Gadgetory

hey everyone Daniel Webster here for packing.com and this is the software review of the Samsung Droid Charge on Verizon's 4G LTE network so this device is running android 2.2 along with the TouchWiz user interface on top so let's get you the rest of the software so the droid charge is running similar software that came on the galaxy s variants of the devices that from last year and unfortunately doesn't have the TouchWiz 4.0 that you can see on the galaxy s2 and i'll post a link right about here you can watch Brandon's video of the galaxy s2 so if i can pinch to zoom out i can set my home screens if I'd like so let me set this one to my home and I can just go back and so now if I go anywhere in the phone i'll have to just hit the home button and it brings me back to that page that i wanted so we don't have any new live wallpapers that we see haven't seen before so we'll just go into the wallpapers and the live wallpapers are here and the beach one does come with the captivate android 2.2 update that came out a couple months ago we can also go down to here and view all of our connections we can turn them on and off which is pretty nice to have on the TouchWiz user interface to be able to turn on and off radios if we tap and hold we can get some of the widgets let's see we have some Samsung widgets available along with Android and a few application widgets that came with this device so we'll just go home and into the menu into the settings i should say and we can view our settings here let me go to about information and we're running android 2.2 point 1 which is a pretty new froyo build so we'll just go back can also get doc settings this device is able to connect to a doc using the micro USB 2.0 port and we'll just go back home for you some the applications that come on the device we just going here and we have the basic applications for android we have the allshare app that allows you to share media over a ready DLNA network so we can go there and if i was connected to a Wi-Fi connection you would be able to see the files on my network so i'm just going to go back home so back in the apps we have our amazon kindle application we have the V CAST apps which is verizon's market it's sort of order their android market we have the backup assistant which allows you to store your contact information and other information directly to verizon server and just go back we have bitbop which is probably seen before a blockbuster which allows you to download movies directly to your android device you can also rent them available in three days let me see here so I guess if you have the blockbuster online movie service you can use this application we have our browser which is just the basic android browser we have a calculator which is a reskinned to the TouchWiz user interface we also have a scientific calculator if we go to landscape mode so let me just go back out of here whatever Google Calendar camera camera is pretty phenomenal not only does it take awesome videos which we will post on the final review and we'll post also a video sample with 720p video resolution it also takes really good photos which will post to the final review one cool thing about this is it does have software so you can take panorama photos and a probably post one of those also on the final review so we'll just get out of here and the camera is pretty easy to use we have city ID which is a pretty basic application i don't know why they decided to put this on here maybe there's something more with your subscription status or with your a subscription but let me go here all it does is looks up a phone number so let's say i was trying to 0 6 205 or something it will show me that it's from seattle washington so i don't know why they included this app but i will just get out of here we have the clock which is the basic android clock daily briefing which is a nice application from TouchWiz and Samsung which allows you to view the information for your specific city we can just scroll over and get finance information for our stock list if we like when you see what else we have we have a tmobile so we can get some news and current events and stuff like that well just go over again we give you our schedule and we can also go to add and let me just go back if I wanted to add a schedule I can just do that from here I can go back and I can add other things to my my finance list so let me just go back out of this application we have our desk cradle which is a pretty cool application if you're going to use your device while it's plugged in it has a day and night mode and allows you to access some of your most used locations directly from this program so are directly from this desk application so we can view our weather and get alarm voice search gallery daily briefing and our music directly from this app while it's sitting on our desk we have email which is pretty basic we have the gallery which is the default Android gallery going over we have Gmail Google search guided tours which gives you tutorial videos on how to set up your device how to set up the droid charge and also how to access various features on verizon so let me just go back out of there we have instant messenger which only works over a 3g service we have AOL instant messenger windows live in yahoo messenger it would be nice if they included facebook on this or some other twitter feeds but you can also update those on the touchwiz home screen i'll show you that on another widget we have Google Latitude let's golf too which is a demo that is pretty a simple game to play it's a 3d game okay so here we are on the let's golf to game and it does allow you to play the demo so we can go an instant play and the