Samsung I9000 Galaxy S preview, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
Competition is certainly one of the things that make the Android OS so much fun. There are already several manufacturers involved in the Google OS game and each of them has already released a flagship that aims at the peak of the food chain.
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Samsung might be coming a tad late to the party but they are obviously entering with a bang. The I9000 Galaxy S packs a display of the greatest technology that the mobile world has ever seen and a pretty big one at that. A snappy 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU, HD video recording and a sweetly slim waistline make it look like the real deal in the eyes of every real geek.
Let’s take a look at the other features that the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S puts to the table.
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Samsung I9000 Galaxy S at a glance:
- General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/1900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar phone
- Dimensions: 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9 mm, 118 g
- Display: 4″ 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 480 x 800 pixels
- CPU: Samsung Cortex A8 Hummingbird 1 GHz processor
- OS: Android 2.1 (Eclair)
- Memory: 8/16GB storage, microSD card slot
- Camera: 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with face detection and touch focus; 720p video recording at 30fps
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack
- Misc: TouchWiz 3.0 UI, built-in accelerometer, multi-touch input, proximity sensor, Swype text input
As you can see the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S specs sheet is long enough to be considered high-end. What’s even better is that it manages to put something on top, namely the large 4” Super AMOLED display, which should become the new thing to beat if it has the performance of the Samsung S8500 Wave unit.
The TouchWiz-like Android customization still had some performance issues on the Galaxy Spica so we will have to see if those are fixed for the Galaxy S. We are also yet to check out how the new 1GHz Samsung Cortex A8 CPU compares to its Snapdragon peers in the Android environment, but we have a good feeling about it.
At any rate the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is a fine piece of mobile technology and we are as eager as you to see if it will actually manage to top the charts or end up in the chasing pack. So let’s not waste any more time and head to the hardware part of the preview where we’ll examine the Galaxy S ergonomics.
Android and the TouchWizard of Oz
The Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is the third Android phone by Samsung and the second to get the TouchWiz treatment. Compared to the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica, the transformation is more pronounced – and it’s better than vanilla Android. Ok, the changes may not change the user experience profoundly, but we just like to see new stuff and we’re already getting bored with Android looking almost the same on devices from different manufacturers.
The task switcher has been left untouched by the TouchWiz changes, but the notification area has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and sound toggles on top. These are quite handy when you need to turn on or off one of these features – no more digging through the Settings.
Even better – if there are no known Wi-Fi networks available, a notification appears that lets you pick a network. This makes connecting to any Wi-Fi network a breeze.
The lock screen has been TouchWizified as well – it offers the Smart Unlock functionality. It allows you to assign letters to certain apps – you can draw a ‘B’ on the lock screen and that will unlock the phone bring you straight to the browser.
Overall, the changes that TouchWiz brings to the table makes Android easier to use – the docked icons are the fastest way to launch the most commonly used apps, the toggles in the notifications area let you easily switch off unneeded features to save on battery usage, adding more homescreens only as you need them is better than having 5 (or 7 in, uh, certain UI mods) mostly empty screens. In short, we like what Samsung have done with the place.
We’re not using a finalized version of the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S for this preview but the interface is smooth and fast. There is no sign that the hardware is struggling with the software and the software spares no effort to animate each transition.
The applications work consistently well – from the camera through the gallery to the document viewer, everything feels very fluid. By the time the software is finalized everything should be running smooth as silk. Check out the video below and see for yourselves
Mind you, the lagging that may be noticed at times occurs when closing apps and isn’t anywhere to be seen when the app are actually running, which points to the fact that those have more to do with the early firmware version of our unit, rather than hardware limitations.
We ran the benchmarks on the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S but the finalized software might be more optimized so we won’t publish them just yet. The Galaxy S runs on a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor – Hummingbird – but when we put it head to head against the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 and its 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, the Galaxy S came out on top.
It won by a small margin, but still it won. The Samsung Galaxy Spica and HTC Legend turned in understandably lower results. We’ll have to see how the Galaxy S compares to another member in the 1GHz club – HTC Desire – but like we said, we’ll wait for the final version.
The HTC Legend is still unbeaten when it comes to graphics and the Samsung Galaxy Spica is ahead of the Galaxy S too – but keep in mind that they only need to update about a third of the pixels that the Galaxy S has to work with.
Text input, Android meets Swype
Text input is not usually a particularly exciting part of a preview but the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is different. It features an on-screen QWERTY keyboard by Swype in both portrait and landscape.
The way Swype works is instead of tapping on keys you sweep a finger across the keyboard. To “type” quick, you need to put a finger on the Q key and sweep over to U, then I, then C and all the way to K. There’s a visual trail that marks your finger movement across the keyboard.
It doesn’t matter if the trace goes over other keys, in fact you can’t help it. But Swype recognizes the word you intended to enter with surprising accuracy – it correctly guessed “xylophone” without breaking a sweat.
Swype is a novel way to type
The high precision means that even fast sweeps will be recognized correctly, so you can enter text very quickly and keep the error rate low at the same time. With shorter words, there might be several combinations possible – in that case Swype simply prompts you to pick which one you meant. It has a pretty big dictionary built-in, but you can teach it new words too (just type them out the regular way and it will store it for next time).
There’s an excellent tutorial, which shows you step by step how to do everything with Swype – capitalizing, punctuation, writing “soon” rather than “son” and a few other tricks.
Swype is very unobtrusive – it presents the user with a regular-looking QWERTY keyboard, on which you can type by tapping the keys the old-fashioned way. Swype is cool though once you get the hang of it.
