Overview, design and feel
Samsung is churning out affordable Android smartphones at the moment. Recently we've seen the Samsung Galaxy Gio, Samsung Galaxy Mini and Samsung Galaxy Ace, and now along comes the Samsung Galaxy Fit.
There's not a lot to distinguish these mobile phones to be honest – the name often being the key differentiator. With the Samsung Galaxy Fit you might think Samsung has added some fitness-related goodness to the phone.
But no. There's not a pre-installed tracking app to take advantage of the GPS, not a calorie counter or weight tracker, nothing.
So is this a 'fit' handset in the looks department, then?
Well, er, no. It's a smallish smartphone, measuring 110.2mm x 61.2mm x 12.6mm and weighing 108.2g.
It has a rather nice ribbed backplate (although a little on the flimsy side), and also a microUSB port sitting at the top edge is protected by a sliding cover.
But apart from that, things are fairly bland. The all-round black chassis has some shiny metal-looking elements in the shape of a surround to the giant Home button beneath the screen and edging to the front fascia, but it's nothing to shout about.
There's a microSD card slot that is protected by a hinged cover on the left edge, and a volume rocker here too. The right edge houses the main on-off switch.
There's no shortcut button for the camera, but you can easily pop its application icon on the home screen if you want quick access.
On the front beneath the screen, the massive Home button looks like a D-pad but isn't. To its left is a Menu button, to its right a Back button. These are touch-sensitive, but rather annoyingly they aren't backlit, remaining a fairly dull grey at all times.
The Samsung Galaxy Fit does feel quite comfortable in the hand, though, so while there are no standout physical features, there's nothing disastrous either.
Specifications-wise, we're talking average. This is a smartphone handset that'll set you back around £100 on PAYG or £150 if you buy it SIM-free, and from that bit of information you'll glean the level of specs you can expect.
There's HSDPA, GPS and Wi-Fi, of course, and a 5MP camera. The screen measures a reasonable 3.3 inches but delivers only 240 x 320 pixels, and Samsung has opted for Android 2.2 instead of the current top spec 2.3.
So can it do enough to beat competitors such as Samsung's own cheap-as-chips Galaxy Europa i5500 or our favourite budget Android smartphone, the Orange San Francisco?
Interface
The Samsung Galaxy Fit is based around Android 2.2, with a little help from Samsung in the form of skinning.
For example each of the three home screens has a fixed row of shortcuts along the bottom providing access to the dialler, contacts, messaging and the full apps list.
Adding shortcuts to any of the main screens is a simple matter of long-pressing and choosing whether you want to add a widget, shortcut or folder, or change the wallpaper.
There's not a huge range of widgets to choose from. On these lower-end smartphones Samsung doesn't generally go to town on these types of extras. But we did like the Program Monitor widget.
We've seen the Program Monitor before. It displays the number of apps currently running, and if you tap it you're taken into the Active Applications area so you can close any you don't need.
If you find the system starting to run slowly (and you probably will) this is a handy way of shutting down anything that is hogging memory resources.
You can get to this by long-pressing the Home button too. Then you see a list of recent apps, and there's a permanent link to the active applications area – Android calls it the Task Manager.
It is a good job you have such easy access to the Task Manager, because the processor runs at 600MHz and noticeably slows down as you have more and more apps opened.
The main apps menu is a very familiar-looking beast, with apps arranged across three screens. The shortcuts along the bottom of the screens remain intact and the way they are on the home screens, with dialler, contacts and messaging replicated and an additional shortcut out to the home screen.
Contacts and calling
Contacts are brought into the Samsung Galaxy Fit's phone book from external accounts, and you can configure Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Microsoft Exchange and Google.
There are various options depending on what you're synchronising, so you can be quite picky about the level of information you choose to download.
When you've pulled contacts in they are neatly presented alongside little thumbnail images. Four tabs give you access to Info, History, Activities and Media, (although the names are a little confusing).
Info gives you some basic contact data drawn from the source, such as email addresses. History brings together text messages and any Facebook communication, but voice calls aren't integrated.
Their history is stored separately in the call log. Activities is a list of Facebook news feeds nd Media, we assume, draws down Facebook media, but it didn't want to do so on our review handset.
The Samsung Galaxy Fit makes a reasonably good job at automatically joining contacts if their names on Facebook and Twitter are the same, but if your friends use a strange Twitter handle, then there'll be some manual joining to go through.
You can also go down the old-fashioned route and add contacts manually by filling in data on the screen. There's a fair amount of flexibility with the level of information you can add about each contact. Any field with a plus sign by it can be expanded for more related fields to be filled in.
