Samsung Galaxy I7500 Preview

Introduction:

The Big Bang of the Android universe happened not a long time ago and its expansion is about start. The first galaxy to have ever been conquered there resigned itself to the power of the Battleship T-Mobile G1 that was, until several months ago, the only one battling on the new frontier. A new player, the HTC Magic, entered the arena a bit later and Samsung has recently announced their Galaxy I7500 space traveler will be traversing the realm really soon. It´s not that dissimilar from the HTC Magic, but sports a 5-megapixel camera and AMOLED display.

Design:

Samsung Galaxy I7500’s outer appearance does remind us of the HTC Magic with its particular shapes and overall look, aside from the navigational buttons located below the 3.2-inch capacitive AMOLED touchscreen that also features a light sensor to help regulate its brightness. Image quality is great with saturated and beautiful colors. The I7500 is a bit thinner compared to the Magic, and is actually the most slender looking Android cell phone as of now. Instead of a trackball, it sports a D-Pad with OK button in the middle and there is another button on the left hand part of the pad with an arrow up on it, which is, basically, the alternative of the MENU button found on HTC manufactured Android phones. The smallest button bears no marking and actually gets you back to the home screen. As a whole, we do like all navigational buttons, because they are large enough and we hope they remain the same on the retail version.



You can compare the Samsung Galaxy I7500 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

There is a small button on the right hand side of the phone, marked with a tiny padlock, that doesn’t seem to be working on our prototype. We guess it will be operational on the final units and the current function of the end button, that now locks and unlocks display, will be changed. Both 3.5mm jack and microUSB port are on the upper side of the device and we welcome these with open arms.  The back side hosts a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and a loudspeaker.

Interface:

We went over the Android 1.0 interface in our review of the T-Mobile G1. The Samsung Galaxy runs version 1.5 of the same OS that is more widely known as the Cupcake update. The differences between these two are few and none of them affects the interface, although other major improvements have been made. Unfortunately, you won´t see anything different from what an updated T-Mobile G1 or HTC Magic shows off.

The home screen consists of three separate pages, where you can place different widgets, shortcuts to functions and applications of your choice. The good thing is this allows you to personalize all three of them to your own taste. They all utilize the same wallpaper and you navigate between them as if walking around in the picture.

One serious disadvantage of the first Android OS was the lack of a virtual QWERTY keyboard, but the version 1.5 seems to have resolved the problem. You can use the feature in both landscape and portrait mode with buttons getting larger and more comfy to press in the first case. Moreover, you can turn on vibration or sound feedback to get a better feel of each press you do. What we also quite like is that keyboard is at your disposal anytime you want; you just need to hold the navigational button with the arrow up pressed for a while.



Browser:

Some improvements and novelty features have been introduced into the browser as well, such as Copy/Paste, searches in text on the current page or Search and Go functions, which are all now located into a single field. Moreover, your favorite web pages, browsing history and most visited sites are now available on tabs at the top of the screen. Although our unit is an early prototype, we decided to open several web pages and we are happy to say we experienced no issues whatsoever. Despite the fact browser doesn´t support flash content, YouTube player gets visualized without a hitch, but if you start a video, the phone switches over to the preloaded YouTube player instead of loading it into the on-page one.



Camera:

The Samsung Galaxy I7500 sports a 5-megapixel camera wrapped up in standard Android OS interface. All new things here are brought forth through the 1.5 version update. One such novelty is that you can easily share your snapshots and videos and get them over to Picasa, YouTube or Gmail, although the option to choose other service providers like Facebook, Flickr or Photobucket is missing. Another shortcoming of the original OS version has also been addressed and you can now capture videos. Take a look at our test video; just keep in mind not jump to conclusions on the capture quality, since this is a prototype unit.

Samsung Galaxy I7500 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution

Finally, we need to point out that, at some point, we cherished the hope Samsung would provide interface with options similar to those offered by their newest makes (the Star, Preston, OMNIA HD). Unfortunately, we did not luck out.



Expectations:

Now, we have made it to the end of our preview of the Samsung Galaxy I7500. We really like its overall appearance, but as a whole, it looks way too much like the HTC Magic. Its interface is not any different as well, although we did expect to see minor personalization that would have, on one hand showcased the manufacturer´s own personality, and shed a new light on the Android on the other. The Samsung Galaxy I7500 is to come out at the beginning of June in Europe. But the HTC Magic has been around for quite a while now, so both trumps the I7500 has to ruff the competition out are its 5-megapixel camera and AMOLED screen. Unfortunately, we still do not have any information as to whether or not any American carrier has signed up for it and about to include the device into their catalogue.

Samsung Galaxy I7500 Video Preview: