Gadgetory

greetings all this is deke Adams of pocketnow.com and today we're taking a closer look at the software on the samsung galaxy s2 epic 4g touch for sprint so sit back relax and enjoy the show so let's start off with the lock screen it's not a normal slide to unlock like I prefer it's this picture unlock so you have to drag the picture off the screen to unlock it and if you're used to being able to swipe very quickly it doesn't tends to get stuck so you have to make a concerted effort to make sure that you just swipe it all the way off the screen the first world problem obviously so and then we move into the TouchWiz application which the samsung's default UI and frankly it's very quick and normally I like to replace the UI very quickly but this has been outstanding and if you tap and hold on the numbers down here the dots you can actually slide back and forth very quickly between the screens to choose which page you're going to be on you can also add pages if you like so you can add more icons to your screen if you so choose to move an icon around on the screen you tap and hold and then you can slide it back and forth will show you another method here in a few minutes which is kind of a neat functionality of this particular device the app drawer has the ability to be sorted view type you can do a customizable grid and then lay out the apps as you see fit at alphabetical grid or an alphabetical list so that you can kind of slide back and forth here between the apps in the alphabetical grid list and the customizable grid this when you move to the and restart the beginning you swipe backwards or forwards respectively you actually move right through the apps again so no moving to the end and then stopping then scrolling all the way back to be able to get to your previous app which I really do enjoy if we go into the display then there is a screen mode here and I've noticed on some people's comments this particular device they complain that the skin tones are to read if you have it in dynamic mode you can see that change there it does make the Reds much more bright and brilliant which could affect skin tones whereas a movie it's almost dulls the picture a little bit i'm live left non-standard because so far that's what i like another functionality that's different here on this epic 4g touch is the power saving mode where you can enable and turn items off and on depending on the battery level so if your battery is getting low you can tell it to turn off the Wi-Fi or turn off bluetooth gps you can change the brightness you can change the screen timeout and also have some power saving tips another item down here is motion settings and this is where i was talking about some of the new functionality in the sense UI you have turnover which allows you to turn the device over to mute it which is not terribly new tilt so to reduce or enlarge gallery pictures you can actually put two fingers on the screen and then tilt the device forward and backwards to zoom the pinch to zoom still works panning allows you to tap and hold an icon on the desktop and then twist the device back and forth to move that icon to another screen and then DoubleTap allows you to set the device into the voice command mode and then tap twice on the top of the device to activate the voice command mode will to cover that in just a second there are some tutorials here to show you how those each individually work which are really helpful but if you leave the notifications on some of these devices it will also show you for example when we open up the internet browser it was going to pop up and tell us that we have the ability to touch the screen and tilt it back and forth you can turn those notifications off thankfully it's got swype it's got the samsung keypad which I don't really care for and I installed the gingerbread variant of the keyboard which is the one I actually prefer swipe as I find it works just fine the Samsung keypad was frankly just annoying some of the apps on this device all share is pretty typical for devices these days although I don't really use it myself Google Books is on here the gallery is the Samsung default gallery as one would expect the internet browser will come back to in just a minute key is air or keys there however you want to pronounce that it's kind of a neat functionality because it gives you the ability to connect to this device via Wi-Fi to move data back and forth rather than having to connect a cable which I appreciate media hub is pretty typical of Samsung you can rent / movies and content there Nova 2 HD is actually the full version not a demo you do have to download about a 350 Meg add-on afterwards to get it to run but it brand very well nascar app is part of the bloat but you can uninstall both of these which is really really nice some of the other functionality or software applications got the social hub which I just don't like using because i find the default apps are usually better Polaris Office for your office viewing apps Sprint ID which we've seen before and again thankfully doesn't lock you into Sprint ID some more of the like the music plus print radio TV and movies some of those you can uninstall on some you can't voice command is vlingo wrapped up for samsung and that's how that double tap works for doing some of the voice command options and then you've got visual voicemail as well which is a nice addition if you look over here here's the the voice command button and in a driving mode as well so here's the default camera app we've got a series of buttons over here and your Settings button here can actually change those shortcuts to items that you would like to use instead all of those settings are available listed right here in this settings menu but if you have some that you like to quickly change for example the autofocus type or the exposure you can customize those to your heart's content then a slider over here to switch between movie and camera mode which will show in just a second this is for the front-facing versus rear camera tap to focus on areas and it does have a notification tone and then you can tap to hold to get ready to take your picture to set the focus and then when you move your finger up it will take the shot if you move your finger to the interior of the screen like this it won't actually take the shot for you which is nice when you're trying to actually take a photo without having a dedicated camera key switching over to the video camera mode will automatically pop up and ask you what mode you want but tapping on it doesn't actually do anything if they click the back button in order to clear that there is the option to turn the flash on for videos but just simply tapping it does not turn the flash on until you tell it to record and then you have some additional options here as well to change some effects and the resolution video quality etc so I got it loaded up to the mobile pocket now but you can see right here it popped up this message learn about tilt tap and hold two points on the you can tilt the device back and forth and shows a little demo and you can tell it do not ask again and it won't prompt you again after it's done but I'm going to scroll down here on the metella to open up the desktop version of pocketnow.com and we can see we're on Wi-Fi here and it's already loaded up most of the page I'm gonna go ahead and just start scrolling or zooming in here scrolling up and down it's very quick and snappy I'm not having any trouble scrolling up and down if I go into video content here scroll here there's our video content that we can actually tap and view if we wanted they have the ability to open up multiple windows if you like stop you can change your browser brightness outside of the normal screen brightness which is awesome as well another way to change your brightness is the android version you hold tap and hold the bar up here for a few seconds and you can slide your finger back and forth on the brightness if you don't already have it set again as mentioned in the hardware review since this is part of software I haven't had any troubles with the device locking up due to applications I really don't have to close the apps really with the task manager other than when I was trying to do some speed tests like quadrant or smart bench I closing apps at that point that it already been launched by me such as touchdown which didn't need to be running as part of the quadrant test so overall it's been a fantastic device and an admirable upgrade to the epic 4g line across the board also in regards to the camera and the video cam we have a photo editor app and a movie made video maker app both of which I found to be rather depressingly simple while some people might have fun tweaking their images a little bit with these apps I didn't find it terribly useful and rather would use something like retro camera to take more interesting photos if that was what I was wanting to do that wraps up our closer look of the software on the samsung galaxy s2 epic 4g touch for sprint give any comments or questions leaving below thanks for watching