Gadgetory

hey guys jon rettinger with john for lakers calm here with a review for you of the samsung epix it's a new windows mobile 6.1 handset that was released just a few weeks ago on a TNT's network i'm going to try and make this more a review of the phone itself and less a review or a dissertation on Windows Mobile so let's get started with a real quick hardware overview of the phone first thing that you'll notice is it looks very similar to the samsung blackjack in blackjack 2 and the old trio is meeting its got a full qwerty keyboard on the front and a touch screen right there in this case the 320 x 320 resistive touchscreen meaning it's got a little bit of squish to the screen the taps are registered by the two thin layers being pushed together so in the front of it there's your full qwerty keyboard and this in the middle that looks like a d-pad is actually an optical trackpad you can move your finger along and it actually looks like a mouse on the screen the arrow follows you around where you're doing it it's actually a very handy and a very quick feature to get used to if you don't like it you can very easily turn it off and the stern it to a standard d-pad with swipes up to go up and down to go down hardware-wise we've got two soft keys the left softkey and a right softkey send key and a lock and n key on the front full qwerty keyboard with shortcuts down below you've got a shortcut for pocket internet explorer calendar camera and mail right there so few handy shortcuts and those can be programmed for anything else well the icons on their make it easy to remember what's what on the left side of device got the power on button right there a very easy to reach volume toggle on the right side of device we've got your papaya Samsung proprietary charging and headset port there is not a 3.5 millimeter headset jack but there is an adapter you can plug right in there without any trouble and what nice people i like to see is a microSD slot on the side which is available without taking out the battery and it is hot swappable of course so you can just take that out push in your microSD card and you are good to go on the back of the device you've got a 2 megapixel camera with a self-portrait near and a soft plastic back the whole phone is made of plastic and it does have a nice solid feel to it in addition on the back of the device there is pull it out that a three-way collapsible stylus for use with the touch screen this samsung epix unlike some of the HTC phones is not skinned meaning Windows Mobile is as microsoft built it on here with the standard windows mobile home screen so everything that you need to do really need to be done on the stylist it's not very finger friendly let me go ahead and close this up here and put that back in and let's talk about the best features of the phone this thing has a monster battery i'll show you guys in a little bit it's an 1800 milliamp hour battery I didn't charge his phone for four days and that's with heavy internet usage phone calls the battery in this thing is unbelievable for a 3g phone I have never used any any 3g phone that can last for that long my iphone for example which is the 3g version lucky to get through a day without a charge so congratulations to samsung the battery really makes up a lot of the half to the phone and reason the phone is as thick as it is during my unboxing i did a size comparison with the iphone so you can go ahead and check that out if you like to see some more sizes on it the keyboard on the phone is very good very similar to the black jack and the blackjack to it is easy to use the keys are small but with a little bit of care you can get the right key presses without much difficulty so i do like the keyboard is hard to get a full front facing cory keyboard to be very wide spaced but samsung did do a nice job with that they really didn't fix it wasn't broken so that's a nice feature the trackpad in here like i mentioned it's actually very easy to use and i really did get used to it very quickly um almost the first time i was using the phone the epics does come with haptic feedback meaning every button you touch the phone vibrates a bit let me tell you that gets annoying so quickly the whole phone vibrates almost like it's ringing just for a quick second it's unnecessary it's a little bit laggy so you'll push it and you'll feel almost like a second later it vibrates I'm not a fan of the haptic feedback so the phone itself if you look at the keyboard here you've got your white number rose going all the way down but the nice thing is it since this is a touchscreen you don't have to use those numbers if you want to dial it does have a full keypad well the keypad itself is a little difficult to use it's small the screen is small it's kind of hard to dial with the resistive touchscreen so not such a fan of the keypad that you have to use the dial let me go ahead and turn this thing off and show you guys a battery because it's very hard to appreciate how big it is until you actually see it so go ahead and pull the back of the softer so you can still see the thickness of the divisor then pull out this monster battery why didn't need the stylist to do it grab that out we will pull this out here alright so the batteries out just get a sense of how big it I mean that really is there's the phone there's a battery the thickness of the phone really is this monster behemoth of a battery 1800 milliamp hours I would gladly have a thicker phone to have a battery of this capacity so again I really have to give Samsung credit and that made the phone much more enjoyable in my opinion glad put that battery back in here reception wise the phone was just as good as than any other phone i've used of any windows mobile phone iphone even the g one I was using last week really reception wise was fine collars on the other ends had no problem hearing me I know probably hearing them they did say there sounds like a little bit of white noise but it might have just been my location so call quality was good speaker volume on the handset is actually outstanding speakers are quite loud it's a very large speaker grill at the top of the device right there so the speaker phone was fantastic cameras 2 megapixel you're not gonna be Ansel Adams taking any professional photography shots with this but it's not bad decent for a camera phone it's fine for a quick snap at a party or take a picture of your friends to show them later so not a problem there hardware-wise the phone is fantastic while it is made of plastic it does feel solid and nice in the hand it's got a little bit of heft probably from that monster battery but it does feel nice and it does feel solid and it's certainly a pocketable device despite its size so I really did enjoy that what I don't like and still what this phone cannot overcome as its fatal flaw is windows mobile 6.1 at least on skinned it's not finger friendly anything you want to do you seemly have to take out a stylus and you have to start tapping away so it really takes anything those one-handed operation now becomes two handed operation I think you lose some of the joy of a touch screen when you can't operate it with one hand I've used Windows Mobile standard before so the non-touch screen version and I'm almost preferential with that that's much easier for one-handed operation you can scroll down with buttons this just seems much more difficult to use and didn't play to the strength of the phone it didn't use the hardware as well as it could of with a phone that has this capacity I think Samsung should have put some sort of skin on it certainly nothing like touchflo 3d like HTC is done but I know Samsung does have some proprietary skins for instance the widgets that's found on the omnia so that would have been a very welcome feature overall I've been very happy with the phone but I just can't get over the windows mobile side of it I was really trying to give Windows Mobile a shot but 6.1 just didn't quite cut at my opinion so on a one-to-five scale I was just grading the phone itself I would give the phone a solid for just for hardware and feel but overall I'll bring system and phone using experience I really got to give the phone at three out of five so guys jon rettinger with john for lakers calm hope you enjoyed the review of the samsung omnia make that the samsung epix rather and this phone is currently available through AT&T service so hop on down to your AT&T store or online it's available for 449 with a no commitment pricing with two-year contract it's 299 with a hundred-dollar mail-in rebate breaking the price to 1 99 99 and the rebates you do get that rebate gift card in the mail so guys I hope you enjoyed this review of the samsung epix if it's a phone you're looking for if you're a fan of windows mobile and go ahead and get it I think you'll be very happy with it if you're looking for something to replace an iphone or something that is a little more one-handed and user-friendly recommend looking elsewhere alright guys jon rettinger john for lakers calm if you want some more exclusive content and sneak peeks at what's coming up be sure to follow me on twitter ww twitter.com / on for lakers i'll post links to those in the sidebar right guys I will talk to you soon bye guys well in this point i wanted to mention is this is just a test device it's not replacing any of my current phones my primary device being the iphone just something i wanted to use to give you guys it sensed of what it felt like and what it was all about bye