Samsung i897 (16 GB) Cell Phone
- Screen Size (Diagonal): 4 inch
- Installed Memory: 16 GB
- Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB, WiFi
- Design: Mobile
- Style: Touch Screen
- Location: Built in GPS Receiver
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AT&T's best Android phone!
Pros
Beautiful screen. Good battery life. Fast. Good speakerphone. Easily hacked.
Cons
Terrible GPS performance. AT&T adds some annoyances.
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Excellent high-end Android phone, and it's available at an unbeatable price.
As of October 2010 the Samsung Captivate SGH-i897 (carrier-named version of the Galaxy S) is definitely AT&T's flagship, and most desirable, Android phone. If you browse the Web for comparative reviews, you'll find several places comparing it side-by-side to the iPhone 4, and that's a good data point, because it competes well with the Apple product. (I myself was upgrading from an iPhone 3GS - however I've used the 4 extensively too so I have a good comparison base for both). Note: If you're upgrading, check the refurb page. You can get refurbs free with a contract extension, which is a fantastic offer for this high-end phone!
The physical features of the phone are very well-executed. The AMOLED display is big, bright and visible in every lighting environment I've tried, including direct over-the-shoulder sun. The touchscreen works flawlessly, and the phone is light and comfortable to hold. The processor is fast - web browsing, movie playing, and just moving around in the applications generally is very responsive. Samsung did skin the OS, but the skin isn't horrible - it's fairly logical, if a bit cartoony looking due to the bright saturated colors. If you've used Android on another phone, you won't have difficulty getting used to the UI on the Captivate.
Audio quality is good, both in "normal" phone mode and when used as a speakerphone, though the position of the speaker on the back means you need to have a case, or put the phone on top of some obstacle, if you're trying to use speakerphone on a table. If you're playing MP3s on the internal speaker, it's good for audiobooks and other spoken-word content, but of course being mono and small, not so great for music. It's reasonably loud - I've heard louder but the Captivate is perfectly adequate.
The appearance is very nice - of all the Galaxy S flavors, I like this one the best cosmetically. It's slim and sleek and the design has minimal buttons, holes etc. Standard 3.5mm headphone jack and micro-USB connectors make life easy when connecting to this phone; nothing proprietary! The metal back is likely to scratch, though - buy a cheap silicone case.
The four capacitative buttons below the screen have an odd "feel", and they are not illuminated according to the same rules as the screen - they go out after a couple of seconds, which makes the icons invisible in dim lighting. I would have liked to see some glow-in-the-dark paint used here to keep at least a faint visibility after the LEDs are turned off.
The camera is really good in medium to strong light, with the only downside being a lack of flash. It has image stabilization using the onboard accelerometer, autofocus, and various special effects. There's no reason to use the special effects - it's better to take a good raw picture and process it later. Stabilization is handy but be aware that it reduces the picture resolution (since a band around the edge of the sensor's field is reserved for "deshaking" purposes). I got some very nice shots even up close (3-4 inches).
No, it does not have a front-facing camera, so you can't videoconference. This doesn't bother me, but if you need that feature, this is not the phone for you.
There are three soft keyboards - Samsung's, Android default, and Swype. None of them are exactly perfect - the Android keyboard has great text prediction, but no haptic feedback, the Samsung keyboard has haptic feedback but no easily-accessible text prediction, and the Swype keyboard works well but takes some getting used to (and some unlearning if you go back to another device for some reason!). This is a minor niggle, though.
I glanced at an earlier review here, and saw that s/he was complaining that the phone is locked down and full of bloatware. Yes, AT&T puts a bunch of garbage on the phone, as they do with all their badged phones (NOBODY would use AT&T payware mapping services when Google Maps/navigation is preinstalled, and free!). Yes, AT&T "disables" sideloading. But the Galaxy S series in general, and specifically the Captivate, is easy to root, and it's simple to delete the bloatware.
Having said that, maybe you won't even need to hack anything. The phone has three storage spaces: internal memory (1.7GB available), an internal SD card (13.3GB available), and an accessible SD slot (supports cards up to 32GB in size). That's WITH the AT&T nonsense still installed. I didn't feel it worth my time to tinker around deleting the AT&T stuff - I just took the shortcuts off my home screens, and they don't bother me any more. Yes, the icons are still cluttering up the "all applications" view, but I very rarely go in there - the apps I use are shortcutted. I mostly need space for music, and that goes on the removable SD card anyway.
