It’s a touchscreen device with a slide out keyboard, 3.1″ 480×320 display and 5 megapixel camera.

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Click the video for the tour of the Galaxy.

The screen looks fantastic. One of the advantages of OLED displays is that they have extremely deep blacks – vibrant colours and amazing viewing angles. This makes them great for showing off pictures. The OLED display on the Galaxy does have one problem; it’s horrible outdoors so if you use your phone a lot in the sun you can stop reading here.

When the screen turns off you can turn it back on by pressing and holding a hold button on the right side. This is one of those minor things but when you press the button it takes 3/4 of a second for the screen to wake up. This makes the Galaxy feel kind of unintuitive. When you press the hold button the screen should turn on right away to tell you, that you have to press and hold it.

As far as input goes you get the basic Android keyboard. It works quite well and on the Galaxy’s not-that-small 3.2″ display it works well.

In front of the Galaxy are menu, home, back, send and end keys along with a navigation pad. I didn’t have any major problems with the layout but I kind of wish the back and home keys were swapped since it would make it easier to multitask.

The first thing I noticed about the Galaxy is that it’s very generic – it’s just plain Google customized Android 1.5. Samsung makes a big deal about putting their TouchWiz interface on all their phones so I’m kind of suprised by this. Of course, for some power users this is actually a good thing since they can customize the Galaxy how they want and don’t need to remove things.

While I found the software generic it’s still quite nice. If you use Google products like gmail, calendar, latitude all you have to do is enter your google login and the Galaxy will automatically download your email, calendar, contacts, etc.

You can also access the Android marketplace which has a lot of applications.

The camera has a resolution of 5 megapixel with autofocus and flash. Indoors it tends to use slower shutter speeds so you’ll get a lot of blurry photos if your subjects aren’t still or if you have shakey hands. There aren’t a lot of options for the camera, just resolution and flash really. The flash tends to blast subjects out.

In the end I found it average for a 5 megapixel camera.

Video is limited to a resolution of 352×288 at around 18fps – video capture is not the Galaxy’s strong point.

I noticed a few problems with the Galaxy. First off the Galaxy lags sometime for no apparent reason.  Now lagging can always happen when you’re multitasking but I wasn’t always doing that when the phone lagged.

Another problem is that it occasionally buffers keystrokes. A good example of this is when I’m using the camera. While I use the camera the Galaxy gets a little sluggish when I press the shutter button – I usually mistaken this for it not registering my button press. So in the end the Galaxy ends up taking a bunch of pictures that I don’t want it to since it buffers the presses.

Sound quality was about average – there is some hiss and voices can be slightly harsh.  RF performance was slightly above average. Compared with a Nokia N97 the Galaxy was slightly worse.

Battery life was difficult to test because there very weak TELUS/Bell HSPA signal in my house so the Galaxy sat there searching for signal most of the time..

There are 2 main things wrong with the Galaxy. While I love Android the Galaxy has a pretty plain jane version of Android 1.5. With 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1 devices are already out/just around the corner the Galaxy was released at a bad time. The other problem is the fact that the Galaxy lags at times.

Still there are upsides. Some will appreciate the fact that the Galaxy is pretty much uncustomized. If you’re indoors a lot (like me) the OLED display is a huge upside. I like to look at pictures and show them off and the OLED’s wide viewing angle plus awesome colours are great for this. It really puts most of the LCD displays/monitors in my house to shame. The 5 megapixel camera also pairs nicely with the display.

In the end I liked the OLED display and the 8GB of built in memory (saves you a trip to the store) and to a lesser extent the 5 megapixel display. Otherwise not much stood out about the Galaxy.

While they’re on 2 different carriers I thought I’d do a very quick comparison of the 2. Full reviews of each device will come soon.

Here are some of the specs:

• 3.5″ 640×360 touch screen
• slide out keyboard
• 32GB storage built in
• 5 megapixel camera

Bell is really pushing the N97’s video calling feature. Unlimited video calling is $5 a month.

I reviewed the N97 a while back. Check it out:

Besides Android it has an 3.2″ OLED display made from scratch resistant tempered glass, 8GB of storage and a 5 megapixel camera.

click more to get a quick run down of what I thought:

BTW most of my reviews are in high definition so check that feature.

I liked the Bold 9000 and while it has been a long time since it came out chances were I’d like the 9700 as well.

Turns out it was true. Here are some of the improvements the 9700 brings ot the table:

• trackpad (no more replacing trackballs)
• smaller form factor
• better build quality
• slightly high resolution display
• OS 5.0 (unless you upgraded your 9000 too)
• 3.2mp autofocus camera

You do lose a stereo speaker and I guess you might not like the smaller size if you have huge hands.

You still get

• good messaging capabilities out of the box
• pretty snappy performance (with the exception of the browser)
• very efficient multitasking
• reasonably good integration between apps
• a good QWERTY keyboard
• decent battery life for a HSPA smartphone

So while I really liked the 9700 I’d like to see a better camera. The 9700’s camera doesn’t really suck but it could be better. Especially 3.2mp is basically status quo. The browser needs to go – RIM, hurry up and bring a new faster browser out!

Howard Chui

12.08.2009

So I just posted my review of the Samsung Omnia 2 (please be patient while YouTube processes it). Hit read more to get a quick summary.

While the Omnia 2 is a dream phone on paper in practice I was a little disappointed. Samsung has really gone all out customizing the Omnia 2. While I liked the customization they made the Omnia 2 and it’s 800Mhz processor feel slow. This really diminished the added value of the customizations. The screen is beautiful as long as you’re not in bright sunlight. Sound quality and RF and both top notch.

In the end the screen is nice enough that I’d recommend the Omnia 2 to some people. Also, if you’re the type of person who doesn’t care about the customizations you can turn them off or better yet you can probably flash the ROM to remove them completely.

It’s kind of hard to tell but the screen looks amazing, stunning, incredible. Not only is it high resolution but the colour just blows me away. It’s easily the best thing about the Omnia 2.

Other random thoughts. While it has a 800Mhz processor Opera still feels kind of slow. The hexagonal button in front isn’t a navigation pad – instead it’s a single button that looks like a nav pad. It’s a waste of space.

TouchWiz 2.0 is nice but having the Windows Mobile menus and TouchWiz makes for a inconsistant user experience.

The camera is very similar to the camera on the Samsung i910. It’s very good except when you’re trying to take close ups where the flash is needed. In those situations it blasts the subject out – that said you can raise the ISO to 800 so you don’t need to use the flash as much.

In the past, whenever I tested a Bell CDMA phone there was always very low signal levels in my house. The Omnia 2 runs on Bell’s new HSPA+ network and it too gets very little signal – FYI.

Anyways that’s all for now. I’ll have a full review up later after I’ve had a chance to play with it more and drool at the screen some more.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 offers sophisticated design coupled with high-performance features to offer users a premium smartphone experience. This 3G smartphone ensures you will receive your emails quickly and reliably. The new optical trackpad ensures easy navigation and the multimedia capabilities mean you can have fun and stay connected to the office. The Bold 9700 allows users to live their personal and professional lives to the fullest through power and performance.

Despite what the marketing team at Rogers tells us, the 9700 is commonly referred to as the “Bold” or “Bold 2″ and not the “Curve”.  With that cleared up, lets look at the key features of the device.