video on this game is pretty phenomenal it's a 3d style game unfortunately we're getting a lot of a polarization from the way that the screen is set up and also how the camera captures some of the images so let me just go hero touch just continue and we can begin playing this game when it starts loading okay so here we are and we'll just shoot this golf ball out here and let's see how accurate we can get it and the game continues on like this the full version does cost four dollars in 99 cents so we'll just get out of here so we'll just continue with the applications we have the android market we have media hub which allows you to download TV and movies directly to your android device in which is the droid charge here so we can download TV and TV shows for a set fee we can also rent them if we like so let me see here if you want to look at one of these episodes we can own it for a dollar ninety-nine cents and you can also rent movies directly from the media hub application we have google maps we have mobile hotspot which allows you to share your data connection from your droid charge to 10 other devices which is a pretty cool especially if you're able to access the 4g LTE network because it's a phenomenally fast let's go to music player which is just the generic and Roy music player that we have here we can go back we have my files which allows you to search through all your files on the device and through the SD card we have my verizon mobile but i don't actually have a verizon account with this device so i won't be able to use that rhapsody which is just a quick video that shows you what rap city is we have a google navigation google places we have rock band which is another demo game we have to our settings which we can get from the menu we have setup wizard which shows you how to set your droid charge pretty easily we have slacker radio which is a free internet radio application that allows you to play music directly over a Wi-Fi or 3G or 4G connection and there's if you have the paid for service you don't have any advertisements or commercial so you can just get out there Google Talk task manage which is Annie application if you want to end various tasks so let me go here I can view my running applications and I can just exit all to help save some battery power and also some memory can go to download and view all the applications that I've downloaded already I can go to ram and I can clear my memory if I'd like right now it's only at 220 megabytes so if I want I can clear this and it might bring it down a little bit less but it changed a little bit so ignites go to storage and view our internal phone storage and our external SD card storage we have think free office V CAST media but you do have to have a verizon account and various things cost money and fortunately I will access this on this phone because this is just a demo unit that we have we have a video player so let me go on here and we have one video that we can play and this device is capable of rendering up to 720p video out of the hdmi connection so here's just a little sample video and we can go back and get out of this we have voice dialer voice recorder voice search visual voicemail which shows you your voicemail messages directly onto the droid charge that is a paid for service through verizon and I don't have a subscription for that we have VZ navigator which also paid for navigation Program youtube and tunewiki allows you to get lyrics so you can sing along with these songs playing on your android device and that is about it let's go through some of the quadrant standards the smart bench and also the Linpack for Android to see exactly how fast this device is run it so we will launch quadrant standard benchmark and we'll come back with results in just a second to the quadrant standard benchmark is not too incredibly fast on the droid charge the device seems somewhat laggy when I'm going through applications and whatnot as you can see we get any 972 which has been pretty average to the other scores that I've been testing throughout the couple of days that I've had this device so let's try another benchmark so on linpack for android we're getting about 12.21 mflops in 6.8 7 seconds so that's a relatively fast it's not incredibly fast course we have seen some very fast benchmarks for linpack with of course rooted phones with like 1.8 giga hertz and that was like at 65 in flops so let's try the last one which is smart bench 2011 okay so on smart bench 2011 we're getting scores of 841 which has been pretty average for what I've got on this particular device over the last couple of days also and it says that android 2.2 point one stock rom which is what it has should be running around 2094 so it seems kind of weird that this device is running a little bit slower than the stock android 2.2 point one devices available so another great feature that the droid charge comes with is the swipe texting so if i wanted to write its out something i'll have to a swipe my finger across the keyboard and it will spell it out so let's just choose the house is white or something like that and i'll hopefully it works pretty well ok it didn't get it exactly perfect but you get the idea so this has been the software review of the Samsung Droid Charge on Verizon's 4G LTE network unfortunately I wasn't able to do a network speed test on the 4g service because the service in my area is rather spotty if you miss the unboxing you can check it out right about here and we'll also post the hardware review right about here and stay tuned for the final review where we go through everything on the samsung droid charge and will also have those video samples and photo samples thanks for watching hmm