Making a call is really straightforward, and you can do it either from the contacts area or from the dialler.
No smart dialling option from the dial pad, though, is really annoying. You can set up nine speed dials, which helps a little, but really, smart dialling is a basic requirement, we think.
Call quality is fine for a handset of this price. We found the volume was loud enough for us to hear in all but the noisiest of situations. The speaker could do with being a bit louder, though.
At this price you don't get fancy features such as noise reduction, but we didn't really feel we were being undersold on voice call capability.
Messaging
Messaging of all kinds relies on a good keyboard, and here the Samsung Galaxy Fit does quite well. Of course the screen is a bit squished, at just 3.3 inches, but even in portrait orientation we found it fairly comfortable to tap with two thumbs.
There's an option for predictive text and a great select tool for cutting and pasting. Just hold your finger down and up pops a select tool that you can drag around to decide what precisely you want to cut, copy or even share in an email or SMS.
If we have a quibble it is that in landscape you don't get to see very much of a text entry window. That's a factor of the size of the keyboard, of course, but if you need to edit a fairly long piece of text it could be irritating.
You've got a couple of keyboard types in portrait mode – a standard QWERTY layout and a traditional number pad-style one, as well as two handwriting recognition options.
You can also try voice input, which is activated by tapping a keyboard icon. We found this worked remarkably well, and it's quite a cool trick to show off to friends.
SMS messages sent and received are shown as threaded, and you can keep an eye on a few steps of a conversation quite easily.
Android keeps Gmail and other email accounts separate, and your Twitter and Facebook messages are kept separate too. You can get to them by using the Social Hub, which drops you into a window that enables you to view any accounts you've set up, as well as SMS text messages.
This is actually a bit of a trick, though, because all the on-screen widgets do is take you through to web apps.
Instant messaging fans will find Google Talk pre-installed, but nothing else in the same vein. If you want another IM tool, you'll have to download it from the Android Market.
Internet
With HSDPA, or 3G+, and Wi-Fi when you're near a hotspot, the mobile internet is well within your grasp on the Samsung Galaxy Fit.
The 3.3-inch screen with its 240 x 320 pixel resolution is something of a restriction as far as full mobile web enjoyment is concerned, though, simply because it doesn't deliver the quality or size of images that you'll get from a larger, higher resolution screen.
So, the TechRadar home page looks less than stunning in full-page view. The text is too small to read without zooming in.
Zoom in with a pinch to zoom motion and things get better, although the low screen resolution means text can look a little fuzzy.
Text reflowing is a bit dodgy, too. If you zoom in with a double-tap, reflowing seems to work OK.
But if you pinch to zoom to get even further in, reflowing ceases to function and you're left needing to do a lot of sweeping if you want to read a web page.
To add insult to injury, the 600MHz processor doesn't have the oomph to support Flash, so there's no chance of viewing embedded videos from the likes of the BBC News web site.
There's a YouTube client on the Samsung Galaxy Fit that gives you an option for video viewing, but a smartphone without Flash is hamstrung, really.
Camera
The Samsung Galaxy Fit camera is a bit of a mixed bag. It lacks a flash, so you're completely stuck if you want to try to take photos indoors, yet it offers a 5MP shooter which is more, frankly, than we'd expected for a smartphone at this price.
There's autofocus and a reasonable range of shooting modes, including a macro mode, panorama mode, negative, black and white and sepia filters.
There are also settings for landscape, portrait, night, sports, party/indoor, beach/snow, sunset, dawn, fall colour, fireworks, text, candlelight and backlight shooting.
These exposure settings didn't make a great deal of difference to any of the sample shots we took, and the filters were much more useful.
INDOORS: Indoors in a garden centre these flowers look quite vibrant and the Samsung Galaxy Fit doesn't do too bad a job of differentiation in what is a quite complex photo
Click here to see the full-size image
MACRO: The macro mode did quite well as long as we stayed no more than about eight inches from the subject. Here it's picked out a fair amount of detail and not lost sight of the background flowers either
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OUTSIDE: This is quite a tricky subject as there's not much colour differentiation, but the image captures textures well
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NEGATIVE: Negative filters are always fun to play around with
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BLACK-AND-WHITE: The black-and-white filter works well
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SEPIA: Sepia mode turns in some neat photos
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PANORAMIC: Panorama mode automatically shoots eight photos as you move the Samsung Galaxy Fit around, and stitches them together in a wide, narrow image. The stitching is quite clean, and you finish up with an image 2704 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall
Click here to see the full-size image
Video
Video shooting in the Samsung Galaxy Fit almost seems to be an afterthought. It is limited in resolution to a maximum of 320 x 240 with an alternative lower resolution of 176 x 144.
