Samsung Galaxy S i9000

This multimedia capable smartphone packs a punch but is priced much higher than its able sibling Samsung Wave

 

 

Thin and pocketable, classy design, best screen on a phone till date, plays HD videos along with DivX/Xvid directly, powerful hardware ensures smooth operation of Android 2.1, thoughtful UI customizations

No camera LED flash, GPRS connectivity issue, no camera shutter button, average battery life on heavy use

Samsung have been constantly trying to better its touchscreen phones ever since they took up the concept. And boy, what a notable evolution they've traced!

The Samsung Galaxy S is also referred to as the i9000. This tells us that Samsung has done away with their "Omnia" moniker for premium segment models, and have instead gone for numbers. If you look at the last three generations of Samsung touchphones, there have been a few milestone changes. Like the transition from LCD to AMOLED to Super AMOLED screens and from Windows Mobile to Symbian to Android operating systems.

The Galaxy S is late to the race of the Rs. 30,000 something, iPhone competing, Android laden smartphones. Here, phones like the Nexus One/HTC Desire, Motorola Milestone and Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 have already penetrated the market. But it seems like Sammy had been prepping real hard to deliver quite a knockout contender. Read on to find more about how good the Samsung Galaxy S really is.

Design and Build

The first time I pulled the Galaxy S out of my pocket in public, many people mistakenly identified it as an iPhone. I can't blame them, the finish and metallic rim on top definitely seems "inspired". But the Galaxy S is a beauty in its own unique way. The smooth surface texture and rounded corners are aesthetically pleasing. And damn, this thing is slim! Despite bearing a huge screen, the phone's 9.9 mm thickness makes sure that the phone doesn't feel bulky at any point of time. It slipped into my jeans pocket quite easily. And for a device packing so many goodies, a weight of just 120 grams is awesomely light. All in all, the device is a head turner in terms of looks, while not compromising on ergonomics. The body feels fairly sturdy. The textured back cover reminded me of the one on the Samsung Jet.

It's got this slightly protruding chin (or butt, in this case) at the back of the device. The phone is minimalistic in terms of buttons -- there's a power/lock to the right, volume controls to the left and the menu/home/back keys on the face. The less used Search button seen on other Android phones is not present here, but you can press and hold the menu key to deliver the same effect. The top is occupied by a microUSB and a 3.5mm headphone jack in that slender body. One button we missed not having is the camera shutter. I personally would like it more to take precise snaps instead of tapping the screen.

OK, I can't hold it in any longer. Let me talk about the screen now. The Galaxy S has a Super AMOLED screen; the same technology we witnessed on the Samsung Wave. But while the Wave's screen measured a reasonable 3.3 inches, this phone has a huge 4-inch display bearing an 800 x 480 pixel resolution. All these specifications led to what we can describe in two words as a 'visual orgasm'. I'll take the privilege of stating that it is the best screen we've seen on a phone till date.

The screen looks fantastic and crisp. So much so that I had to choose a single color tone wallpaper because the vivid ones served as a distraction while reading the shortcuts on the homescreen. Other than the 'super' output, Super AMOLED also serves another advantage; better sunlight legibility. In our experience, even with bright sunlight the text on the screen was fairly visible. Not as clear as one would desire, but definitely better than before. It also offers excellent touch response. Every activity, from typing to multi-touch pinch zooming, was quite accurate and on par with the iPhone 3GS's experience, if not better. The size is great for reading through websites or e-mail, as well as videos and photos. There's a good quality front facing camera as well, along with the ambient light sensor (which we missed in the Wave) and a proximity sensor. 

The speakerphone at the back is just about loud to hear phonecalls and other audio in a silent environment. But in a noisy area, it isn't mighty enough. It is not as loud or clear as the Samsung Wave's speaker. But I guess these are compromises you have to bear with for a phone this slim. But one compromise that we weren't willing to adjust easily was the lack of an LED flash. C'mon Samsung, even the adamant Apple finally succumbed to put one in their iPhone 4. It's quite useful during photography and videography in the dark. A single-bulb LED would've been sufficient, like the one on the Wave.

Overall, we only had a thing or two to complain about the design of this phone. Otherwise, the phone is just perfect; it radiates a feeling of class, status as well as uber-style. 

The Galaxy S runs Google's fairly recent (if not latest) Android 2.1 OS. Like most others, Samsung too has added a dash of its own custom UI overlay called TouchWIZ. But their changes aren't as drastic as HTC's Sense UI. These are more simplistic and done with functionality in mind. There are 7 homescreens for you to splatter widgets all over. You've got extra ones for weather, finance and news. You've got Facebook and Twitter feeds integrated into a widget on the homescreen. They've got that whole contact integration thing but it ended up with multiple entries of the same person. There's an option to manually link a contact to other entries, which would be rather tedious though.

The basic Google apps are all there and plus you've got a couple of extras. Some are quite useful, like a File Manager (probably the first I've seen on an Android phone), an Apple iBooks 'look-alike' e-book reader, MS Office/PDF viewer etc. The e-book reader can read and import books in the popular ePub format, and has a store where you can download copyright-free books without paying any extra.

There are some really nifty features like smart-dialing, advanced mobile tracker, 3G internet sharing over Wi-fi, wirelessly streaming media to other devices (DLNA) etc. The mobile tracker not only lets you know of new SIM cards via an SMS, but also lets you remotely lock/wipe/track your phone from their website. A good feature to have for an expensive device like this. We tried sharing internet over Wi-fi, and while our laptop detected the phone as a 'Wi-fi router' and connected to it, we weren't able to surf the net. This is because it apparently supports internet sharing only on 3G networks and here in India, well...forget it (sigh). But this a cool feature to have where 3G connectivity is available.

