The Samsung Fascinate: A Review of the Galaxy S Series' Representative Device

One of the most notable features of TouchWiz, which is used on the Samsung Fascinate, is its "Right On Top" feature. This feature provides controls for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and Airplane Mode directly at the top of the screen, making it easily accessible when you're in a phone call. The speaker buttons are also located right there, allowing you to quickly switch between calls without having to navigate through menus. Additionally, sliding down the notification tab gives you all your information right at your fingertips.

Another enhancement provided by TouchWiz is the customization of home screens and app icons. Applications appear as squares on the screen, which can be easily scrolled through and customized to your liking. This feature allows users to make their phone look and feel exactly what they want it to, thanks to Android's open nature. The Samsung Fascinate features four capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen, but these can sometimes cause issues with responsiveness, requiring a second tap to register.

The performance of the Samsung Fascinate is undoubtedly one of its strongest points. Powered by a Hummingbird processor, this device is blazing fast and provides a seamless user experience. This was particularly evident during our tests of the browser, which displayed a fantastic multi-touch interface that allowed for effortless pinch-to-zoom capabilities. The speed of the phone was truly noticeable in this feature.

However, it's worth noting that the display on the Samsung Fascinate has a slight blue tint to it, which may be a drawback for some users. This tint is also apparent when viewing pictures and text, giving them a slightly warmer tone. Additionally, the speakerphone volume is not particularly loud, making it less suitable for use in noisy environments.

One of the most distinctive features of the Samsung Fascinate is its slim and lightweight design. The phone's 4-inch screen creates a compact bulge that won't take up too much space in your pocket or purse. This makes it an ideal choice for those who want a phone that can easily fit into their daily lives.

Overall, I was extremely impressed with the Samsung Fascinate, finding it to be a solid representation of the Galaxy S series. The device's performance, design, and features all come together to make it a compelling choice for anyone considering an Android phone on Verizon. With its ability to customize home screens and app icons, coupled with its fast performance and sleek design, this phone is sure to please even the most discerning user.

If you're in the market for a new Android device and don't like the look of TouchWiz, rest assured that Android's open nature means you can customize it to your heart's content. This allows users to make their phone truly unique, which is one of the biggest selling points of Android. As someone who has been thoroughly enjoying using this phone as my daily driver, I wholeheartedly recommend the Samsung Fascinate to anyone considering a new device.

