Gadgetory

first there was the Samsung Galaxy s5 which we reviewed back in April then there was the galaxy s5 lte-a aka the prime which we also reviewed and then the beefed up Galaxy s5 active for AT&T not to be left behind Sprint has landed its own variant of Samsung's flagship the galaxy s5 sport a very slight twist on its predecessors marketed toward a you guessed it sporty people so just how fit is this Fitness phone for your physical fancies let's find out i'm michael fisher with pocket now's video review of the galaxy s5 sport the most important thing to understand about the galaxy s5 sport is that at its heart it's a Galaxy s5 we'll explore what that means these days in a coming episode of after the buzz but for now just know that if you like or hate the Galaxy s5 you'll feel the same way about the sport it's only slightly larger and heavier than the stock s5 but its industrial design makes it look much bigger and while it's rubberized battery door gives it more grip on the back it's totally smooth sides actually make it more slippery more difficult to pick up and there's no shock proofing here to protect it when you do drop it though we're happy to see the usual ip67 water and dust resistance carried over just so long as all the battery cover snaps are secured around front are the same hardware keys we saw on the s5 active all of which offer pretty good tactility and the 5.1 inch AMOLED panel is capable of the same extremes of brightness and not so brightness making it probably the most versatile smartphone screen we've used and powering it all is the same Snapdragon 801 processor backed up by the same very capable internals powered by the same battery pack that charges from zero to full in about two hours what's not the same is the software oh it's still Android 4.4 shellacked over with samsung touchwiz so you get all the usual benefits of multi window Knox and so on but sprint has loaded the sport with more carrier bloatware than we've seen in the States in a long time it maybe ever there are the usual folders full of add-ons that carriers consider perks and visual voicemail that's only free for a month pre-installed shortcuts to download eBay and I Heart Radio and a bunch of other stuff a carrier portal that bothers you with notifications and a featured apps widget that does a pretty good job of crashing for no reason Oh in TouchWiz itself also crashes on occasion this isn't a pic on Sprint all carriers do this to varying degrees there's just a lot in this case much of it natch is Fitness focused now the last time we tried doing an in-depth fitness piece on pocket now I spent the day in a very cold kayak and nobody watched the thing so we contented ourselves with a more superficial pass this time and we still found some pretty good stuff not the Fitness wallpapers with cliched motivational phrases those are pretty weak but the pre-installed MapMyFitness suite is pretty cool we especially like the visual trail on the map for walking running or biking and the audio coaching feature seems pretty awesome too sprint is also offering a year's free subscription to the MapMyFitness MVP program $30 value you can open the app through their persistent pull tab on the home screen which also gives you s health some health news and Spotify and by the way Spotify also comes with a few free months of premium membership but that pull tab tends to pop up even when it's not needed and we also get random system update notifications even though no update is available it's possible that our demo unit is defective if it turns out we're the only ones reporting this experience we'll revisit the sport in a follow-up Sprint's HD voice technology is available across most of its network now but we didn't have another HD voice enabled sprint device available to test with plain old cellular calls were fine if a little muffled over our six day test period and the speakerphone was usually nice and loud as well in terms of coverage Sprint suffered significantly indoors often dropping LTE in favor of 3G but it's never as bad as the signal meter thinks it is we were usually able to maintain calls and data sessions with just one bar of service and when we had a 4G connection speeds were good that's important for sharing photos among other things and photos were exactly as we've come to expect from the galaxy s5 great in daylight ok in dim conditions not so hot in low light battery life was also on par with what we've seen before from Samsung's 2014 flagship if all that seems mighty familiar it should one more time this phone basically is a stock galaxy s5 with a few altered hardware specs no additional durability and a very heavy software suite that's a textbook case of trying too hard the fitness and Spotify promotional savings amount to just shy of a hundred dollars in the best case which is possibly why Sprint is charging an extra Benjamin for this device online compared to its non sporty sibling but frankly this just seems like a case of same but different if your life is all about fitness and not much else this might be the phone for you otherwise if you want a galaxy s5 on Sprint you should probably just get the real one for a refresher on why check out our full review of the standard and prime Galaxy s5s and see how their bulky camouflage compatriot over at AT&T fared in our galaxy s5 active review please like this video and subscribe if you did enjoy it until next time this has been michael fisher with pocket now captain to phones on twitter thanks for watching and we'll see you next time