Phone
The Samsung Charge has its phone icon at the bottom of the home screen similar to that of the various HTC models. It also has messages, contacts, and applications at a permanent part of the phones home screen for easy access.
The Charge will link Facebook data (contact’s photo and profile info). There is also a buddies list that can be used as one of your seven screens. Having it set up as a widget makes it quick one touch access to dial some of your favorite people! One feature I really did like was the fact that you can make any one of the seven home screens the “main” home screen.
The clarity of the phone is good I had no problems with people being able to hear me. I did find that it’s rather large size would make it hard to hang onto during long conversations.
Design
The Samsung Charge, is powered by a Cortex A8 1GHz Hummingbird processor which is extremely fast not to mention the 4G LTE network behind it. It does have 512MB of RAM/ROM but that seems to work out ok as long as you move some of the apps to the SD card that helps open up some of the memory.
I found this phone to be easy to type on, however when it came to using any sort of punctuation I found it to be extremely tough to use. The keyboard set up is great for a left handed person all the shift, punctuation keys, etc, are all on the left side of the keyboard. On the right side where I would like to see the “special” keys is a settings button, and when I would get to typing I would hit that on accident. That would frustrate me every time! This made it slower and harder for me personally to type because I was always going back to make sure I hit the right button. Maybe I would get used to it being on the opposite side, but it would defiantly take some serious getting used to! Swype also comes standard on this devise as well as the android stock keyboard which is a nice feature, especially for me, because I did not like the layout of the Samsung keyboard.
There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top as well as a 2nd noise canceling microphone, a power/sleep button on the right side as well as a HDMI port and a volume rocker on the left side and Micro USB connection on the left side.
There are actual physical quick launch buttons for menu, back, home and search below the screen.
Display
The screen on the Incredible is a 4.3-inch, 480-by-800 pixel AMOLED Plus display, which is brighter and more battery-friendly than LCD and can support up to 16M of color. The amazing display makes everything seem more vivid and bright and has amazing color and clarity.
Camera
The camera is an 8 megapixel on the rear of the devise with a 720p recording capabilities and a 1.3 front-facing camera on the front of the phone.
It took bright, vivid pictures in natural light. But, in low light, the dual-LED flash washed out most photos – especially objects that were close to the camera. When taking indoor pictures with the camera the quality depending on the lighting that was available. I did not seem to notice much of a difference when I used the flash on the camera and when I did not use the flash. The pictures both ways still seemed dark and slightly washed out.
The video recorder captures 720p HD video. We used this great HD video feature during some severe weather that we had in our area and we wanted to email it back to the station. It took me some time to actually get it to email, but once I realized that we had the resolution set way to high and took it down we had no problems emailing it. Unfortunately we were unable to use this footage in the newscast, because at the time, it comes across as MP4’s and at that time we didn’t have any one around to down-convert it to a different type of file. However the following day we had someone take care of it for us and we used the footage on our website to show the path of the storm as well as some of the damage it had caused.
The Samsung Charge also includes a 1.3 MP front facing camera it makes it simple to take pictures as well as video chat with your friends.
Battery Life
I’ve concluded that I’m going to have to charge my phone every day. This is the case with whatever phone I’m using. However I did manage to keep the Samsung Charge running through one full day and night using it pretty heavily during the severe storm coverage, taking a lot of video and email the footage back to the station. By 8:30a the following morning it finally gave me a warning saying that I needed to put it on the charger and there was only so much battery left. I thought that was pretty amazing considering how much it was used during the storm.
Interface
Android 2.2 Froyo on the Charge runs seven home screens. It can run over 150,000 apps that are available on the Android market. Also, Samsung, gives you access to the Samsung Media Hub for other unique items.
The phone never slowed and scrolling between pages or up and down long lists happened without hesitation. The user interface is wickedly fast and responsive.
Web
The Samsung Charge is powered by a Cortex A8 1 GHz Processor for ultra fast web browsing as well as HTML in the browser with Adobe Flash 10.2.
You can pinch-zoom pages in as far as you want, you get a nice screen shot of bookmarked pages, and they can all be viewed in landscape or vertical configurations.
Conclusion
I was not sure what to expect when I received the Samsung Charge. There are things that I liked about and things I didn’t like. However I think that is the case with every item whether it’s a phone or any other type of gadget that may be around.
I enjoyed the screen on the phone; it is bright, beautiful, and crystal clear! Even looking at pictures, it’s like looking in HD vs. Regular; it appears that almost every imperfection can be spotted up to 10 feet away.
There was a few things that I really did not like about the Charge they keyboard was my biggest complaint, but having the option of the Swype keyboard or the Android Stock keyboard, I can’t complain too much. I would have to say the engineer behind that keyboard must have been a lefty. It may be a neat concept to have a right and left handed keyboard option, they do it for Guitar Hero and Rock Band for the guitar, why not with a phone keyboard.
Specs
Processor: 2GB onboard memory
Storage: 8GB of internal storage; MicroSD slot with a pre-installed 32GB SD card.
Screen: 4.3-inch AMOLED Plus Display (Supporting up to 16M color)
Camera: 8MP rear with dual LED flash with 720p HD recording and 1.3 megapixel front facing camera
Audio: 3.5mm headset jack and powered
Connectivity: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, Accelerometer
Weight: 5.04 ounces
Bundled apps: Backup Assistant; Android Market; Google Talk; Amazon Kindle; Mobile IM; Visual Voice Maill; Slacker Radio; VZ Navigator; Tune Wiki; VCast App Store; City ID; Free Google Navigation (turn-by-turn navigation); Samsung SNS Widgets (Weather bug Clock, Daily Briefing, Buddies Now); Speech to Text feature; ThinkFree Office; Task Manager; E911; Google Over the Air Updates.
