Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com in my last video I showed you the hardware of the Samsung Galaxy S series phone from Sprint called the epic 4G and I just showed you hardware I did that specifically for a reason than that so you wouldn't be dazzled by the software so that's what we've got in today's video let's go right to it okay so this is the home screen of the Samsung Epic 4G what you're gonna notice first and foremost is right after you boot up your phone you're gonna see this screen you're not gonna go through the typical Android setup process now that Android setup process is the one where you have a little Android guy on the screen says touch the Android to begin and it sets up your Google Account some Google services you don't have that on this phone instead you have your home screen if you want to set up your Google services you tap on one of the google apps like the market which is right here on the main home screen or the center home screen and that will ask you for your username and password very simple very elegant and lets you start using your phone right away I kind of like this approach and I think that other other service providers other carriers you're gonna start doing something like this let's get right into this this is the TouchWiz UI it's not the stock Android interface as you can see there are a couple things to show you first of all your app drawer is over on the side it kind of has this little tabbed display to show you that you are in your apps I'm actually in the third page now you'll notice this is a sidescroller rather than an up-and-down scroller and it has these little dots at the top of the screen to show you which page you're on it's kind of nice because you can say okay I'm right here in the middle I'm over on the side and it's got this neat little elastic bounce to let you know this is as far as you can go back on the home screen you'll notice those dots across the top again there are seven screens in this case and moving between them is fairly easy using the dots or accidentally tapping on the Google search box or simply swiping across now one thing that I've done is I have replaced the stock wallpaper with one of my favorites this is beautiful beautiful live weather wallpaper what it comes with and let me switch back to it really fast is this really really pretty delicate arch wallpaper now delicate arches in southern Utah I mean you so it's kind of homey but this is not a live wallpaper this is just a static wallpaper which is kind of unusual seeing how we ran an article not long ago on how to get all of these beautiful samsung live wallpapers from the captivate and vibrant over onto your Android powered phone including dandelion galaxy this luminous ocean waves they're just really cool they're they're beautiful why didn't the phone come with them pre-installed in stock well it's all about battery life and I'll show you that in just a minute for the meantime we'll leave it right where it is one other thing I'd like to mention this back button in fact all of these buttons on the bottom are a bit finicky you're going to have to tap at them a couple times especially if they turn off before you're ready to press them now I've made some modifications to keep these on a little bit longer because when the backlight goes off you can't see them at all now that's beautiful when looking at the blank screen but not Mary user-friendly when trying to navigate on the device we'll leave that as it is let's get right into the apps that come on the phone sprint zone is the first one and this is kind of an all-in-one everything I need to know about my sprint account including my account how to find a store and this I need help section which is really cool you'll notice up at the top there's a diagnostic ongoing right now that's testing the voice and data connections and it gives you all of this information right there on the phone so you can give that to whoever the support technician is let's go back you've got some Sprint news what can you do with 4G we'll talk about that in a minute and some suggested apps including what's already installed phone tips and tricks and some more stuff so let's go back and look at what other apps are installed first and foremost ESPN and CNN these you might think our apps but they're not they're just shortcuts to the mobile version of the website which isn't a bad thing but that means that anybody with an Android can put these shortcuts on their home screen and get that same effect over here you've got one of Samsung's many really cool apps it's a widget that sits on top of the TouchWiz UI kind of like the HTC Sense widgets this one is a buddy's widget and see if we can find somebody that we want to put in here we'll put in Anton case he's a nice guy and we will put in let's see another picture down here I've got way too many contacts in my phone as you can tell let's put in Brandon now you'll notice I've got kind of a Rolodex thing going on it's very nice very fluid and I can see who this person is just at a glance I can send them a text I can call them or using this edit button I can remove them from this widget now this only lets you change the person it doesn't let you change the details of the person I'd like to be able to go in and edit that person's details right from that screen and you can see they're the back button was being a bit finicky again but we'll say done on that so that's one of the cool widgets another widget let me scroll all the way over to the other side this is the feeds and updates widget which ties