Samsung Galaxy S i9000 (with Video)

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Samsung Galaxy S i9000 (with Video)

Rohan Naravane, Jul 20, 2010 1340 hrs IST

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

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User Interface

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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.