But if it really offends you to have the AT&T stuff there, a quick Google search will find you a simple one-click root application that will let you delete all the AT&T stuff. There's also a simple sideloader application that does not require you to root the phone - it basically just dumps the .apk directly into the phone for anything you can't find on the Market. It doesn't get any easier than that!
The phone also has some social networking integration features built in (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Picasa). My advice: Don't bother. Apps from the sites in question do a much better job (except maybe myspace - I never tried it), and the apps will be kept up to date as the networks add new features. The Samsung-provided integration is barebones and will likely never be updated. By the way, Samsung also includes an app to access some proprietary music/movie store they are planning to roll out, but it still doesn't exist yet, and probably never will - certainly it will never have the licensing reach of iTunes, Netflix or Amazon.
The email app is a bit of a paradigm switch for an iPhone user, but no more so than any other part of Android. It works well, and has a lot of flexibility to allow you to connect to various types of inbound and outbound mail servers. Gmail integration is one-step and instant, of course.
To sync with a PC, you'll need Samsung's Kies software, and the USB drivers specific to the phone. Get the USB drivers from Samsung USA, specific to the Captivate. Get Kies from Samsung Europe, because the USA version is "lite" (and older than the Euro release). Once you've got this software, you can export and import Outlook calendar and contact data, among other things - it's cumbersome and slow software, and you won't want to do this often. It does NOT connect automatically to Outlook - you need to export contacts as a .CSV file, then import them to the phone. This means no photos, etc - just text data. More annoyingly still, you need to map the .CSV headings created by Outlook to the field names in the phone (and it's not 1:1). This is very counterintuitive, you will probably get it wrong the first time, and you need to do it by hand every time you import. Very low-quality software, like practically all phone manufacturers' software, but at least you don't have to type in 1,000 phone numbers by hand. This is Google's way of telling you you should be managing your contacts inside Gmail - because those sync automatically and seamlessly over the air, in both directions.
Now to the only downside I've encountered with the actual phone: You'll find that the GPS just doesn't work out of box with the first firmware rev. Doesn't work. Period. There are a couple of hacks around the Internet to improve this situation, but something's still not quite right. AT&T released a software update over the air, but it doesn't make the situation appreciably better and you still need to make some manual configuration changes. At minimum you need to enable WiFi location services. Navigation accuracy is not as good as, say, the iPhone 3GS, and the unit appears to have poor GPS antenna performance as well - loses satellites much more easily than other devices.
As far as turn-by-turn in Google Navigation goes, the voice synthesis isn't anywhere near as human-sounding as the iPhone's, but it's intelligible and that's what matters.
Overall, I'm thrilled with the Captivate. It's exactly the upgrade I wanted - getting out of Apple's walled garden and into an open phone platform, with a highly capable piece of hardware that I will still be enjoying when I next come up to renew my contract.
The physical features of the phone are very well-executed. The AMOLED display is big, bright and visible in every lighting environment I've tried, including direct over-the-shoulder sun. The touchscreen works flawlessly, and the phone is light and comfortable to hold. The processor is fast - web browsing, movie playing, and just moving around in the applications generally is very responsive. Samsung did skin the OS, but the skin isn't horrible - it's fairly logical, if a bit cartoony looking due to the bright saturated colors. If you've used Android on another phone, you won't have difficulty getting used to the UI on the Captivate.
Audio quality is good, both in "normal" phone mode and when used as a speakerphone, though the position of the speaker on the back means you need to have a case, or put the phone on top of some obstacle, if you're trying to use speakerphone on a table. If you're playing MP3s on the internal speaker, it's good for audiobooks and other spoken-word content, but of course being mono and small, not so great for music. It's reasonably loud - I've heard louder but the Captivate is perfectly adequate.
The appearance is very nice - of all the Galaxy S flavors, I like this one the best cosmetically. It's slim and sleek and the design has minimal buttons, holes etc. Standard 3.5mm headphone jack and micro-USB connectors make life easy when connecting to this phone; nothing proprietary! The metal back is likely to scratch, though - buy a cheap silicone case.
The four capacitative buttons below the screen have an odd "feel", and they are not illuminated according to the same rules as the screen - they go out after a couple of seconds, which makes the icons invisible in dim lighting. I would have liked to see some glow-in-the-dark paint used here to keep at least a faint visibility after the LEDs are turned off.