in with the Facebook MySpace and Twitter feeds that you set up on the phone and it's a scrollable widget which isn't something you get from stock Android widgets you only get those in the more advanced launchers such as a TW launcher launcher pro sense UI of course and now TouchWiz but this gives you everything that's going on in your social circle all at a glance and you can tell the service that it's on in this case these are all twitter and there we passed a Facebook right there so kind of cool there are a few others this is a task manager widget that comes with the phone and I'm kind of disappointed about that Android does really good monitoring and managing all of the running apps here you can see I've got five things running voice search market Gmail feeder and browser and I can end them all so let's go ahead and do that now Android takes care of all that memory management for you and I think it does a pretty good job I've never needed to have a task killer if you will on my Nexus One I don't think it's really necessary on the Samsung I think it was just included because people were asking for it so that having been said let's look at some other widgets these are the Samsung widgets that come with it and AccuWeather clock we would we've seen all of these on the other Galaxy S cell phone so I'm just gonna browse over them really quickly but it's now which I showed you the calendar clock feeds and updates which I showed you program monitor which I just showed you in the Yahoo Finance clock so lots of cool ways to get information that just kind of really quickly and again that back button is just a bit finicky for my for my likes now let's go into Samsung Apps first and foremost sprint football because who doesn't like football and for everyone else in the rest of the world football for us is an oblong ball it's not a soccer ball so that's just what we call it in America sorry about the confusion this of course is divided into pro and college and gives you all kinds of stuff you can stop your favorite team it gives you scores and schedules news analytics statistics standings team pages Twitter lots of cool stuff including odds so you can fuel you're betting addiction right there getting the odds one thing that's interesting about this app and one of the other apps is it makes you update immediately on launch now I don't know if that was just me or if they put kind of a shell of the app on the phone and then force the download the first time but it was kind of kind of a disappointing experience that I had to go through and get an update before I could even run my app I would have liked to see an update happen in the background one other thing you can't see it because I've already pre-loaded the data on this that little helmet right in the middle is the busy indicator it's not the standard Android busy indicator and it's kind of distracting and I'd like things to be more consistent across the UI and it's not that having been said it does what it's supposed to do let's skip sprint navigation for a minute and go into NASCAR NASCAR does the same thing as the football app and it reloads the update to the app and then it brings you right in very similar to the football app I've already selected my favorite driver this is Tony Stewart and I get all of these things related to him point standings of him along with his other drivers or other drivers in that the circuit that is and just a bunch of other data some videos you know we can go into details on these apps at some other time sprint navigation we need to hit on this is Sprint's version of Google Maps Navigation and it's kind of interesting you'll notice again a non-standard busy indicator but there is a nice progress bar to let you know that it's logging in now why does it take that long I don't know if I'm looking for directions I want to get them quickly and get on the road and go I don't want to have to wait and wait and wait and wait while it's loading I don't know why they do it I think they need to improve that here we've got the basics we can drive to a location we can search for a location we've got maps in traffic and share and more let's go ahead and look at maps and traffic went through to the wrong one and in maps and traffic this is where I am just very basic very simple it's from TeleNav telling Atlas so it looks just like the maps that you're familiar with you'll notice it's a bit slow in loading now we're gonna go away from apps for just a minute and talk about Sprint's 3G and 4G when I was doing my FCC Broadband Tess sprint 3G performed at right around 300 sometimes up to 400 kilobits per second that's not all that great I mean it's not bad but it's not great my t-mobile at the same location is going to get me anywhere from 6 to 900 kilobits per second but the thing that kills me is Sprint's Lattin see the amount of time that it takes for you to ask for something and get a response back on the internet is somewhere around the five to six hundreds on Sprint where it's usually below 200 on t-mobile which is really where it should be I'm kind of disappointed in that with sprint sprint advertises having such a fast network now you'll also notice up at the top my 4G is grayed out because I don't have 4G at my location when I did get under a 4G umbrella you can see that screen turn off I'll talk about that in just a moment too when you get under a 4G umbrella the speeds are astoundingly fast we're talking loading up YouTube videos and playing them almost instantaneously we're in the FCC app right around five megabit per second down about one