Ecran Complet Samsung Galaxy J3 2016

(Pocket-lint) - Samsung is fighting its mode into the Android superphone field with the Galaxy S. With a whopping iv-inch Super AMOLED display, information technology'south 1 of the biggest phones on the market. Tin can Samsung accept on HTC in the Android market place that it's done then much to define? And tin can it proceed the nemesis iPhone 4 at arm's length?

The Samsung Milky way S measures upward at 64.2 10 122.4mm, just is still just 9.9mm thick. Maybe the virtually immediate matter y'all discover nearly the Galaxy Due south is the weight. At 118g it's hardly heavy and this is downwardly to Samsung's choice of materials. They've gone with plastics, rather than the machined aluminium or glass of notable rivals.

The consequence is a phone that doesn't quite have the same premium experience to it. The dorsum does attract fingerprints due to its sleeky finish, just once snapped in place, it is solid plenty with no signs of twisting and no creaks as you utilize it.

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A pocket-size bulge on the bottom rear helps give some definition to what would otherwise be only a slab, the crash-land sitting neatly in the palm of your mitt as you hold the telephone to cast your eyes across its expansive display. Information technology likewise provides some grip for the fingers when holding information technology in landscape to watch movies or use the photographic camera. The five-megapixel snapper sits on the back, framed in chrome detailing.

The front end is nicely done, with the 4-inch capacitive 480 x 800 pixel resolution Super AMOLED display sitting beneath a single-piece front, with a unmarried physical home push centrally flanked past 2 touch controls for menus and back. The screen has the sort of silky smoothness that you'd expect from a high-end smartphone, and wipes clean of oily fingerprints easily also.

Around the body of the telephone you'll discover iii.5mm and Micro-USB connections on the top, a volume rocker on the left-hand side and a lock/standby key on the right-manus side.

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To look at the Samsung Milky way South doesn't evoke the same degree of interest that something like the iPhone 4 does, but the rounded edges, like the HTC Desire, make this a more than comfortable device to nestle in the palm of your hand equally you use it. This also applies to the top edge, which is mercifully curved, meaning the Galaxy Southward is also comfy for those long phone calls.

Internally you also get a decent amount of memory, with viii and 16GB versions available, plus there is a microSD menu slot for further expansion. We tested it with a 16GB microSDHC carte and it handled the wealth of media on that card without issue, although "media scanning" can accept a while.

Apparently it is tricky to starting time anywhere other than the screen. Samsung has been shouting about its Super AMOLED display, with the tech customs pitching the Milky way S display confronting the Retina Display of the iPhone four. Both displays are highly accomplished and although the iPhone has a higher resolution, we tin't mistake the Samsung'southward vibrancy and contrast. Blacks are deep, whites are brilliant, colours are vivid, making the Galaxy S a striking device to await at once yous bring the screen to life.

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Is it improve than the iPhone 4 in terms of display? It'due south certainly bigger, which makes a deviation, but with a lower pixel density, the iPhone four can produce smaller, sharper, details. Whether this matters or not will be subjective. Looking at a full webpage on the screen, the iPhone 4 renders text that you can barely read, the Galaxy S is a piddling fuzzy in these pocket-sized details, only peradventure this is a moot bespeak: if it is too small to read, it doesn't really matter that much. When it comes to video watching, over again, the iPhone volition make more of the details in your HD movies, whilst the Galaxy S will give you lot a larger screen to watch it on. It'south an statement that's fix to run: both are accomplished and we'll leave it at that.

The large screen gives y'all plenty of real estate to play with. Samsung has added its TouchWiz 3.0 user interface over the top of Android 2.1 in the Milky way South. TouchWiz, as we saw on Samsung's Wave running on its Bada platform, offers upward 7 home pages which tin exist customised to your liking, or removed if you don't desire them. You tin can add Samsung or Android widgets, drop shortcuts and bookmarks and move the whole lot around.

Taking a leaf out of HTC's Sense UI, you get a number of services to take care of your social networking needs, and so Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are all neatly pulled into your contacts (if you want them to be) and diverse Samsung apps offer to use your social networks in various ways.

