Samsung Galaxy S - Review

“Film and photo buffs will love the 4in screen on the Galaxy S. The smartphone also has plenty of top-notch features and runs on Google’s popular Android operating system”

Samsung Android smartphone

The large 4in touchscreen looks great

The Samsung Galaxy S smartphone was designed to rival Apple’s iPhone 4. So how do the two compare?

Samsung went all out in the looks department, fitting the Galaxy S with a huge 4in touchscreen that, aside from screaming “watch videos on me”, made reading text and viewing pictures a joy.

The Galaxy S is also extremely light - just 119g, compared to the iPhone 4’s somewhat hefty 137g.

Although the Samsung smartphone’s plastic back felt a little cheap, I soon forget that upon discovery of the removable battery and slot for Micro SD memory cards lurking underneath it.

Galaxy S also has either 8GB or 16GB of onboard storage - depending on which model you buy. So there’s plenty of storage space for photos, videos, documents and apps.

Galaxy S is predominantly based on Google’s Android operating system (OS), though elements of Samsung’s own Bada OS (which runs on the Samsung Wave) were noticeable because they felt out of keeping with the phone’s high-end Android features.

Apps can download from Samsung’s own and very basic app store, or from Android Market. Lots of useful apps also come pre-installed on the smartphone.

One such app is Layer: an augmented reality app which, thanks to the smartphone’s 4in screen, made finding out what was around me (coffee shops, restaurants, museums, etc) really straightforward.

Augmented reality apps

Galaxy S is extreamly light

Another app called AllShare is designed to help you share content (videos, pictures, files, etc) between the Samsung smartphone and other devices, including your laptop and TV.

I never managed to get the feature working properly, but other Galaxy S users have since told me it works well after a little technical tinkering.

The smartphone’s large screen made using Google Maps easy. Though I pined for the iPhone 4’s digital compass feature which makes using Google Maps more intuitive.

Samsung’s own web browser comes as standard on the Galaxy S and offers plenty of customisation in the way webpages are accessed and viewed.

Shortcuts for sharing webpage links over email, Facebook, Bluetooth, etc proved handy. The phone also supports flash - a feature that the iPhone 4 lacks.

Sadly the smartphone’s 5Mp camera left me a little disappointed. The camera appeared to take clear images, but when I viewed them on a PC screen they looked quite grainy and sub-par (check out the sample camera image below).

A flash for brightening-up dark shooting conditions (as featured on the iPhone 4) would have been nice, too. The phone’s various pre-set shooting conditions (Portrait, Night, Candlelight, etc) made little-to-no improvement.

Google Maps

Pictures were OK, but not great

The good quality of videos captured by the Galaxy S really impressed me though, with the camera shooting videos at various resolutions up to 1280 x 720 pixels.

On occasions when my laptop went beyond the range of a wi-fi signal, a “wireless tethering” app on the Galaxy S came to the rescue by transforming the phone into a portable modem that let my laptop connect to the internet via the smartphone using my 3G data allowance.

The music player on Galaxy S was pretty basic, I felt. The phone also only comes with a pair of low quality earphones that I quickly swapped for my own, more comfortable and better sounding pair.

After a full day’s worth of testing the Galaxy S had a small amount of battery life left. This impressed me given how much I had actually done with the phone.

But a second day of watching endless hours of videos on the gorgeous screen did drain the battery pretty quickly.