and a half megabit per second up the Latin sees however are still high I don't understand why they came down a bit but they were in the mid to high 300s I think Sprint really has to work on that but anyway this is the tella Atlas the sprit navigation let's go back now again that back button being finicky it asks us if we want to exit and yes we do it does that so it doesn't eat up battery life Sprint TV turn it this way this could be Sprint's killer app and you can see I've been using this all morning and I have drained my battery down this could be the killer app unfortunately it's not the reason being there are several first and foremost if you're on Wi-Fi because you don't have a good sprint signal at home say you're like me and don't have Wi-Fi or excuse me don't have 4G at your house you want to use your houses Wi-Fi maybe you don't even have 3G or good 3G at your house you have to turn off Wi-Fi to be able to use this app now I'm sure that Sprint's way of locking down this app so people don't rip it out and use it on other non sprint devices but it's very disappointing that I can't use my high-speed Internet to watch my very bandwidth intensive shows let's go ahead and dive in we're gonna look at all channels now the first thing you're gonna notice is there's not an awful lot of channels here I mean there are several but there's not a ton we just scrolled through the list what twice that's all you've got let's go ahead and look at well first of all there's free stuff and there's not free stuff the not free stuff becomes just like cable TV where you can go through and buy a package in this case for ten bucks a month plus taxes you can get all of these channels which is a pretty good deal this could let you turn off your cable TV your satellite TV or whatnot and stream it all to your phone now where that is really advantageous is with this phone you can actually hook it up to your TV and watch it on your big-screen TV that becomes a problem and I'll show you here let's go into the Disney Channel this is what my nine-year-old daughter found right away and she loved it because she had Hannah Montana now in here we've got Hannah Montana full episodes well that's to differentiate them from the not full episodes which are just clips and the clips are a pain in the neck you get involved and you think this is the show I want to watch but it's just a two-minute clip of the show so it's kind of painful they've separated that by annotating full episodes I really wish you had a top level navigation or a setting that said look I don't want to see clips I just want full episodes but that's just a feature request that I like let's go ahead and open up this if we can tap on that will open up this episode and I'm just gonna show you a little bit you'll notice it's taking a little while to load again because I'm on 3G unfortunate faster now my viewable screen area is from that corner to that corner but the TV is only that big to that big so there's a lot of space missing you'll also see here that this is the actual resolution of of the video that's playing and I'm getting distracted by the video that's playing here so we're gonna go ahead and zoom back out again and then we'll navigate away from Hannah Montana but it's nowhere near high-def if you plug this into your big-screen TV you're not going to be happy with the quality especially with it being over a slower 3G connection so sprint needs to up that again this could be the killer app but it's not this isn't organized all that well it does let you it kind of learns your favorites and it puts those all together so that you can go back and watch them after you've found what you want several times you know you can go back in there and see what you're looking for quickly so that's kind of cool and that's in the recommended section up there again this back buttons acting up there's some other stuff radios favorites and more but that's pretty much the app so all in all the apps on the phone aren't bad they're not great if you're buying this phone just for the apps go ahead and pass get tv.com from the market which is free it gives you nearly the same offerings as Sprint TV not quite then it doesn't give you the premium channels like sprit TV does but if you want to get free stuff there you go TV common folder Schlow sure does also have the problem with showing clips rather than full episodes so that's still a frustration and that recommendation goes out to them too I mentioned I was going to tell you about battery and that's the last thing that we're gonna cover we come in here and look at settings and we'll rotate the screen really quick the display has some interesting things set up for it let me get down to it brightness is automatic so there is an ambient light sensor that adjusts the brightness of the screen and it does this perfectly it it's amazing I've not noticed a problem like I do with the Nexus One where you can actually see the screen getting brighter or getting dimmer it's always nice bright and visible indoors outdoors anywhere you want it's gorgeous you'll also notice they changed the Android stock user interface here for this nice blue which is nice it looks good the fonts are a bit bigger I don't think they needed to do that but they've set themselves apart from everybody else down here is the power saving mode this is checked by default and it gives you the option to save power by having having the OS basically analyze what's being displayed on the screen and adjust the LCD brightness not just for the ambient light but for what's being displayed on