Posts Tagged ‘Reviews’

Another late Review – Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica

A couple of weeks ago, we had gotten a hold of a Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica and tested it with a 2.1 ROM. Same as always, we lack a proper tool to take the pictures (or host it, for that matter)

In this review, we use HTC Hero as the control phone for come comparison. Galaxy Spica is slightly heavier than a Hero, but is slightly thinner.

Speedwise, with its 800MHz processor, we wouldn’t call this a lightning speed, but its Android 2.1 ROM is indeed way more smooth and is noticeably faster than any given custom 2.1 Hero ROM up to date. We proceeded to re-flash the HTC Hero back to Android 1.5 nearly immediately.

There is a lot of buttons for this innocent i5700. Just by bottom of phone we have dial, hook/power, return, menu, search, home, four-way cursors, and an OK button. On the right side, there are also a camera key on the right side which is disabled in the 2.1 ROM, and a Lock-screen button. On the left side there’s volume control. To make things worse, the arrangement of the buttons are not quite easily adaptable, especially the Return button.

On battery life, we have no special complaint since it beats Hero quite comfortably, as we didn’t need to charge it in the middle of the day, while we can’t probably make the Hero pass 4PM even with a brand new official battery (Model TWIN160). Look, we had to recharge the Hero!

The 3 megapixel camera is quite impressive and is comparable with (if not better than) the quality of a 5 megapixel camera of an HTC phone.

With most Android handsets over US$400, Samsung Galaxy Spica’s price is virtually unbeatable – we can get it for below US$250 here, less than half of price of the Google Nexus One. It’s definitely a nice budget choice for new users of Android.