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Smartphones for the masses is what Samsung want and Bada alone won’t be enough perhaps to get them there. Why not the Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 then? A mid-range Android phone with a custom paintjob on the OS and few nice software surprises – doesn’t sound bad at all.

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Android is infiltrating the lower smartphone ranks. Mission objective: cut down on expensive hardware features and provide a robust experience. The Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 does just that. The hardware won’t make it a flagship, but with 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, Android OS (slightly modified and even improved) and a 1500mAh battery it sounds like a reliable phone that can do the job for most people.

Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 at a glance:

• General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 1900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 3.6Mbps
• Form factor: Touchscreen bar
• Dimensions: 113.5 x 55 x 12.9 mm, 109.7g weight
• Display: 3.2″ 16M-color TFT capacitive touchscreen of WQVGA resolution; multi-touch support
• Platform: Android OS 2.1 with Touch Wiz 3.0 UI
• Memory: 170MB internal memory, microSD card slot, 1GB card included
• Camera: 3.2-megapixel auto-focus camera, geotagging, smile detection
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, digital compass, 3.5mm audio jack
• Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, DivX/XviD support, FM radio with RDS, Swype text input, social networking integration, Layar Augmented Reality browser
• Battery: Li-Ion battery, 1500mAh

The Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 has no flagship aspirations and it doesn’t need to look like a million bucks. The minimalist design means it’s not too extravagant, but it’s not boring either. High-end, cutting edge phones are reputation builders, but it’s usually the mid and low end handsets that end up in most people’s pockets. Pocket is the keyword and the Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 seems well aware of that.

About the software surprises we mentioned – one of them is Swype, a novel way to type on a virtual QWERTY keyboard, and the other is the excellent DivX/XviD support. Not that it’s a surprise coming from Samsung, but certainly a great feature to have. And it’s rare enough on Android.

On the next page, we take the Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 for a spin and check the newborn droid in and out.

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Disclaimer: This preview is based on an early Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 prototype. Changes in the final retail product are highly probable. We’ll update this article when we get a more final version of both the hardware and software.

Design and construction

The design of the Samsung I5800 is not revolutionary, but the touchscreen bar is very limiting in what manufacturers can do. Samsung have given us another neat and simple, all-plastic device.

The design is utterly minimalistic and hides away most of the functional elements. The Android keys (menu, home, back and search) are touch sensitive and are only visible when their backlight is on. The D-pad looks like a simple center key, even the volume rocker is not very prominent.

The display is a 3.2” touchscreen of WQVGA resolution. It’s the first Android smartphone we see that has this particular resolution. It uses capacitive technology to sense even very light taps. The image quality is good as far as TFT screens go, with good brightness and decent contrast.

The sunlight legibility is pretty bad however – there’re too much reflections and the display often ends up reflecting sunlight right into your eyes, obscuring everything on screen.

Below the display are the D-pad and the standard arrangement of Android keys. The D-pad has the appearance of a simple center key, but can be used to scroll both vertically and sideways. You probably won’t use it much, the only time it’s actually better than just using the touchscreen is when you need to go back a couple of letters and fix a typo.

The other four keys – Menu and Home keys on the left; Back and Search on the right – are touch sensitive. When their backlighting is off, they become invisible and blend with the black plastic of the front.

The keys are capacitive, which means they react only to bare fingers. They don’t provide any haptic feedback at this point, but that’s about to be fixed we guess. There’s a setting for it in the menu.

User interface – best of both worlds

Putting a custom skin on the OS is what manufacturers have always been keen to do. They would tailor the user interface to their own understanding of usability. The bottom line though, is making it unique and recognizable, to set it apart from competing devices using the same software.

The Samsung I5800 is no different – the interface has been tweaked to look very much like Samsung’s pride and joy, the Bada OS.

Much like on the Samsung Galaxy S, on the I5800 Samsung have managed to blend their interface with the native UI, rather than just slap one on top of the other. Given the inherent similarities between Bada and Android, the I5800 UI is very smooth and consistent.

