Samsung Fascinate Reviews
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011That really Samsung’s Galaxy S phones have landed at AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, Verizon Wireless is last in line–which will not be necessarily a bad thing, considering Verizon customers have sufficient strong Android phones to choose from, including the Droid X, Droid 2, and Droid Incredible. So what does the Fascinate give the party on Big Red? This handset has the same vibrant AMOLED screen we loved on the earlier models, and in contrast to AT&T’s Captivate and T-Mobile’s Vibrant, this model includes an LED flash and mobile hotspot feature.
Design
In the of the Galaxy S devices, the Samsung Fascinate most closely resembles the Vibrant. The handset contains a neat and attractive slate design with rounded corners, and it’s slim and lightweight at 4.92 inches tall by 2.53 inches wide by 0.39 inch thick and 4.1 ounces. Though we dubbed the Vibrant as the sexiest of the series, in a few ways the Fascinate is more preferable.
Display
As with the other Galaxy S devices, the Fascinate’s AMOLED screen is, well, fascinating. Its 4-inch display dimensions are between the Droid 2 (3.7 inches) and the Droid X (4.3 inches), it includes a lower 800 x 480-pixel resolution in comparison to 854 x 480 for the two Motorola devices.
Keyboard
The Fascinate offers two strategies of input: Swype or the stock Android keyboard. The latter is easy make use of, even portrait mode, but when you experience how quick you can compose messages using Swype, it is challenging switch to anything else.
Interface
Like the most the Galaxy S series, the Fascinate runs on Android 2.1 with Samsung’s TouchWiz 3.0 interface. The latter is probably improved from previous versions, with enhanced functionality and a more polished look. To get started, you can find new widgets, including one called Feeds & Updates and the other called Buddies Now. Feeds & Updates streams updates from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and you will choose to display content from one,two, or all three of the social-networking sites, along with set the refresh rate, between 30 minutes to every day. Buddies Now could be such as a favorites list and lets you immediately call or text those contacts, along with reply to any one of their updates.
Music and Video
The TouchWiz ipod is touch-friendly and simple to navigate. It showcases album art nicely, too, with an iTunes Cover Flow-style user interface. Sound was clean over by myself earbuds, and decent via the external speakers. An example of the most intriguing popular features of the Fascinate is the Samsung Media Hub, that will include each one of the Galaxy S phones. Media Hub is Samsung’s reply to iTunes, a local store for getting music and video. Unfortunately, Media Hub seriously isn’t yet accessible to users at the moment; according to my contact at Samsung, Media Hub will launch this fall. Customers should be able to download the service via an over-the-air update.
Camera
The Fascinate has a 5-MP camera, but unlike those two phones, the Fascinate has a LED flash that worked well; even just in a completely darkened room, the flash provided enough light to use fairly decent pictures at short range. In the light, pictures were a lot better. The Fascinate’s camera also did a superb job adjusting the aperture even as we moved the phone from the street to the bright blue sky; the street wasn’t shrouded in darkness, nor was the sky passed.
Battery life
The Samsung Fascinate ships by using a 1,500mAh lithium ion battery by using a rated talk time of 7 hours or longer to 13 days of standby time. Within our battery drain tests, the smartphone provided 6.5 hours of continuous talk-time using one charge. During our review period, however, we had been capable of getting a full day’s use away from the smartphone–e-mail, Web browsing, music playback–before being forced to recharge at the end of the night. Read another Samsung cellphone review.