Samsung GALAXY Fit Review

Design:

In the looks department the Galaxy Fit is definitely more attractive than the Galaxy 3, although significantly wider but much thinner at just 12mm in depth. What was a bit disappointing (but only to a small degree) was the 3.3-inch capacitive display that showcased just a 240 x 320 pixel resolution. The 16 million colors support did make a little difference though, in its defence. At that price a slightly higher resolution would have been so much better but you can get by without complaining… too much. At least the 240 x 400 pixel resolution the Galaxy 3’s display was slightly better for overall viewing.

The micro USB charging/connectivity port is located on the top near the 3.5mm handsfree socket and comes with a slide-over cover. On the right side is the power/screen lock button while on the left is where you’ll find volume/zoom keys and a microSD card slot. The two touch sensitive keys on either side of the large Home button did not seem to light up at all which was a bit annoying. Overall, it’s a light weight and well balanced handset.

Features:

Running on a 600 Mhz processor, FroYo functioned quite well on the Fit. Not being a fan of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI though, I switched to Launcher Pro and found the fluidity of the system to have gotten much better. Scrolling through menus, desktops and accessing most of the normal apps worked without a hitch. All of FroYo’s goodies from tethering to creating a Wi-Fi hot spot and shifting apps to your memory card to create space all worked out just fine.

Interface:

The Samsung Galaxy Fit is based around Android 2.2, with a little help from Samsung in the form of skinning.

For example each of the three home screens has a fixed row of shortcuts along the bottom providing access to the dialler, contacts, messaging and the full apps list.

Adding shortcuts to any of the main screens is a simple matter of long-pressing and choosing whether you want to add a widget, shortcut or folder, or change the wallpaper.

There’s not a huge range of widgets to choose from. On these lower-end smartphones Samsung doesn’t generally go to town on these types of extras. But we did like the Program Monitor widget.

You can get to this by long-pressing the Home button too. Then you see a list of recent apps, and there’s a permanent link to the active applications area – Android calls it the Task Manager.

The main apps menu is a very familiar-looking beast, with apps arranged across three screens. The shortcuts along the bottom of the screens remain intact and the way they are on the home screens, with dialler, contacts and messaging replicated and an additional shortcut out to the home screen.

Contacts are brought into the Samsung Galaxy Fit’s phone book from external accounts, and you can configure Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Microsoft Exchange and Google.

Messaging:

Messaging of all kinds relies on a good keyboard, and here the Samsung Galaxy Fit does quite well. Of course the screen is a bit squished, at just 3.3 inches, but even in portrait orientation we found it fairly comfortable to tap with two thumbs.

If we have a quibble it is that in landscape you don’t get to see very much of a text entry window. That’s a factor of the size of the keyboard, of course, but if you need to edit a fairly long piece of text it could be irritating.

You’ve got a couple of keyboard types in portrait mode – a standard QWERTY layout and a traditional number pad-style one, as well as two handwriting recognition options.

Camera:

The Galaxy Fit has a 5 Megapixel camera with autofocus but no flash. The image quality is decent for the price range the phone

Samsung Galaxy Fit Camera Sample

belongs to, but we have seen better image quality from 5 Megapixel sensors. The lack of a flash does hurt a lot in the dark and even the video recording quality is abysmal.

The video player is pretty mediocre as well. It lacks support for popular codecs such as DivX and Xvid. You can however install an app such as RockPlayer, which can play those for you. However, we found the experience to be less than ideal. The display quality doesn’t really invite you to watch a lot of content on it and the video also stutters thanks to the slow processor.

Music:

The music player supports all major formats except for FLAC, which is found in Samsung’s more expensive smartphones. It also has a 5.1-channel mode and several equalizer presets but no manual equalizer. Audio quality through the headphones was pretty good, although we wished it were a bit louder. Loudspeaker quality was decent as well with adequate volume levels.

Battery And Connectivity:

Samsung ships the Galaxy Fit with a 1350mAh battery, which it says is good for up to 620 minutes of 2G talk, 370 minutes of 3G talk, 640 hours on 2G standby and 460 hours on 3G standby.

The Galaxy Fit is a quad band GSM 3G handset. It supports HSPA, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and A-GPS connectivity. The call quality and network reception was good and voices on either side were heard clearly. The Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and A-GPS too worked well.

The Samsung Galaxy Fit Specification

General	Status Available Introduced March 2011 Announced January 2011 Network (2G) GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900 / GSM 850 Network (3G) HSDPA 2100 / HSDPA 900 Form factor Block Antenna type Internal
Size	Weight 108.0 g (with battery) Dimensions 110.2 x 61.2 x 12.6 mm
Display	Type Graphical Coloured Yes, TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors Size 3.31 inch Resolution 240 x 320 pixels - Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate - TouchWiz v3.0 UI - Swype text input method - Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
Memory	Shared memory 160 MB - Photocall - microSD, up to 32GB, 2GB included - 600 MHz processor
Ringtones	Polyphonic ringtones Yes Ringtone profiles Yes - MP3, WAV ringtones - 3.5 mm audio jack - DNSe sound enhancement
Networking	HSDPA speed 7.2 Mbps GPRS Yes EDGE Yes WLAN Yes, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n USB Yes, microUSB v2.0 Bluetooth Yes, 2.1 with A2DP WAP Yes Browser Yes, HTML Email client Yes - Android OS, v2.2 (Froyo) - GPS with A-GPS support - Digital compass - Push Mail - Instant Messaging
Features	Vibration Yes SMS Send / Receive MMS Send / Receive Camera Builtin, 5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, geo-tagging, smile detection video (QVGA@15fps) Java Yes, via third party application Games Yes, (changeable) Clock Yes Alarm Yes Calculator Yes Calendar Yes To-do list Yes Voice dialing Yes Voice memo Yes T9 Yes Multiple numbers / contact Yes Handsfree Yes Headset jack Yes FM Radio Yes - SNS integration - MP4/H.264/H.263 player - MP3/WAV/eAAC+ player - Organizer - Document viewer/editor - Image/video editor - Google Search, Maps, Gmail, - YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa integration
Standard Battery	Type Li-Ion Amperage 1350 mAh Standby time GSM: 642h / 3G: 421h Talk time GSM: 10h 40m / 3G: 6h 40m

Performance:

The Samsung Galaxy Fit has proven to be a great little phone, even though it lacks a higher resolution, better graphics and internal storage.

Conclusion:

The Samsung Galaxy Fit manages to outclass the Galaxy Mini with a larger screen, better camera and more attractive appearance. In terms of raw power, though, the two phones are practically identical.

PRO:

• Smooth performance
• Compact
• Cheap
• Great camera
• Larger screen than the Galaxy Mini
• Attractive design

CON:

• Low resolution display
• Poor in-call quality