The camera is really good in medium to strong light, with the only downside being a lack of flash. It has image stabilization using the onboard accelerometer, autofocus, and various special effects. There's no reason to use the special effects - it's better to take a good raw picture and process it later. Stabilization is handy but be aware that it reduces the picture resolution (since a band around the edge of the sensor's field is reserved for "deshaking" purposes). I got some very nice shots even up close (3-4 inches).
No, it does not have a front-facing camera, so you can't videoconference. This doesn't bother me, but if you need that feature, this is not the phone for you.
There are three soft keyboards - Samsung's, Android default, and Swype. None of them are exactly perfect - the Android keyboard has great text prediction, but no haptic feedback, the Samsung keyboard has haptic feedback but no easily-accessible text prediction, and the Swype keyboard works well but takes some getting used to (and some unlearning if you go back to another device for some reason!). This is a minor niggle, though.
I glanced at an earlier review here, and saw that s/he was complaining that the phone is locked down and full of bloatware. Yes, AT&T puts a bunch of garbage on the phone, as they do with all their badged phones (NOBODY would use AT&T payware mapping services when Google Maps/navigation is preinstalled, and free!). Yes, AT&T "disables" sideloading. But the Galaxy S series in general, and specifically the Captivate, is easy to root, and it's simple to delete the bloatware.
Having said that, maybe you won't even need to hack anything. The phone has three storage spaces: internal memory (1.7GB available), an internal SD card (13.3GB available), and an accessible SD slot (supports cards up to 32GB in size). That's WITH the AT&T nonsense still installed. I didn't feel it worth my time to tinker around deleting the AT&T stuff - I just took the shortcuts off my home screens, and they don't bother me any more. Yes, the icons are still cluttering up the "all applications" view, but I very rarely go in there - the apps I use are shortcutted. I mostly need space for music, and that goes on the removable SD card anyway.
But if it really offends you to have the AT&T stuff there, a quick Google search will find you a simple one-click root application that will let you delete all the AT&T stuff. There's also a simple sideloader application that does not require you to root the phone - it basically just dumps the .apk directly into the phone for anything you can't find on the Market. It doesn't get any easier than that!
The phone also has some social networking integration features built in (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Picasa). My advice: Don't bother. Apps from the sites in question do a much better job (except maybe myspace - I never tried it), and the apps will be kept up to date as the networks add new features. The Samsung-provided integration is barebones and will likely never be updated. By the way, Samsung also includes an app to access some proprietary music/movie store they are planning to roll out, but it still doesn't exist yet, and probably never will - certainly it will never have the licensing reach of iTunes, Netflix or Amazon.
The email app is a bit of a paradigm switch for an iPhone user, but no more so than any other part of Android. It works well, and has a lot of flexibility to allow you to connect to various types of inbound and outbound mail servers. Gmail integration is one-step and instant, of course.
To sync with a PC, you'll need Samsung's Kies software, and the USB drivers specific to the phone. Get the USB drivers from Samsung USA, specific to the Captivate. Get Kies from Samsung Europe, because the USA version is "lite" (and older than the Euro release). Once you've got this software, you can export and import Outlook calendar and contact data, among other things - it's cumbersome and slow software, and you won't want to do this often. It does NOT connect automatically to Outlook - you need to export contacts as a .CSV file, then import them to the phone. This means no photos, etc - just text data. More annoyingly still, you need to map the .CSV headings created by Outlook to the field names in the phone (and it's not 1:1). This is very counterintuitive, you will probably get it wrong the first time, and you need to do it by hand every time you import. Very low-quality software, like practically all phone manufacturers' software, but at least you don't have to type in 1,000 phone numbers by hand. This is Google's way of telling you you should be managing your contacts inside Gmail - because those sync automatically and seamlessly over the air, in both directions.
Now to the only downside I've encountered with the actual phone: You'll find that the GPS just doesn't work out of box with the first firmware rev. Doesn't work. Period. There are a couple of hacks around the Internet to improve this situation, but something's still not quite right. AT&T released a software update over the air, but it doesn't make the situation appreciably better and you still need to make some manual configuration changes. At minimum you need to enable WiFi location services. Navigation accuracy is not as good as, say, the iPhone 3GS, and the unit appears to have poor GPS antenna performance as well - loses satellites much more easily than other devices.
As far as turn-by-turn in Google Navigation goes, the voice synthesis isn't anywhere near as human-sounding as the iPhone's, but it's intelligible and that's what matters.
Overall, I'm thrilled with the Captivate. It's exactly the upgrade I wanted - getting out of Apple's walled garden and into an open phone platform, with a highly capable piece of hardware that I will still be enjoying when I next come up to renew my contract.