In conclusion, the Samsung Fascinate is an excellent choice for those seeking an Android device on Verizon. Its performance, design, and features all make it an attractive option for users of all levels. With its ability to customize home screens and app icons, coupled with its fast performance and sleek design, this phone is sure to please even the most discerning user. I give the Samsung Fascinate a solid 4.75 out of 5 stars, only deducting points due to some minor build quality issues that were addressed in the final version of the device.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everyone john rettinger from technobuffalo here with a full review of verizon's galaxy s offering the samsung fascinate let's go ahead and get started the name galaxy s is starting to become synonymous with android phones it is a branding technique that is being seen across all major carriers in the us and this is verizon's version of it the samsung fascinate so before we jump into the review let's go ahead and recap some of the specs and see what your about 200 on contract is going to get you first it's gonna get you a four inch super amoled touchscreen with a resolution of 480x800 what super amoled means you're going to get very darker darks you're going to get brighter colors you're going to get better visibility and sunlight essentially what it does is it takes the touchscreen mechanism on the phone and puts it actually into the glass as opposed to putting it right on top which is going to give you a little bit better visibility overall it features a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with flash it's capable of shooting hd video at 720p uh it's also one of the fastest smartphones around featuring samsung's one gigahertz cortex 8 hummingbird processor which shares a lot of architecture with apple's a4 chip same thing that's in the a iphone 4 and the ipad is running android 2.1 commonly called eclair with samsung's custom skin on it which you see right now called touchwiz samsung has said that it will be upgraded to 2.2 froyo in the near future it's going to come with 2 gigabytes of internal memory and a 16 gig micro sd card installed it's also compatible with verizon's 3g mobile hotspot potentially going to turn your phone into a myfi device so it'll suck in verizon's evdo network and kick out wi-fi you can connect to up to five devices so now that we've recapped the specs let's talk about the phone itself no matter how good a phone is or how many features it has or what touchscreen technology it uses it doesn't make good phone call it's not going to be much use to you and a typical to most verizon phones that i've reviewed call quality on the fascinate is really fantastic i had no white noise on my end colors had no white noise on there and there wasn't any popping i experienced zero drop call by using this as my daily phone and it really just worked very nicely it almost sounds like landline quality uh something to keep in mind this is a fantastic device it actually was able to pull in a relatively strong signal where i usually maybe got one or two bars of verizon evdo signal i generally just pulled in a little bit more where i am right now uh sometimes i don't get any verizon signal and i'm getting two bars as we speak um let's talk about battery life since that's one of the negatives of the phone and there aren't many negatives uh battery life is not the greatest you really need to do some decent battery and memory management with your phone in order to get through a full day i'm a pretty heavy phone user i use a browser quite a bit i'm making a lot of phone calls and i'm using email a lot and i had a hard time getting through a full day i had to always find a charger to plug it in uh one of the nice things about the galaxy s though is it does feature a removable 1500 milliamp hour battery so if you're a power user you can always pick up another battery if you need and have it fully juiced and ready to go all right so let's talk a little bit about touchwiz interface i'm sure you're probably familiar with android and what it looks like this is a bit different this puts four rows of icons on the bottom which are customizable and sort of keeps them on each screen go ahead and view and see each screen here and you do have actually seven home screens you can choose to have more or less but seven are really what samsung gives you i'm not the biggest fan of touchwiz it does have some nice enhancements one of the nicest enhancements that it has is right on top you get controls for your wi-fi bluetooth gps and airplane mode when you're in a phone call you actually get the speaker buttons right there and a call so you don't have to actually jump into the phone menu to do that you can just slide down the notification tab and you get all your information right there oh it really is a handy feature touchwiz also features when you're in your contacts you slide your finger to the right to make a phone call and slide it to the left to send text there are some nice enhancements there applications look a little bit different that's sort of encapsulated in these squares and then go ahead and scroll through whatever you'd like and when you download apps from the marketplace they still show up in these squares you can customize these pages any way that you like the captivate does or excuse me the fascinate does feature uh four capacitive buttons across the bottom and i'm not the biggest fan of capacitive buttons oftentimes i had to sort of tap them twice to make sure it worked so wants to light it up and once you register the touch uh that's a little bit of a small detriment to the galaxy s series of devices but certainly not a huge negative running this hummingbird processor this phone is blazing fast probably one of the fastest phones that i have ever tested really just works quite well and speaking of speed let's go and take a look at the browser because the browser is really fast on this device and as you can see right there there's a big flash logo unfortunately this does not yet support flash 10.1 uh that will supposedly come with the upgrade to uh 2.2 it's android 2.2 froyo which will support flash it does have a fantastic multi-touch browser though which really is capable of great pinch to zoom and i think this is really where you see the processor speed a lot of times with multi-touch devices particularly android if the phone is underpowered you're going to see a little bit of delay i want to use your multi-touch gestures here it is almost instantaneous and just works very well uh you can see probably that the screen's got a bit of a tint to it that is one of the i think downside the super amoled display it's got a bit of a blue tint to it uh which is going to give