Above the display is a front-facing 1. Below it are the four now-typical touch-sensitive buttons for opening the menu, going home, going back, and launching search. On the right spine is the power button. On the left, you'll see the volume rocker. The 3. Behind the back cover there's the microSD card slot, which takes up to 32GB in external storage. I really like the light-blue accent color on the backlit keys, and the square shape of the keys themselves, which can comfortably accommodate a fingertip.
While fully separated, the buttons sadly have a common issue of being too flat, in this case almost flush with the surface. The limited tactile feedback of these buttons makes typing slower and far less satisfying than other keyboards in which the buttons rise higher from the surface.
I was able to accurately compose e-mails and texts, but wouldn't be able to discern most keys by feel alone. There are some nice additions to the keyboard as well, like the four navigation buttons flanking the letter keys, two on each side. The presence of these navigation buttons makes the keyboard a little more compact than it would otherwise be, but the slightly shorter configuration happens to better fit my smaller hands. There's also a dedicated microphone button for launching voice actions, plus functions for www.
Features An Android 2. It supports multiple e-mail accounts, including Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, and other Web mail accounts, either in separate or combined inboxes.
The device also has settings for tethering, VPN, and hot-spot support for up to five devices 3G speeds only. There are a number of apps that come preloaded on the Captivate Glide. Other apps are here, too. Essentials include a task manager, a to-do list, a calculator, a calendar, and a clock. Google's music app finds a minor upgrade in the looks department with Samsung, and there's a welcome option to turn on 5.
You can add music to a playlist on the fly, add to a quick list, and share music you're listening to. In addition, Samsung adds Tilt, which zooms the screen in and out when you press and hold two fingers and tilt the screen back and forth. I suppose it's a neat capability, but I've never found it particularly useful since first encountering it on the unlocked Samsung Galaxy S II. In fact, it sometimes pops up at inconvenient moments. As with other Android phones, you can switch among available virtual keyboards by pressing and holding within a text field and selecting "Input method.
Samsung has often hit the nail on the head with good cameras, and so far the Captivate Glide seems to follow in the footsteps of others, like the Samsung Galaxy S II phones. The 8-megapixel rear-facing camera has nice features like auto-focus, smile detection, and panorama mode, but there's much more besides, like smile shot, which snaps the photo when it detects a smile, and action shot, which takes a panorama of moving objects.
There are automatic white balance settings, a timer, three color effects, six resolution options, and options for shutter sound, GPS tagging, grid, and self-timer. It certainly doesn't have the biggest variety of options, but the photo quality looked pretty good. I was able to get some nice detail when using the flash for an indoor night shot, and other indoor shots taken during the day also produced images with good color fidelity and sharp edges--it's easy for those to be, at turns, oversaturated, dull, or overexposed.
There was the expected amount of shutter lag for indoor night shots when using the flash and auto-focus combined. Not all photos were equally fabulous, however, with some winding up in better focus than others. The p HD video 30fps performed well in our tests, and the microphone captured the subject's voice better than many other smartphones. There's room for up to 8GB onboard storage, with up to 32GB more in expandable memory.
Call quality was acceptable. Voices sounded loud on my end, and pretty natural, although there were moments of digital distortion that made my caller cut in an out, and I did experience a dropped call. On the other end of the line, one caller described volume as very good, but noted that my voice didn't sound particularly natural.
He got the impression that as I spoke, my voice bounced against a tin can, a fuzzy distraction. I tested speakerphone by holding the phone at waist level. Volume was strong to my ears, and callers didn't sound echoey, but voices did have a buzzy quality.
On their end, callers thought I was less intelligible, cutting in and out. They said I sounded tinny, and my voice distorted more at high speaking volumes. We also liked having directional keys for fine cursor movement, along with dedicated keys for Search, Home, Back, Search, www.
However, establishing a nimble pace on the keyboard proved difficult, because the keys are so flat and felt mushy. We had to press harder than we'd prefer. In addition to the physical keyboard, the Captivate Glide features three touch-screen keyboards. The Android keyboard's tiny keys were too small in portrait mode, but were large enough in landscape mode. Samsung's keyboard offered larger keys in both landscape and portrait modes. However, the landscape version dominated a large portion of the screen.
We also had to switch to an alternative keyboard to access numbers and symbols. The Swype keyboard was just right, delivering a manageable keyboard size and easy access to alternate symbols and punctuation. Haptic feedback was very light--almost too light. We were particularly fond of the AP Mobile widget, which delivered the latest news pictured right. While TouchWiz doesn't drastically change the look of stock Android, there are a few additions.
The most interesting features are the tilt-to-zoom and panning gestures. When they were enabled, we could enlarge or minimize an image by placing two fingers on either side of the screen and tilting the display forward or back. To pan left or right, we simply held our finger on the display and moved the handset in the direction we wished to scroll. Both motions took a steady hand to accomplish and felt somewhat gimmicky. Samsung makes good use of the notification shade in Android by allowing users to toggle various wireless radios with a tap toward the top of the screen.
You can also turn on Flight Mode and lock the screen rotation. Click to Enlarge The apps menu carries over the dock from the home screen, so you can access Phone, Messaging, and Web without having to go back home. You can also swap out any one of these shortcuts if you enter the Edit menu from the home screen.
The most useful feature hands-down is screenshot, which let us snap stills of our phone's screens by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously. Navigating between home screens and playing games was pretty snappy, and zooming in and out of web pages was quick and fluid. We played Asphalt 6 with little to no latency with four applications running in the background. The Glide turned in a strong showing on synthetic benchmarks, notching 2, on the CPU portion of the Benchmark app.
That's 1, points higher than the 1, Android phone average. The Skyrocket and its 1. The Captivate Glide scored 7, on An3DBench, a synthetic graphics benchmark, beating the 6, category average.
However, the Skyrocket maintained its lead with 7, The desktop version of Laptopmag. On the Skyrocket, NYT. There's also Social Hub pictured , which aggregates Facebook and Twitter updates into one manageable feed. AllShare was one of the more useful apps, allowing us to wirelessly share multimedia content with DNLA-compatible devices. Click to Enlarge One of our favorite apps was Mini Diary, which allowed us to create digital entries to recap our day.
In addition to text, we were able to add photos and location via Google Maps. We also enjoyed taking our Ferrari for a few spins around the track in Asphalt 6: Adrenaline , an entertaining racing game. However, we noticed significant graininess when we viewed the photos on our desktop PC.
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