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Buddies now lets you assign favourite contacts to follow, so they appear on a Rolodex-mode carousel, with their about contempo status update on display and an option to contact them. Feeds and updates volition show your social networks in a list type feed that is like to HTC's Friend Stream, although if y'all follow whatever number of people on Twitter, you'll never be able to keep track.

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Daily Briefing offers up AccuWeather.com, Y! Finance, AP Mobile news, and your agenda to give you a selection of pertinent data when you wake upwards in the morning. It's nice, just a little too inflexible and we'd like to be able to completely customise each of the sections to get a truly personal feed.

There are various other fun Samsung widgets on offer too, and then yous don't feel brusk-inverse as soon equally your new telephone arrives. The live widgets have prominent refresh buttons, also as being able to set the auto refresh time, where applicative. Y'all can also change the wallpaper behind the dwelling house pages, scrolling across a little as y'all move through pages, just like HTC Sense does. Yous can assign live wallpapers, although this seemed to slow the phone downwardly, then best avoided.

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In that location is also a Samsung App store, joining the Android Market, offering Samsung's own applications for your device. In that location was simply a handful available when we reviewed the phone, including a duplicate Facebook app then we'll have to see exactly how this develops in the future.

TouchWiz makes a visual change across a lot of Android, with the tiptop pull-down carte du jour getting large Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Silent and Vibration icons to instantly toggle these services. Like other Samsung handsets, y'all as well get a line of icons across the bottom of the screen offering Telephone, Contacts, Messaging and Applications by default which are easily changed to your favourite apps if you want.

The Application menu is more than a little reminiscent of the iPhone's menu, but then how different can you be when y'all offer a selection of icons? Neatly, the Samsung interface adds a little background gloss to the applications you add to the phone, and then although you are downloading from the Android Market, everything gets a picayune graphical treatment in the carte du jour. Information technology's a neat touch, making the menus looks fantastic.

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The card as well shows-off the screen: the icons are similar islands of color in an inky black body of water of background, simply the sort of thing that gets geeks like us excited. You can opt for a list view if you prefer, although it doesn't make bully use of space. You can re-conform menus to your preference, dragging icons over pages and so on.

Nosotros like Samsung'southward screen lock, which lets you unlock it by swiping the "cover" off in any management y'all fancy, and the jigsaw-blazon alerts that volition sit on it to inform you lot of missed calls or messages. You can then drag to piece into the pigsty in the background to open the message or call listing direct - pretty smart.

Internally the Samsung Milky way S comes with a 1GHz processor which is more or less par for the form on current smartphones. It should, in theory, keep things running along smoothly, just there is some unexpected lag hiding in the Galaxy S. It doesn't struggle to fire up a 720p video, but might sometimes pause when y'all open the messaging window, or when yous move around your contacts list. This suggests that something isn't quite right on the software front and volition most probable be fixed with a firmware update in the futurity.

That wasn't the simply effect we constitute with the OS side of things either. We had a large number of failures with the Android Market place, applications not downloading cleanly, although we know this has been a problem for other Android users too, and may not bear upon all devices. The Android Marketplace continues to gain strength all the fourth dimension, although we don't feel information technology is quite as comprehensive as the Apple App Shop notwithstanding.

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Samsung's AllShare is present, meaning you tin stream your content from media server, which is where things get exciting. Information technology happily played Hard disk drive content from our server, which looks absolutely sensational on the screen. Equally, you can share content you lot accept on your phone, which is a real bonus for those with compatible hardware especially when someone wants to evidence off the Hard disk drive video they have captured using the phone.

The camera effectually the back not but offers 5-megapixel withal capture, but also 1280 x 720 resolution video capture, on a par with the iPhone 4 and matching many pocket camcorders. At that place is no sign of an LED "wink".

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The photographic camera offers a boundless array of settings. Shooting modes offering the usual suspects of grinning shot and beauty, but there is some creative fun to exist had with Vintage and Cartoon. You too get scene modes, offer up the likes to landscape, portrait, sports and so on. Simply the settings don't stop there. You can modify the exposure compensation and then dive into more settings where you go a whole range of options, like white balance, special effects and focus way. It might just exist a little as well comprehensive and as well convoluted, as the focus mode should really be easier to go to.

Just the results are very practiced, then some of the messing effectually is justified. Affect to focus works well alongside the autofocus which is relatively fast to observe what y'all want to take a picture of. In low light, naturally, noise becomes an event along with slower shutter speeds giving you blurry pictures and it is slower to focus.

