Gadgetory

hi this is dieter bohn for the verge and we are looking at the samsung galaxy s blaze 4g on t-mobile which is a device that is the spittin image of a blackberry bold 9790 it looks almost identical to a blackberry from the back but it is kind of a throwback Android device its galaxy s device it's even got an external microSD card slot but this phone primarily exists as a showcase for t-mobile's advanced hspa+ network which is theoretically capable of downloading a 42 megabits in my testing of course I never came anywhere near that and neither will you but I was getting you know regularly you know 1415 down and pushing around four megabits up which is as good as I've ever seen on HSPA device and I'm just really impressed with the download speeds when I've got good t mobile signal which unfortunately isn't that often the screen is only 800 x 480 and it is a super amoled screen which means it's a pentile matrix so text isn't that Chris but color fidelity is great the colors are really crisp and vibrant really happy with that in terms of performance it's actually a much better than I expected it has a dual core Qualcomm s3 processor clocked at 1.5 gigahertz and that is also another change from the other galaxy s devices from you know the year and a half ago but you know as you can see here on the web browser it actually manages to scroll much better than I expected based on just a you know dual core processor really pleased with that and throughout the device the snappiness was quite good this unfortunately is running Android 2.3 point 6 not ice cream sandwich and obviously I'm very displeased with that it's also running Samsung's custom skin the TouchWiz skin which you know it's bright and colourful which matches with this AMOLED screen but it's a little bit garish to my tastes otherwise though I don't really have any major complaints about Samsung's skin it seems relatively snappy doesn't seem to slow the phone down however you start to run into problems as you're seeing here with what t-mobile has done with the device so Samsung wanted to include the software but it needed to make it download so you had to go to unknown sources it's just a terrible user experience what's worse is that t-mobile has laden this phone with just a huge amount of crap where apps there's antivirus apps there's two or three different custom storefronts to download apps there's custom t mobile apps for tracking your family for a calendar and a whole bunch of other junk that's mixed in with actually good apps like Netflix and Google Music and zinnia so it's a pretty decent phone for 149 99 on contract but all that crap software makes it hard to recommend