We think that Swype is a great improvement over the regular virtual keyboard and we’d like to see it in more handsets. Most importantly though, it’s there if you like it – if not, you don’t even have to turn it off or anything. Just type instead of sweep.
Gallery impresses with 3D, disappoints with downsized images
The Samsung I9000 Samsung S gallery is identical to the one found on the Nexus One. It automatically locates the images and videos, no matter where they are stored. The gallery packs cool 3D effects and transitions, which we find rather attractive.
Images and videos placed in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder, which is very convenient – just like a file manager.
The different albums appear as piles of photos which reorganize in neat grids once selected.
The gallery certainly is a looker
Alternatively, you photos can be organized by date with the help of the toggle in the top right corner which switches between the grid view and another view, which separates photos into different piles, according to when they were taken.
In grid view, there’s a date slider, which can also be used to find photos taken on a certain date.
When you dig down into several sub-folders, you can use the use the tabs on the top of the screen to jump back several levels to the folder you need (similar to how, say, Explorer on Windows 7 works).
The gallery supports finger scrolling or panning so you can skip images without having to return to the default view. Just swipe to the left or to the right when looking at a photo in fullscreen mode and the previous/next image will appear.
The pinch-zooming is also available here thanks to the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S multi-touch support but you can also use double tap or even the +/- buttons.
Looking at a single photo
Strangely, you can’t zoom images up to 100% of their resolution. Obviously the gallery displays only downsized versions of your shots and you need to transfer them to a computer if you’re into pixel-peeping.
Video player eats DivX/XviD and 720p videos for breakfast
The Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is among the best performers in the Android family as far as video playback is concerned. In addition to packing a dedicated video player app (though playing videos through the gallery is still possible) it also has DivX and XviD video support, which is very rare in the Google OS family.
Performance with higher-res videos is great – it played 720p videos like a champ. Small wonder, considering it can record 720p videos. There’s no TV-Out but thanks to the DLNA support you can still stream videos and photos to your DLNA-enabled TV or media player (any PC with Wi-Fi and DLNA-capable software would do too).
The Galaxy S video player is the best Android has seen
The interface of the video player itself is as simple and as it could possibly be. You get a list of all videos available on the phone and the controls while playing a video boil down to play/pause and skip buttons, as well as a draggable progress bar.
Camera
Android is keeping out of the megapixel race and the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is no exception – it packs a 5MP camera, which seems to be the norm for higher end Androids. This one’s pretty bare though – no flash, not even a shutter key.
The user interface is standard Samsung for the most part – and that’s not a bad thing. It’s easily thumbable and offers readily accessible scenes and shooting modes. It features geo-tagging, face and smile detection too.
At first it appears that the lack of a dedicated shutter key and the virtual shutter key that’s not even half-pressable are to the detriment of the camera but once you get used to it, Samsung’s solution is very good.
You use the touch focus feature to focus on your subject and tap the shutter key – the camera auto-focus is among the fastest we’ve seen. This makes focusing on the subject (and possibly reframing the shot to observe the rule of thirds) by half-pressing the shutter obsolete. You frame the shot how you want it, focus on what you want and snap the photo – it takes some getting used to, but in the end it’s a great solution.
The image quality is not the best in the 5MP range. There’s a fair amount of noise in the photos and even though the image processing algorithms suppress it, they also smear out the fine detail.
Images are also slightly underexposed but at least there is no clipping in the shadows and highlights. Anyway, we’ll delay final judgment until we see the finalized version of the Samsung Galaxy S software – a few tweaks here and there could improve the quality.
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S camera samples
Video recording
The Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is in the elite club of mobile phones that captures 720p video.
Videos are captured in 1280 x 720 pixels resolution at 30 fps – unlike the Samsung i8910 OmniaHD and the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, which capture videos at 24fps. The amount of captured detail is good, noise levels are low – the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is a worthy replacement of those pocket HD cameras.
But there are still things in the software that need to be worked out – videos can run up as much as several megabytes per second of video. The data rate will probably be reduced to something more reasonable in the final version of the software.
We would like to apologize for the poor video sample that we are giving you below. Unfortunately due to some bug of our early pre-release unit most of the videos we took got accidentally deleted and this is the only one we have left. We will try to fix this as soon as possible and provide you with new video samples.
Final words
The Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is certainly a remarkable handset. Its software might need a bit more tuning before it hits the shelves but its hardware is already impressive enough.
Certainly having the best display in the business will attract quite a lot of customers by itself. Now add the HD video recording that the Galaxy S holds against its competitors and you get yourselves a pretty decent deal.
We wouldn’t go as far as saying that Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is the best Android handset just yet, but it’s certainly in contention for the throne. And if Samsung manages to polish up the already really nice TouchWiz UI before the Galaxy S gets released officially it will certainly become the handset to beat.
Even more, it’s expected that it will hit the market in about a month, which is even sooner than the Samsung Wave planned release. It will easily be your first opportunity to get yourself a SuperAMOLED HD-flaunting smartphone.
It’s pretty clear that Samsung’s first attempts of an Android-running flagship is a success but the jury is still out on whether or not it’s the uberphone that can make up for the delay as its competitors are already on the market.
What is the verb, all these people in the comments? o_O
تعليق بواسطة xenical weightloss — 2010/11/22 في 1:58 AM
I do not understand why such a fuss. Anything new and different opinions.
تعليق بواسطة aidelmAmisa — 2011/02/28 في 2:04 PM