Video gives y'all a smashing result from the highest settings, with 720p video capture at around 30fps equally a 3GP file. You don't go any focus controls, only it does auto-focus as you start filming. A pause function will let y'all string together video in different locations to save you lot postal service-processing, which is something we like, although there is a focus twinge at the start of each new department.

Overall the results from the photographic camera are great, it'due south fun to apply, at that place is plenty to play with before you look at sharing your results - either by sending out via social networks or email, streaming, or via Telly out onto the big screen. In that location is also a forward-facing camera with a 640 ten 480 pixel resolution, although admission to information technology is limited to the "self shot" shooting way and video calling.

Music is handled well, with the bundled headphones being better than average, only no contest for a decent set of third-party alternatives. The music thespian offers various different methods of viewing your collection, including a Cover Flow-style carousel. You lot also get controls whilst the screen is locked via a drag down CD image (of the embrace art no less) so you can skip and pause music. Volume tin also be changed when the screen is locked. The radio machine-tunes, letting you preset your favourite stations and works nicely, with controls moving into the down-downwardly menu when you move away from the app.

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Video playback is i of the telephone'southward strong points, equally it supports a broad range of formats, including DivX, AVI, MKV, MPEG4 and FLV in various forms. Not all codecs are supported in their various containers, only we played a range of video files in both HD and SD without issue - you certainly get more variety than many rival devices. Watching videos on the large screen is fantastic, although we found that it didn't recollect where we had paused videos on resume, and then nosotros had to skip back through them once more to continue watching, a small-scale indicate.

Connectivity is, every bit you'd look, excellent. Y'all have HSDPA for fast data on the move, joined by Wi-Fi b/m/n, the new Bluetooth version 3.0, GPS, and proximity and motion sensors. Google Maps from the GPS offers upwards multi-touch on zooming, as well as free navigation from Google Maps Navigation, as crude as it is.

Multi-touch back up is a great do good for the browser, which we found was fast to navigate, reflow text and zoomed and scrolled smoothly. 1 matter that didn't seem to work on our device was embedded YouTube videos, then we were left with no spider web video at all. This may not exist a problem with the forthcoming update to Android v2.2, bringing with it compatibility for Adobe Flash video. Samsung has promised the update this year, simply as nosotros've seen in the past, this isn't necessarily any guarantee. The sheer infinite and the proficiency with which websites are handled makes the Galaxy S a slap-up handset for browsing the Cyberspace, video or not.

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Of course the on-screen keyboard is essential. Once we'd got rid of the bear upon tones and the haptics, nosotros found the Samsung QWERTY keyboard allowed for fast and authentic text entry in both landscape and portrait modes. Predictive text and corrections come courtesy of the XT9 system. This can be a petty overwhelming, offering up suggestions of the side by side give-and-take in your judgement which tin can be confusing at kickoff, but y'all practise get used to it. You can also customise the system and switch this off, which we found more acceptable.

Samsung has also included Swype. We're seeing Swype on a growing number of Android phones; information technology's a organisation that lets yous "type" by moving your finger across the keyboard to string together the letters. Information technology works well for bones text entry, with clever suggestions. Information technology'due south another skill to master, just we like it. Once more, the selection is yours, so if you don't want it, you don't necessarily need it.

The of import thing we found about text entry on the Galaxy Due south was that it was unhampered by other lags in the system we found elsewhere. It may accept taken a moment or 2 to open messaging, but once we got there nosotros could lay down text very fast indeed. The screen is certainly up to the job.

When we had the phone in apply, we noticed that the top half became warm, every bit it did when charging the battery. The battery life is a niggling poor and you'll certainly have to charge this phone every 24-hour interval. Life from the 1500mAh prison cell will depend on what you do with information technology, how bright y'all have the screen, background syncing and so on, but you do pay the price for the slim dimensions and the wealth of power-hungry hardware.

To epitomize

As information technology is, the Samsung Galaxy S is a welcome addition to the superphone category, proving to exist a great multimedia handset that can only get better with updates. At that place is some space for software improvements from the review sample we tested, but as it is, the Galaxy Southward is a fantastic device to utilize

Writing by Chris Hall.