Samsung Stratosphere Review
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The camera software is quite robust, allowing for numerous settings and adjustments, such as the image resolution, effects, shooting modes, scene modes, ISO, and GPS tagging. Pictures that we took while using the 5MP Autofocus camera outside on a sunny day have nice detail to them, though the colors are a bit oversaturated and bright areas have the tendency to be overexposed. Inside images aren't great, as they look grainy and occasionally had trouble focusing in low-light, but the single LED flash does a good job of illuminating a dark environment.
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Camera interface | |||
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Outdoor samples shot with the Samsung Stratosphere | ||||
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Strong | Medium | Low light | Darkness with flash |
Indoor samples | |||
Samsung Stratosphere Sample Video:
Multimedia:
The tabs on the top of the music player allow sifting through your collection by artist, album and playlists, or display all at once. The current song keeps going in the background when the screen is locked, and you can even pull down the notification area to display the controls - not a bad idea, but we wish there was also a desktop music widget. Aside from showing the album cover while playing a selection, we like how there's an option to enable a visualization to run above it. We're happy to say that music quality from its rear speaker was more than vibrant with some serious power to make every tone extremely audible to the ear, as there is a nice selection of equalizer settings and effects to choose from.
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The music player | |||
The standard Android Gallery will show all of your pictures and videos categorized into folders for easy viewing, and with the Super AMOLED display, it does a wonderful job showing ripped videos or ones streamed from YouTube. We tested the video player with files of various resolutions and bitrates, encoded with H.264, MPEG-4, DivX and Xvid, and all of them were able to play without a problem.
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The standard Android Gallery | ||
Software:
There is also a selection of included apps, such as Amazon Kindle, Blockbuster, City ID, Lets Golf 2, Google Maps with Navigation, NFL Mobile, NFS Shift, Slacker, VCast Music, VCast Tones, VZ Navigator, and Verizon Video.
One app that is nice to have included is QuickOffice, as you can open or create Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files, and also open Adobe PDF files with it.
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QuickOffice | |||
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16 Comments
3. terabyteRouser posted on 25 Oct 2011, 10:18 1 0
I used this phone and it's pretty slow. I would give it a 6.
4. burtonsnow8 posted on 25 Oct 2011, 14:08 0 0
4g on my stratosphere in LA worked great. 44Mbps down, 22Mbps up. No switching back and forth. Just north of LA in the valley I was hitting 22Mbps down and 11Mbps up. No drops of any kind and pages loaded quickly. Wirefly loaded in less than 5 seconds on 4g, RARELY had half a second or less of checkerboarding when zooming/browsing the pages, but it was very responsive. On wifi it was just a tad slower than my roommates 4s.
So far with moderate usage (40+ txts/email, 30 minutes of call, 30 minutes of gaming), my phone has been on a full charge for about 36 hours. At about 20% currently. I was in a 4g area for only about 3-4 hours though, so it would probably be less with full 4g.
5. RORYREVOLUTION posted on 25 Oct 2011, 19:54 1 0
At first I thought this was a harsh review given the score. Then I remembered "oh wait, this is the Epic from nearly 2 years ago just with LTE" Since it's got Gingerbread but that's all it'll have. If you are in a strong LTE area and need a keyboard, you should still wait. Wait for the Droid 4 or deal with not having one because this is completely outdated from the start.
8. burtonsnow8 posted on 27 Oct 2011, 14:41 0 0
It is an older model, but there are some improvements over the epic4g. I consider myself a techie, had a TP2 before this which I built custom ROMs for. If this phone can't do what you want with whats out there than you are looking for something not on the market. As long as I keep the task manager cleared (which why would anyone not, even on a dual core 1gb phone, for the battery savings alone) this phone handles everything. Phone arena loaded blazing fast, thats with all the flash content. I very well might be trying to rationalize my purchase but for what I do (moderate use, business use, e-mail) it is awesome.
9. sarahkap83 posted on 16 Nov 2011, 20:20 1 0
Someone doesn\'t know what they\'re talking about. I have this phone and I like it a lot. It has all the major features that new phones have.
Also...I use my keyboard ALL OF THE TIME and...I definitely don\'t feel the keys scraping against the display when I slide it in and out. Just saying....
It\'s a solid phone and it\'s free at radio shack. What is there to complain about?!
10. jen_y posted on 25 Nov 2011, 21:15 0 0
I love the phone only problem the battery last 18 hours and today it was over heating
12. ILikeBubbles posted on 24 Dec 2011, 03:58 2 0
i think people keep forgetting this would be considered ENTRY/MID LEVEL... waiting for the Droid 4 would defeat the purpose.. the Droid is on a whole different tier.. there still needs to be mid level smartphones out there to help people break out of the messaging phone or feature phone catagory..
16. asmallchild posted on 21 Jan 2012, 13:34 0 0
I had network connection issues with this phone.
Moved to the Nexus.
Apparently the Nexus has network connection issues for some people. Not for me.
Thank god.
Otherwise I would have shunned Samsung phones forever.
17. sondamom posted on 25 May 2012, 20:26 0 0
I don't like the camera on mine...there is a blue line that goes down all my pictures I take and I have only had it 3 weeks or so.
19. keyboardmom posted on 20 Jul 2012, 18:23 0 0
I don't really like this phone. the camera is pretty good and the touch screen is good. I don't like the size of the keyboard.... i don't like the way I have to answer it... I hang up on people a lot. Don't like typing on the touch screen... I'd rather have a tablet for browsing and reading email.... It does some things OK, others .. not so OK in my opinion. I'm going to go to something else.... i guess for the price... what do you expect.
It's only an entry level smartphone. I guess I like a smart tablet and a dumb phone.
20. irfanskt1 posted on 04 Sep 2012, 05:28 0 0
i am screwed.........i live in a country where no other natwork then gsm is available and i have this phone gifted to me........and i have no idea how i can use my gsm sim card in this phone....if someone has the idea of doing that pleas let me know...........
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