People who have used TouchWiz before (few have yet got a chance on its successor, Bada) won’t take long to feel at home. The good news though is the same holds true for Android users. Samsung have changed the vanilla Android enough to make it their own, but all the strengths of the Android interface are intact.

There are four buttons at the bottom of the homescreen that provide shortcuts to the main functions of the phone – dialer, contacts, messaging and applications. There are 7 homescreen panes instead of the five in Android 2.1, and the current position is indicated by numbered dots top of the screen.

The notification area has also been tweaked – it now has four toggles to mute sound and turn Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS on and off. These are accessible from pretty much anywhere, so if the app requests, say, your location or wants to download lots of data, you can switch on GPS or Wi-Fi in a couple of clicks.

The homescreen makes heavy use of widgets – they are not just cute little apps that show the weather or tell you to quit smoking. Some custom Samsung widgets have enough functionality to be apps in their own right.

For example, the Feeds & updates widget streamlines the updates from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter into a single feed and lets you post updates to these sites straight from the widget itself. You get full-blown apps for Facebook and MySpace for the more complex tasks.

The Daily Briefing widget is an exact copy of the eponymous application in Bada OS and being on the homescreen feels much more natural for what it provides – a one-stop summary of the weather, stock quotes, news and upcoming appointments in the calendar.

There’s also the StockClock, which combines the clock with a stock quote ticker, and the Days widget, which works with the Mini Diary app – it’s similar to HTC’s Footsteps.

Text input, Android meets Swype

Text input is not usually a particularly exciting part of a preview but the Samsung I5800 is different. Just like Samsung Galaxy S, it features a Swype-enhanced on-screen QWERTY keyboard 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. 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.

Browser got a touch of make-up too

The web browser has got some of the skinning treatment. The changes are cosmetic mostly and all the excellent functionality of the Eclair browser is there.

Aside from the different look of the address bar, there are five buttons at the bottom row – back and forward, more, bookmarks and tabs. In full-screen mode those are hidden and the only thing to see is the full-screen mode toggle.

Camera: no lights, but action!

The camera on the Samsung I5800 is modest by today’s standards – 3.2 megapixel with autofocus and QVGA video at 15fps. There isn’t even a dedicated shutter key (but then again the Nexus One doesn’t either).

Samsung have a lot of experience with cameraphones, so they’ve developed a really good touch camera interface. And they’ve ported it to the Samsung I5800.

Multimedia: music and video players, FM radio and Media Browser

The Samsung I5800 boasts an impressive multimedia package – in both audio and video.

Let’s start with the Music player. It’s a custom job by Samsung and offers 5.1 channel emulation, DNSe with Music Clarity, Bass enhancement, Concert hall, externalization and a few other presets.

Apps galore

There are dedicated apps for Facebook and MySpace, though for simply updating your status you can use the Feeds & Update widget. Unfortunately, the apps couldn’t log in, so we’ll have to wait for the review to test them.

Mini diary is similar to HTC’s Footsteps. You can add entries into it with dates, the weather (automatically pulled from AccuWeather) plus a photo and a short text. It’s great for a travel diary, though we would have liked it to have a way to post diary entries online.

First impressions

There are quite a few impressive things about the Samsung I5800. For one, the re-skinned Android looks like Bada OS, but isn’t a half-baked mess. Instead, it promises comfort to both Android users and those coming from a Samsung handset with TouchWiz.

Swype too – it’s a fresh take on touchscreen QWERTY and could easily become the way to touch-type in the future. It’s faster and more accurate than handwriting recognition, and once you get used to it, it’s certainly faster than tapping the keys.

The Video Player that handled DVD quality DivX was impressive as well – DivX/XviD players for Android are hard to come by. There are other things as well, like the balanced selection of widgets and apps for business and fun.

The hardware, unlike the top-notch software, is average. That’s not to say bad, but it’s not ahead of the competition either.

Well, there you go. Android is a mature platform already and it brings excellent user experience – especially with a few tasty add-ons like Swype and DivX video. The Samsung I5800 is one of the finer examples of what the OS can do in the midrange. With the right price tag this phone can really push on value for money.

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