What's the use of that gorgeous screen if you can't play back vivid content on it, right? Samsung has fantastically delivered on that front. Their earlier phones like the Jet were already capable of playing DivX/XviD files directly without the need for conversion or down-scaling, but this phone takes it one level further. The Galaxy S is a DivX HD certified device. Yes, it can play back 720p HD videos directly; just drag and drop from your PC. We tried playing a few 720p MKV files and it did play them with a viewable frame rate. Plus with a screen like that, the Galaxy S is one heck of a video player. This feature actually trumps many of the dedicated PMPs in the market, rendering them almost useless.

The music player is also slick; much better than Android's regular offering. It even has a equalizer setting with presets and an 8-band custom EQ setting too. Our experience with the preset settings wasn't great, since the sound levels kept wavering. But a custom EQ setting fixed that. There's also 5.1 channel surround, but its available only via earphones. During music playback, it didn't really enhance our experience in any way. But while watching movies, it did make the output a little clearer, so we liked it here.

Web browsing was a smooth experience. Fonts were big and readable, the pinch-zooming gesture worked as well as it does on the iPhone. Typing was an easy and accurate. You can either choose from a QWERTY or num-pad with T9 in portrait mode, which we think is cool for one-handed input. Thanks to the good display width and well-designed key-mat, typing on the QWERTY in portrait was accurate too. The landscape keyboard is even easier and better for a lot of typing. Another unique feature is the Swype text input. Once you get used to it, you could type as fast on Swype with one hand, as you could tap using your thumbs. Watch the video here.


Performance

The network reception was pretty good. In our office basement, where most phones quickly lose signal, the Galaxy S could latch on to a phone call a little longer. Call clarity was up to the mark. The person on the other end reported my voice to be fairly clear. But we had a major issue with the GPRS internet connectivity. Every time I ended up in a no-network area and came out of it, the phone reception would get back on track but the GPRS would remain disconnected. Turning the phone in and out of flight mode didn't do much good. So my only fix was to restart the phone to get it working again; an irritating experience if you frequent no-signal areas time and again. Also, if I walked into a no-network area while talking, the call would disconnect but it still showed the call as 'Connected' on screen. I couldn't disconnect it, or make new phone calls as the phone thought I was still on that call. Again, a proper restart was the only way I could get this thing working again.

Samsung provides a pair of in-earphones with the package. They're decent, though not as good as my Creative EP-630s, but for casual listening they are fine. The 5 megapixel camera sensor placed at the back does not have a lens cover. The camera menu has a multitude of features like Beauty shot, Smile shot, Anti-shake, Blink detection etc -- all of which worked as advertised.

The daylight picture quality is good. Pictures look great on the screen, mainly because of its AMOLED nature. But expectedly, the camera suffers during night photography, where without the LED flash the pictures turn out to be grainy. It supports 720p video recording and captures video at a smooth frame rate.

Our model came with 16GB of on-board memory. You can expand further using a microSD card. Over the USB data cable, 1 GB worth songs transferred in four-and-a-half minutes. A 700 MB video file transferred much faster in a little over a minute. So, swapping data takes place at a decent pace.

Battery Life

It isn't rocket science to figure out that a phone power-packed with features is going to need some serious juice inside the hood. Samsung tried all it could by giving a 1500 mAh removable battery. When used with moderate usage, I got around a day's life. This included a couple of hours of phonecalls, music playback, a little e-mail and web browsing. A one-day battery life is fine, actually acceptable, since most touchscreen phones last for this long on an average.

But if you are a power user wanting to abuse each and every feature, then I gotta warn you. In another instance, I did more than an hour of web browsing, multi-tasked with GPS usage on Google Maps and music playback. That, with an hour of phone-calls, and the battery died in between the 14th and 15th hour. Same was the case when I was using Wi-fi on the phone once. I could see the battery meter falling fast. So, I infer that the battery life is just about decent. If you want to use this phone heavily, make sure you have a wall charger nearby every now and then (or keep a spare battery).  


Price and Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy S i9000 is being sold for Rs. 28,000. It joins the list of those Rs. 30,000 mega-phones (as I like to call them) mentioned at the start of the review. The Nexus One will still be the preferred choice for people who want the latest version of the Android OS first. But with the others, the Galaxy S has completely changed the game. For one, it has virtually rendered the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 useless. With its Super AMOLED screen, HD video playback/recording, Android 2.1, FM Radio etc., there are just too many reasons why one would choose the Galaxy S over the XPERIA X10.

We were satisfied with what the Galaxy S i9000 offered. But a couple of software issues, like the GPRS disconnection, need to be addressed immediately. If you're looking for a good multi-media capable smartphone, then this phone won't disappoint. But if capturing photos and videos is your first priority, then the Galaxy S isn't the best. You'd probably want to wait for Nokia's N8. At Rs. 28,000, it is two or three thousand rupees cheaper than other mega-phones. I would ideally want to call it value for money but the launch of the Samsung Wave actually put a big doubt in my mind. If you compare spec-by-spec, there aren't many differences between the Wave and the Galaxy S. The Galaxy S does better than its younger brother with a thinner design, almost an inch bigger screen (although of the same Super AMOLED type and bearing the same resolution), and the Android OS, which is Open Source, so there's no cost to be paid to Google.

So if internally these two are so similar, why does the Wave sell for Rs. 18,000, while the Galaxy S for Rs. 10,000 more? Perhaps, this is because it can trump many phones that cost Rs. 30,000 and above, so it deserves to be sold at that price. So, are we paying more money just for that touch of class and exclusivity when it could have been sold for a little cheaper?