the screen they're really concerned about power saving on this phone and with good reason this display is very large it's very bright and it chews up a lot of battery life sorry off-camera there for a minute but what you see is I've gone ahead and dug into the about this phone a battery status and just as we'd expect the display took up 74% of everything since we have unplugged the phone Sprint navigation the short amount of time that we had an open and chewed up an enormous 13% whereas the Android system cell phone standby the live wallpaper Bluetooth Android core apps took up just hardly any in comparison to that display so they're doing everything they can with the display to keep the battery life reasonable in fact the timeout for the screen is 30 seconds by default and of course I had to change that to shoot this video otherwise I'd be constantly turning it on and off and on and off so they've done a lot to change it so that you can have a more battery life so let's talk about real-world battery life in the mornings I get up I read my email I read my feeder feeds I eat breakfast I do some other reading in that nook or in Kindle I get in my car I listen to a couple podcasts on my way to work at work I'm back to emails answering several phone calls and doing that you know surfing a few web pages watching a few YouTube videos work-related of course when I do that it's not bad I have in fact I did that and showing it off to my friends yesterday I ran to about two o'clock so that's not bad 7:00 in the morning to two o'clock in the afternoon before I needed a charge was actually pretty good I had to plug it in at that point now if I hadn't been showing off to all my friends it would have lasted me through the whole day and I could have plugged in on the commute on the way home your mileage may vary of course and I've just got to put this out up front the first two three days that you have this phone you're going to think that this has the worst battery in the world even though it's a 1500 milliamp battery you're gonna think it's terrible be patient the reason you're gonna think it's terrible is because you're going to be installing lots of apps populating a lot of data you're going to be using the heck out of this phone and it's going to be very data and screen intense it's not your normal average use so wait till the novelty wears off and then start judging the battery and I think you'll be relatively pleased I'd still recommend a mid they charge or charging on the commute to and from work but other than that it's great watching TV even watching that sprint TV my daughter was able to do it on the couch for a good two three hours before we got a low-battery notification so all in all the phones really great if you don't like the TouchWiz UI you can actually install another home launcher and that will give you this chooser here so you can go back to the stock Android 2.1 homescreen which is kind of nice I like launcher pearl and I put that on here just to test it out and make it look like mine you can see I've gone into battery SOS mode where it's dimmed a whole bunch of stuff turned off 4G so it's trying to save as much battery giving me as much extra life as I can if you don't like TouchWiz this is the way to get rid of it you will still have the new notification drop-down that gives you quick access to turn on and off your radios which is really nice but again in summary it's a good phone the software that comes on it is you know it's sprint stuff so just kind of live with it or don't use it or replace it with whatever you want don't buy the phone because of the software by the phone because it's gorgeous because it's fast because it's got a cool slide-out keyboard because it's got this neat slide to unlock thing and that I do like by the phone because your sprint user and you want a really fast really nice Android phone because this is it it's amazing for software this I'm going to divide my software review into two parts the first part is the sprint apps sorry sprint you're only getting one out of five for reasons that we mentioned for the Android stuff and the Samsung stuff for out of five okay so there you go this sprint Samsung Epic 4G Galaxy S Android phone very beautiful hardware especially that screen and the slide-out keyboard the software Samsung stuff really really nice the TouchWiz UI rather than the stock Android launcher does its job does it well I still kind of lean towards the stock Android launcher type apps but TouchWiz UI is a nice fluid feel especially with some of those Samsung widgets that you can put on your home screens the Sprint apps not so much if you're looking at this phone and saying I want to get a an Android phone because of the Sprint apps that come on it don't do that just for the apps they've got a lot of room to grow in fact one thing I didn't tell you about was a couple of those sprint apps that I showed you don't even run on sprint 4G you have to drop down to sprint 3G to be able to use them and of course they don't work over your Wi-Fi network or the local Wi-Fi at Starbucks or McDonald's or wherever you may be so if you like this kind of super super detailed video and give it a thumbs up if you haven't yet subscribed to our channel and you want to keep up to date with all kinds of upcoming phones and future videos regarding the Galaxy S series phones you've got to subscribe to our YouTube channel right now we do have a full write-up of all the technical specifications along with links to this and other videos over at pocketnow.com and for pocketnow.com I'm Joe Levi