browser performance. With froyo it should be able to support Flash 10 I guess? Hows the performance with live streaming sites likes ustream and justin.tv ? Laggy, decent or perfect?
 
arjun123 said:
Only thing missing in review is the information about web browser performance. With froyo it should be able to support Flash 10 I guess? Hows the performance with live streaming sites likes ustream and justin.tv ? Laggy, decent or perfect?
oh yeah forgot about the browser performance.... will add...

on froyo i tested fews sites with flash and worked very well... didnt experience any lag though
 
A Good review.....

But i have decided not to go to Gala S due to lack of flash

Waiting for HTC Desire HD
 
built quality made me lean towards desire but samsung has a Jewell... i5700 and i7500 were better looking and built though .. next iteration would be to watch out for
 
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