Samsung Galaxy i7500 – Good For An Entry Level Android Phone… But Will It Survive The Competition

Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Vibrant display, 8GB storage, nice set of features, 5MP camera.

Thumbs down: Funny headphones, disappointing battery life.

Inside the trunk:
Price at launch £499.99
Bluetooth Yes
WiFi Yes
Ringtones MP3, WAV
HSUPA Yes
Internet Browser Yes
Vibrating Alert Yes
Memory (GB) 8
Built-In Camera Yes
SMS Yes
Display Size 3.2
HSDPA Yes
Memory Card Compatibility MicroSD/TransFlash
EDGE Yes
Playable Formats eAAC Plus, H.263, H.264, MP3, MPEG-4, RA, WMA, WMV
MMS Yes
E-mail Client Yes
Camera Resolution 5 Dimensions 56 x 11.9 x 115

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: With the Galaxy, Samsung has finally joined the league of  Android phones. The Galaxy comes in with a brilliant feature set and is being offered by O2 in the U.K. Anyways lets go ahead with the review see if this could truly survive in the android game.

This one truly fits into the sleek phone category at a thickness of  11.9mm thick and it is quite light at 116g and easily fits in the pocket. The screen of this one is around 3.2-inch and it supports the OLED technology. Thanks to the OLED technology the display of this looks absolutely stupendous with bright and vibrant images.

This one could definitely remind a few of the Samsung Jet with its kind of similar layout on the back.  Below the screen we have the search button and the home key which is conveniently placed between the terminate and the back buttons. However most of the space below the screen is eaten up by the OK button, which in all honesty doesn’t require that much of footage plus the home button could have surely used up some of this place.

On the left side of the phone we have the up/down keys to control the volume, adjust the brightness of the screen without actually having to use the touchscreen  slide bar. The top of the phone houses a 3.5 headphone jack along with a micro USB port. The right side has a small button for the lock key and the camera shutter button. At times however the small button could get a bit irritating.

O2 offers this one along with a nice case for the Galaxy. Other than that there’s a 3.5mm headset inside the box along with a Samsung New PC Studio CD for connecting it to the PC and a micro USB charger. Obviously when Your paying £240 for a phone on contract, you expect it to be packaged well.

Coming to the interface, let me warn you beforehand itself that this one does not offer much in terms of customization. Its got the standard 1.5 OS platform ahich kind of loses it charm when compared to the HTC Sense UI and Motorola’s MotoBlur. The look of the homescreen can be easily changed with the help of the three swipeable options, which means that the user just has to drag the widgets he wants on the Homescreen and simply drop it on the screen. The built in Google Gadgets for the home screen are pretty decent as well. Though this one cant match upto the Sense UI, its got some really nice options to fiddle around with. However I was a bit disappointed by the responsiveness of the screen. There was quite a lag at most of the times and it really took some efforts to get this one working.

Well there is definitely something weird about the 3.5mm headphones because whenever I tried to plug it in it made a beep sound which was halfway played through the sspeaker and then through the headphones. Also as soon as you plug it in, it initiates the music player. Possibly it kind of mimics the handsfree functionality. Anyways I hope the makers fix it up soon.

Its got a nice huge contacts list and the contacts interface is really simple which makes it a delight to use this one. The contacts application handles all the aspects  of the calling system including the dialing, call history, contact list and favourites.

Coming to the call quality, this one offers a decent call making experience for sure. There was no static or interference for the most part of it. in crowded areas however the volume was a bit low. On the callers side too, they were pretty much satisfied and hardly had any complaints. The size of the phone is pretty much adequate for the face size which makes it really comfortable to use the handset for talking.

It supports text messaging and the messages are displayed in the threaded form which makes it easier to view the conversations with different people.

Browsing using the Android browser has always been a pleasant experience and thankfully the browsing on Galaxy is also satisfactory. The internet on the i7500 Galaxy will give easy access to full HTML options, and the phone has a similar smart-fit ability to the HTC Hero, with text being shown in the correct column even after zooming in to a massive size.

The music player sorts songs according to the artists, albums and tracks. The music player interface is pretty nice. The sound through the speaker is not al that great but anyways since it comes  equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack the user can easily plug in his favourite pair of headphones.

However the major disappointing point about the Galaxy is the battery life. This one could easily win the Worst Battery life title easily. This 1500mAh battery could hardly 3 hours of life even when it was hardly being used.

Nitty- gritty: The design of this one is really nice and probably one of the best designs in the Android market, accompanied with a brilliant screen and awesome set of features. However the battery life is what hits this one hard. I would say that Samsung really hasn’t done much to the Android OS in a way that anyone could probably go gaga over it. Plus for the price at which this one is being offered I would surely expect much more. Though this is just the start of the android journey for Samsung I sincerely wish that this one had something more to offer.

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