Quality is – as it was with the still camera – surprisingly good, and we're pleased that you can apply the filters to video as well as to photos.
Media
The Samsung Galaxy Fit offers several media options. There's music and video playback, YouTube streaming and an FM radio to be going on with.
Memory-wise things are a little strapped, with just 160MB of internal storage and a 2GB microSD card provided. But the card can be swapped for a higher capacity one easily enough.
The music player handles MP3, WAV and eAAC+, manages play lists and has a shuffle mode, but doesn't do anything particularly fancy and has no online features for downloading lyrics or other data.
It failed to pick up album art stored on our microSD card, too.
Audio itself is tinny to the point of irritation through the Samsung Galaxy Fit loudspeaker, and lacks volume. Samsung doesn't provide headphones, and when we used a good quality set of our own we found the tinny output continued, and rather offended our ears.
There's an equaliser built in, but it had no discernable effect on our sample tracks.
If you'd rather listen to the radio, then connect headphones and away you go. Four presets can be displayed on the main screen. There's autoscanning of channels, and we do like that you can repeat this while retaining favourite presets so these aren't lost.
Video playback is obviously limited in terms of enjoyment by the small screen and low resolution. The Samsung Galaxy Fit handles MP4, H.264 and H.263, but nothing fancy like DivX.
Streamed video from YouTube was unproblematic, although again the low resolution does the handset no favours. The screen is a bit on the dark side for video viewing and colours aren't very vibrant.
Battery, Maps and Apps
Samsung ships the Galaxy Fit with a 1350mAh battery, which it says is good for up to 620 minutes of 2G talk, 370 minutes of 3G talk, 640 hours on 2G standby and 460 hours on 3G standby.
We didn't anticipate the battery getting through more than a day of use, and we were right. Or, at least, had we not charged it up overnight every day, it looked like it would have been depleted by morning.
With social networking updates on offer, Samsung has a target demographic in mind that's going to want to use them and this regular polling gives the battery quite a lot of work to do.
The same goes for having your email regularly checked, and if you use the GPS you'll drain the battery even quicker.
Samsung puts a very handy connection manager onto the pull down notification bar. You can simply tap to enable or disable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS – and this alone could help you conserve battery power. You can also use this bar to easily turn off screen rotation and mute the handset.
Maps
Google Maps is of course on the Samsung Galaxy Fit, and it comes with the usual array of layers including some 3D mapping in certain areas - impressive given the relatively meagre processor.
There's point-to-point navigation on offer, too, but do be careful about using the GPS too much. As we mentioned in the battery and connectivity section, this really does drain the battery.
Apps
Samsung adds a few apps to the Android standards. There's Memo, which can be used to make little notes to yourself – and colour code them if you like.
QuickOffice is also here for viewing, but not creating, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF documents.
Samsung has also included a voice recorder so you can make quick little notes to yourself.
In addition, Samsung offers its own applications market, called Samsung Apps, which is a standard feature of its smartphones and is intended to supplement the Android Market.
Hands-on gallery
Official gallery
Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Fit is a £150 Android handset, and for that kind of outlay you really can't expect a fantastic smartphone.
What's important is that the compromises that have been made to meet a price are the right ones, and that no cheap corner cutting has gone on that diminishes the handset's potential.
To that end, we think there are some plus points here, but also some compromises we aren't too happy with.
We liked
The little settings area you get when you drag down the notifications bar gives quick access to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, silent mode and screen rotation, which is very handy.
The task manager widget and access to the task manager via a long press of the home button makes it relatively easy to shut down power and processor-hogging apps.
We disliked
Screen resolution is simply too low for some activities to be rewarding. Web browsing at 320 x 240 is never fun, because text looks fuzzy, and the similarly priced Orange Monte Carlo manages a 4.3-inch WVGA display for the cash.
The lack of Flash support makes using the Samsung Galaxy Fit for multimedia a much less rewarding experience than it should be, thanks to the impossibility of viewing much embedded video.
The lack of a flash on the camera also annoys us. We know smartphone flashes are never wonderful, but they can be useful at times.
Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Fit doesn't do much for us, we're afraid. It doesn't do anything spectacularly badly but it doesn't do anything spectacularly well, either, and the low res screen seems, well, too low-res. It has no particular USPs over many other similarly-priced lower-end Android smartphones.
We still can't get away from the fact that if you are strapped for cash and want an Android phone, the Orange San Francisco is one of our favourite handsets.
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1 comments:
One of my friend is using this phone last some months. He is happy with this because it's a affordable phone with all new features. Now you can read all mobile reviews in Hindi visit: Samsung Hindi
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