Sunday, August 22, 2010

My New Android Smartphone - Samsung Vibrant Galaxy S

I was thinking of buying an android phone from long time. I was very close to buying Droid X phone. But I was not sure if I will be able to honor the two yr contract I would have to take had I bought it from Verizon. The contract breakage charge was restrictively high. When I learnt that T-mobile was offering Samsung Galaxy phone with a lesser contract breakage and for a lesser cost, I jumped at it and lapped it up. I received the phone yesterday and I have been playing with it from then.
It feels amazing to use it. It is very light and it has 4 inches AMOLED screen which is very bright. You can really watch videos on it and they feel real. The touchscreen experience is also very good. After using the scroller where you just do a scrolling motion with your finger, my previous experience of clicking a button to scroll down would just doesn't appeal anymore. I am not attempting a review here. I am just listing the facts which I liked. The concept of home screens is good. Whatever you want you can create a shortcut on the homescreen and without going to menu inside menu, you can just click it from there. It comes close to a laptop experience rather than a phone experience.
All google applications like GMail, Maps, Talk  are very well intergrated into the phone. Though typing is not very easy, with Swype application practice, you can type without much effort. Phone is good and it syncs contacts from google so it is amazing. It syncs photos from picasa etc. So whatever photos are there in picasa you can directly view here.
One special application I loved is the Amazon Kindle application. The experience of reading a book is very very good. I already read a novel Gone Green on the phone. I definitely see myself reading more books on the phone.
5 mp camera is very very good. The clarity of the pictures is amazing. The calendar app is synced with google calendar and it will give me reminder of events from google calendar also. I think this is very useful in staying organized and it would definitely increase my productivity. One more thing which I love is the voice search app. You just have to speak into the phone your search query instead of typing and it works very well. Very very useful.
On the flip side, the screen has the full original resolution i.e 960x800 px and the photos you set a wallpapers don't automatically get re sized as in other feature phones and you have to select an area which you want to set as wallpaper. This fact will take some time getting used to. Also there are no good telugu songs streaming apps for Android. Raaga.com has an application for iPhone but not for Android I don't like that fact. But they have a  mobile website which uses flash. Android 2.2 has flash but the version of android on my phone is just 2.1. Samsung says it will update to 2.2 by end of this year so hopefully I should be able to stream songs on my phone directly.
Update 1: The battery life is not really great. But if you play a lot with the phone, it will get discharged pretty soon. For normal usage you can get by with charging once a day, but if you want to browse on it or play games on it, I think you cannot use it more than 6-7 hrs continuously. It seems the display is taking most of the battery. So I switched to reading books in white letters on black screen instead of the default black letters on white screen.
On the whole, very satisfied with the phone.

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