Samsung Vibrant Galaxy S review

Since I recently moved from Europe to the US I had to get a new phone. My brand new HTC Legend did not work with the 3G bands over here. Who would have thunk….  Since the Legend wasn’t available at T-Mobile I decided to go for the Samsung Vibrant Galaxy S instead. All reviews were overwhelmingly positive. I was led to expect that this was the best Android phone per today. Well, after a month’s use I am a little disappointed. I still prefer the slower, smaller and technologically inferior HTC Legend and here’s why:

Pros

The Samsung has a great screen, a really fast CPU and enough RAM to where it will always start your applications quick! It also has a pretty sleek design, although it really looks a lot like a iPhone 3g.

T-Mobile also bundled it with The SIMS and the movie Avatar in great quality.

Cons

Plastic fantastic: Compared to HTC Desire and Legend, or IPhone the Galaxy feels cheap. The plastic is hard and is too easy to scratch.

GUI: The GUI designers did an inconsistent job. For instance when you turn the phone on or off – it will play a loud annoying Jingle. It will even show a horrible animation with ugly pink “Goodbye!”-logos flying around the screen. What were they thinking? Compare that to the slick startup/shutdown of the HTC phones and you’ll know what I mean. I also think the font size is too large for the most part. Personally I like smaller fonts in order to fit more information on the screen. For the most part the GUI is functional enough though, but it is not nearly as nice as Sense or IOS.

Slow GPS: The GPS is ok when it works, but it can be extremely slow. Sometimes it takes 5-10 minutes to get ready.

Several Google Calendars: It simply will not sync several Google Calendars. I have my Google calendar hooked up to my wife’s. She can see my appointments on her Android phone, but I can’t see hers. And we all know how popular it is when you miss appointments that your wife has set up for you.

Music player: I listen to audio books a lot. These usually consist of several CDs. Let’s say I stop listening at 3 mins 30 secons of track 3, CD5. Then I decide to continue the next day. What will happen is that I click the “now playing” button, and it will take me to the beginning og track3, CD5. Then it will skip to track3, CD6 next to track3, CD7 etc. In other words it will start playing from the playlist containing all songs, not the albumlist which I want. Utterly annoying.

Samsung KIES and no tethering: What a horrible horrible bugridden piece of bloatware this is. I tried installing it in order to use phone tethering, but I gave up. It would simply halt my system to a crawl, and it just wasn’t worth it. I ended up buying easytether instead ($9.99 is cheap compared to crippling my main system). In comparison the HTC Legend had tethering working pretty much right out of the box, no need to buy extra software. KIES makes iTunes seem like a walk in the park in comparison. Luckily it’s not needed very often and thank God for that.

No trackball: Sometimes when you’re browsing you just can’t hit that particular checkbox no matter where or how you press the screen. Other times you’re editing text and need to click exactly on a particular letter in a string. This is where a little trackball or optical trackball (which the HTC phones have) comes in handy. The Vibrant does not have this, and thus it can be quite frustrating.

Exchange connector: I’m not sure why they chose this solution, but the email-client for Exchange is not as good as HTC's implementation. The most annoying part is that I cannot move messages between folders. Navigating between folders is also annoying because they are listed partially alphabetically on top of the screen, and you have to scroll sideways until you’re in the right folder. I have about 100 folders in a tree structure, and finding the right folder can take a while.

Conclusion

Most of these shortcomings are software related and can be fixed. It makes a potentially great phone feel like it is a beta product. It just has not been tested enough. The big question is whether Samsung intend to do something about it or not. It remains to be seen I suppose. If not I’m going to go for a HTC next time.