Gadgetory

this episode of TechnoBuffalo is brought to you by netflix go to WWF flexkom slash buffalo for your free trial membership today sovereign John Rhett injure in TechnoBuffalo here at the full review for you of the Samsung Galaxy S 4G it is the newest member of the Galaxy S line of phones and this one's got an extra G for all of you t-mobile fans out there so let me run through the specs very quickly and then we'll get into all the review goodness so it's got a four inch Super AMOLED screen with a resolution of 480 by 800 it's being powered by Android 2.2 with Samsung's own touch wits plenty more on that coming up on the back it's got a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus which can shoot video at 1280 by 720 so that's 720p for all your folks keeping track at home at 30 frames per second for its Wi-Fi NISS it's got 802 11 be GNN all being powered by a 1 gigahertz very familiar now Humminbird processor batteries been upped a little bit to 1650 milliamp hours so all the specs are great the phone does quite a lot but browser and all the rest sets suffer and talk about are no use if the thing can't make phone calls so let's first talk about call quality I do a 20 call test sort of test the phone acumen of these devices I do it in various areas throughout my community places where I know cell signal is degraded to get a sense of how it sounds and whether or not we have any drop calls now certainly it's going to vary depending on where you are and signal strength where I am right now I generally get about 2 to 4 bars of t-mobile 4G service you can see right now it is showing 2 bars up there call quality is outstanding on the Galaxy S 4G it was crystal clear people had no problem hearing me at all they couldn't even tell was on my cellphone I did test a Wi-Fi calling as well and that worked just as nicely there was any popping or white noise I did however experience a few dropped calls on the device speakerphone is just average so if rely on speakerphone while you're in a car or in a meeting for an allowed boardroom you might want to look to a Bluetooth headset I found that to be a little bit disappointing I was able to bring in a pretty strong signal strength number 4G wasn't present I dropped back down to about five bars of 3G which has been just about on par with other key mobile devices so the radio in here seems to be just as strong as the other phones and again certainly that's going to vary depending on where you are okay so now let's get to the fun stuff and the phone review and let's start with the skin that is sitting on top of Android 2.2 not Android 2.3 Gingerbread this is a scoop of Froyo so I've talked in the past about not being the biggest fan of TouchWiz and that still holds true but Samsung has made some improvements that have a dress on my concerns so one of the improvements and things actually I'm starting to like about TouchWiz and this is very familiar if you guys that have used an HTC device to sort of do that you can get access now to your home screens and further you can now rearrange them which certainly puts it on par with other skins that we've seen in the past I do like the addition to TouchWiz pull down the tray here you get shortcuts for Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS silent so you can change your profile silent and vibrate and autorotation to understand why more manufactured in stock Android don't do that make it really easy to change your profiles if you're like me and you're in a lot of meetings or you don't want your phone to ring or keep it quiet it's really nice sort of have that setting experiment you can add a widget that'll do it to the homescreen but it's very nice to have it on every screen or just by pulling down the tray the applications here are the same as we've seen on other TouchWiz devices it's sort of laid out in this icon the horizontal scrolling I don't like that I don't like that each one is sort of encapsulated into its square but I do understand that that is just personal preference one of the nice things about Android however is if you don't like TouchWiz you don't like the way the launcher works here you can go ahead and put on your own launcher I just did a clean restore the device but when I was testing it I was using launcher Pro which completely redesigns and redoes how look so that is definitely one of the positives of Android the web browser here is pretty standard what you'd expect from an Android web browser go ahead and take a look all your pinch to zoom functionality is there it works pretty quickly there wasn't much of a lag scrolling I didn't getting that checkerboard pattern the hummingbird processor definitely keeps up with what you need to do flash was not so watchable was definitely a bit Sutter II I'd probably recommend unless you need it for a particular reason a turning flash off not only because it's not the most usable that's also going to be a big battery drain so the screen here is Super AMOLED which means it's absolutely beautiful - gorgeous screen but it still is first generation of Super AMOLED and as we've seen with other samsung galaxy s devices there is a bit of a tint to the screen it's a little bit of a bluish gray tint and it's nothing that certainly you can't get by and if you don't look at it next to another device you don't notice it but if you pull in something that doesn't have that tint here's an iPhone 4 it becomes a little bit more apparent now I got very used to it and I'm willing to sacrifice that tint to have the outstanding visibility in direct sunlight the really dark blacks and the very rich and beautiful colors so Super AMOLED for me is a huge huge huge addition but if you think you might be bothered by that little tint definitely go and check it out in stores you can look at any of the galaxy s devices they all have the same screen let's go ahead and hit home here one sort of issue that I had with the galaxy s devices and some have them some don't if we flip this guy on its rear end no flash that seems to be a really common feature now on pretty much every smartphone there's some sort of LED flash we don't have that here on the Galaxy S 4G and while we have this thing turned over and we're looking at its butt and let's talk about this back it looks like there's some texture on there with that gray but that is just an illusion it is completely hard plastic that's one of the issues that I had with the phone the build quality doesn't feel that well let's just say high quality it's got a nice feel to it it's got a nice look it feels a little bit flimsy though so when I say nice feel it's solidly it was rather fuel solid but you can definitely the sense it if you drop the phone the back is completely going to fall off from a design standpoint it's going to come down to personal preference what you like it's got sort of that chrome ring around it which looks very reminiscent of another device that we've seen these two definitely look like they are distant cousins iPhone 3GS right here go ahead and push that off oh and all the package comes together very nicely and things work as you'd expect from a modern Android device being a 4G phone I was very impressed with the download speeds from t-mobile's HSPA+ network certainly I got nowhere near the 21 plus that they advertised but I was definitely getting about three to four sometimes I got five or six speeds on the down thats megabits per second and on the up as you can see right here I was very strong on the up polian sometimes even as fast as 3 megabits per second up so if he uses for hotspot capabilities you're going to be very very nicely set go ahead and hit home I haven't always been the biggest fan of capacitive buttons sometimes I find them unresponsive very good here on the Galaxy S 4G camera quality is fine it looks about as it expected the year resolution front camera works just about as you'd expect the VGA front camera to work and it does use the quick software for video chat so all in all if you're in the market for a pretty capable pretty robust Android smartphone and you're on Team moat when you want to make sure it can do for G this is going to be a very very good option and for those of you folks that may have a vibrant which was the previous I suppose generation version of the galaxy s on t-mobile this definitely represents a nice upgrade just for the battery but for the additions to TouchWiz and those 4G speeds so on a one to five scale it gets a very very solid actually four and a half however there is a new generation of smartphones coming out very quickly that are going to be using a dual core processor chipset and are going to have improved amount of RAM so while this is a very capable phone for now I'll certainly serve you throughout the course of your two-year contract if you're in the market for a phone right now you may want to wait for another two to three months to see what's coming down the pipeline guys I am John retinas and TechnoBuffalo and this has been a review of the Samsung Galaxy S 4G I want to thank our friends at Netflix for sponsoring this video be sure to check out netflix.com slash buffalo for your free trial membership and sign up using that link to let them know that we sent you I've been reading the comments on the console war series and I know you guys have an xbox to ps3 or Wii downstairs or upstairs on your television you could stream a ton of really awesome movie and TV shows right to your TV from your game console with Netflix so be sure to check them out and let them know that Jon Sencha