Samsung Vibrant – Battery life could have been better
Samsung Vibrant has a four inch Super AMOLED touch screen and I think this is the reason behind the name. The screen supports about 16 million colors along with a WVGA resolution. The screen is extremely sharp and very vibrant. Text is really easy to read and the screen is readable even in bright daylight. If you ask me to compare this display with the iPhone’s I’d say that the Vibrant’s screen is a bit more saturated. It shows rich colors and the blacks too are deeper. On the other side, iPhone’s screen is crisper. Vibrant’s screen is also quite responsive. It registered my taps quite well and the scrolling too was fast and smooth. Apart from that, there is built in accelerometer which quickly changes the screen rotation when you tilt the phone. You have plenty of input options like the Samsung’s own keyboard, Swype, and the standard Android keyboard.
Below the screen, there are four touch sensitive buttons for search, menu, back and home. There are not too many physical buttons on the Samsung Vibrant but on the left, there is a volume rocker along with a power/lock key on the right. On the top, there is microUSB port right next to a 3.5 mm headphones jack. The camera, as usual, is located on the back but I was disappointed to see that there was no flash.
The features of Samsung Vibrant include multimedia and text messaging, voice dialling, conference calling, speakerphone and all possible wireless options – 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. GPS is also there onboard. There is no limit to the entries in the phone book and the SIM card can hold another 250 contacts. A single entry can take multiple phone numbers, photo caller IDs, group IDs, IM handles, e-mail addresses, etc. Contact information can also be merged from various accounts like Gmail, Outlook and Facebook.
I tried syncing my Twitter, Outlook, Yahoo and Gmail accounts to Samsung Vibrant and there were no problems. There were a few occasions when information of some of my friends didn’t merge but I won’t complain about that since I have seen that in other Android phones too. There is also some thing called Sweep feature for the Contacts app where in if you swipe left to right, the person’s number is automatically dialled and if you swipe from right to left, you get a message box.
Some applications worth talking about here are memo pad, voice recorder, calculator, visual voice mail, TeleNav GPS, Layar’s reality browser, ThinkFree Office Suite and Mini Diary app. There are tons of apps, both paid and free, that can be downloaded from the Android market. Samsung Vibrant has a five megapixel camera which supports HD video recording. You don’t get flash and because of this, photos in low light conditions are pretty awful. On the bright side, there are a few really good editing options like panorama mode, blink/smile detection, and ISO settings. Video quality is quite good considering this is a camera phone. For storing your photos, music and videos, there is a whopping 16 GB internal memory and the external card slot supports additional 32 GB cards.
