Samsung Galaxy S

by PrepaidWirelessGuy
(Orange County, CA)

I've posted my review of the Samsung Galaxy S 4G. T-Mobile was kind enough to send me a loaner unit, including free service for two weeks in order to test the product. As I'm not otherwise affiliated with T-Mobile (or Samsung), you can rest assured that I expressed my true, unbiased thoughts and opinions based only on my personal experience.


In my full review (which you can link to below), I get into more detail, however, here's a summary of my findings and general conclusion:

- The screen quality of the Samsung Galaxy S is absolutely phenomenal; it's bright and vibrant, and an absolute pleasure to look and and use. The screen really is the best quality/feature of the Samsung Galaxy.

- The back plate of this flagship 4G LTE phone was extremely disappointing. I found it to be visually unappealing, and in my hand it felt cheap. Some better materials, or perhaps a soft-touch finish would have added a lot to making the Samsung Galaxy feel more like a premium smartphone that it deserves to be.

- The 1GHz processor made for a very fast and responsive smartphone, which was a nice change from the entry level smartphones I have recently tested.

- Although the entire packaging revolved around the fact that the movie Inception (a great movie BTW) is included with the phone, I found it puzzling, and can't help put wonder whether anyone would make a purchase decision based on a movie being included?


- While I didn't have any speed issues in terms of data speed, my tests didn't show anything spectacular with respect to 4G LTE speeds. It wasn't even close to half of the theoretical speeds (which of course no one expects to get). Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to test the Qik video chat app to really put data speeds to the test (nor tethering).

- The rear-facing camera was nice, and took decent pictures, and the video quality was quite good, though I still find shutter speed to be an issue when taking pictures of anything in motion.

- Battery life was neither worse, nor better than the average smartphone that I've encountered. i.e. It was just a poor as the industry standard, meaning that if you should always have a charger close at hand.

Overall I really enjoyed using the handset mostly due to the incredible quality of the touchscreen, and the fast processor. If the design look and feel would have been better, I would have been left feeling that this was a best in class smartphone. Unfortunately, the Samsung Galaxy S missed the mark on build quality, leaving me hopefull that the next iteration of this device will be the complete package.