Gadgetory

hey guys this is Evan blast from pocketnow.com and today we're going to be taking a look at the software component of the verizon samsung fascinate which is so we've told you many times before their version of samsung's galaxy s so stay tuned welcome back to the samsung fascinate software tour first thing we're going to do is do it up so you can see what it looks like when it goes through its initial startup process so there you have the samsung logo followed by the galaxy s animation then of course some verizon wireless animation it's a little stuttery considering 1 gigahertz processor in here and this is what the phone is going to look like exactly when you turn it on for the first time it defaults to the puzzle lock screen which some may prefer some people would rather have the sliding glass one that's an option which as you've seen on the unlocked versions and some of the other variants as well lets you just slide the screen all the way in any direction to unlock it but anyway this is exactly how it's going to look when you first turn it on and probably the most noticeable change to this model is the inclusion of bing as you can see right there microsoft struck struck a deal with verizon putting bing on many of their phones and so we have it embedded pretty deeply here this is the regular bing application then we also have a bing search bar up here and below we have the Bing Maps separate application along with obviously VZ navigation if you choose to go the pay route so here we'll go to the Bing Maps application service agreement and location services except usually location allow because we're inside here we're going to a lot of trouble getting any sort of satellite coverage so I don't think it's actually going to be able to find the location so yeah it's not it's the general area where we're at but a lot of people live in that area too so go back home here and then you can also see here is the VZ navigator version except oh this requires a downloading everything alright we're not going to do that so we'll go home while that supposedly downloads and take a look at the Bing search bar which allows you to either use swype or we don't want to do that we can just hit the search option pizza parlor and presumably it should look for a pizza place but maybe we didn't stop it quick enough so we'll see what happens thinking searching for City pizza parlor well that's not going to work alright well you get the gist of it it works pretty similarly to you know Google's version of voice search so the other things we have here are this is kind of handy the my verizon application and right now it's just setting it up and what this does is let you get to sort of a drill in depth to your um your usage your you know your monthly bill since since it since this is a review unit we're not going to have that option available but you can see that there's all sorts of different services on here friends and family family locator so seems like for the consumer this could be quite a handy little application and we'll go home and move on to something else so you'll notice right away that a few of the applications here are different than the ones that you'll find on other variants of the galaxy s as well as the international unlocked version first one here is the 3g mobile hotspot and this is a feature that you have to pay for through verizon but because this is review unit i think we get that turn on you know please turn a little hot spot so let's say see if we're able to do this and how long it takes okay so we should be able to go into the settings and there we are if we had a Wi-Fi device we be able to connect to it and use verizon's 3g network gone over the tethering so next up why don't we check out blockbuster application here mmm which of course is only a link to the blockbuster application in the android market so that's not going to help us too much what else do we have a car cradle we found that we've seen that before desk cradle that's handy if you're going to be using this as an alarm clock maybe at night or on your desk at work some other rising specific applications here are the mobile IM service which gives you access to a IM windows live and yahoo but as that window just said before not over Wi-Fi so you can only use this service over 3g which you may not particularly like that but that's how verizon wants it some other ones here are we already checked out my verizon mobile there's a skype mobile application which is really nice and sort of a welcome move that providers are starting to let people use their networks and also Wi-Fi networks as we've seen with tmobile and um a to make calls and you know not necessarily demand that people are using their minutes so we're not going to go through the whole setup here and then lastly we will take a look at the V CAST applications that come on this phone there are three V CAST applications which come pre-loaded on the phone including V CAST music recast tones and V CAST videos ich a stones is obviously ringtones and we won't take too much time with that but the music is powered by Rhapsody so it's sort of an interesting application let's see what we have here what's new and we've tried this a few times before and it's it's always downloaded songs pretty quickly connecting so okay we're not going to charge our review account for this song but you get the general gist of things and now we'll go back and you can also see V CAST videos unfortunately this also only works over 3g and the resolution is rather low so we go to staying in news and we want to watch you know CBS News these are all pre-recorded clips Zuckerberg gives in something and we'll turn this here you can see it's qvga at 256k with 32 kilobyte audio home so it looks all right but it's certainly not nearly as high resolution as the device is capable of displaying so we don't know if necessarily this is something that we would pay for each month if given the opportunity so other than that many of the things that you've seen on our past software tours are the same here the reskinned notifications bar all of the widgets are the same except for one single widget and that is the data usage widget which tells you how much data you've used so far this billing period and if you click it it takes you to the verizon mobile app which is sort of nice so that's something that will probably be helpful to a lot of people who are trying to watch their data especially as unlimited plans go the way of the dodo and everyone is subjected to tier pricing in the next few months and years so this has been Evan Blass for pocket now I hope you've enjoyed this software tour of verizon samsung fascinate aka the galaxy s and please tune in next time for our next video have a good day