you better visibility and direct sunlight for some people it might be a positive uh for me it sort of hinders the experience of using this gorgeous screen but not nearly enough that would hinder it that i wouldn't want to use the device just something to keep in mind it's going to make the pictures and the text look a bit warmer i suppose let's go ahead and jump back here uh one other thing to notice about the samsung fascinate is the back of it uh features a plastic back which i found to actually come loose every now and then if i actually snap it back into place perhaps that's a promise to my review unit uh you can see right there there's a little speaker uh the speakerphone volume is not incredibly loud i've certainly tested many phones with better speaker phone volume so if you rely on sticker phone when you're in a car you might want to invest in a bluetooth headset it's usable when you're in a quiet environment but if you have ambient noise around it's going to be a bit more difficult to use the phone is very very very thin and very easily pocketable i think this 4 inch screen may actually be the perfect size it doesn't create too much bulge in your pocket if you put in your purse not going to take up too much room really just worked very well overall i'm extremely thrilled with the samsung fascinate and definitely representative of my view on the galaxy s series advice as a whole if you don't like the way this phone looks with touchwiz uh with android being open you can customize it to your heart's content and really make it look and feel your own which is one of the really big selling points of android i've been a big fan of the phone i enjoy the phone i'm actually using uh the phone as my daily driver and i can recommend it wholeheartedly so on a one to five scale i give this phone a very very very solid 4.75 almost five just due to some build quality issues that was fixed this phone would be a very solid five and i can completely recommend this with two enthusiastic thumbs up if you're a verizon user in the market for an android phone you definitely owed yourself to take a look at the samsung fascinate i'm john rettinger from technobuffalo be sure to check us out for all your tech news i'll see you in the next video byewhat's up everyone john rettinger from technobuffalo here with a full review of verizon's galaxy s offering the samsung fascinate let's go ahead and get started the name galaxy s is starting to become synonymous with android phones it is a branding technique that is being seen across all major carriers in the us and this is verizon's version of it the samsung fascinate so before we jump into the review let's go ahead and recap some of the specs and see what your about 200 on contract is going to get you first it's gonna get you a four inch super amoled touchscreen with a resolution of 480x800 what super amoled means you're going to get very darker darks you're going to get brighter colors you're going to get better visibility and sunlight essentially what it does is it takes the touchscreen mechanism on the phone and puts it actually into the glass as opposed to putting it right on top which is going to give you a little bit better visibility overall it features a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with flash it's capable of shooting hd video at 720p uh it's also one of the fastest smartphones around featuring samsung's one gigahertz cortex 8 hummingbird processor which shares a lot of architecture with apple's a4 chip same thing that's in the a iphone 4 and the ipad is running android 2.1 commonly called eclair with samsung's custom skin on it which you see right now called touchwiz samsung has said that it will be upgraded to 2.2 froyo in the near future it's going to come with 2 gigabytes of internal memory and a 16 gig micro sd card installed it's also compatible with verizon's 3g mobile hotspot potentially going to turn your phone into a myfi device so it'll suck in verizon's evdo network and kick out wi-fi you can connect to up to five devices so now that we've recapped the specs let's talk about the phone itself no matter how good a phone is or how many features it has or what touchscreen technology it uses it doesn't make good phone call it's not going to be much use to you and a typical to most verizon phones that i've reviewed call quality on the fascinate is really fantastic i had no white noise on my end colors had no white noise on there and there wasn't any popping i experienced zero drop call by using this as my daily phone and it really just worked very nicely it almost sounds like landline quality uh something to keep in mind this is a fantastic device it actually was able to pull in a relatively strong signal where i usually maybe got one or two bars of verizon evdo signal i generally just pulled in a little bit more where i am right now uh sometimes i don't get any verizon signal and i'm getting two bars as we speak um let's talk about battery life since that's one of the negatives of the phone and there aren't many negatives uh battery life is not the greatest you really need to do some decent battery and memory management with your phone in order to get through a full day i'm a pretty heavy phone user i use a browser quite a bit i'm making a lot of phone calls and i'm using email a lot and i had a hard time getting through a full day i had to always find a charger to plug it in uh one of the nice things about the galaxy s though is it does feature a removable 1500 milliamp hour battery so if you're a power user you can always pick up another battery if you need and have it fully juiced and ready to go all right so let's talk a little bit about touchwiz interface i'm sure you're probably familiar with android and what it looks like this is a bit different this puts four rows of icons on the bottom which are customizable and sort of keeps them on each screen go ahead and view and see each screen here and you do have actually seven home screens you can choose to have more or less but seven are really what samsung gives you i'm not the biggest fan of touchwiz it does have some nice enhancements one of the nicest enhancements that it has is right on top you get controls for your wi-fi bluetooth gps and airplane mode when you're in a phone call you actually get the speaker buttons right there and a call so you don't have to actually jump into the phone menu to do that you can just slide down the notification tab and you get all your information right there oh it really is a handy feature touchwiz also features when you're in your contacts you slide your finger to the right to make a phone call and slide it to the left to send text there are some nice enhancements there applications look a little bit different that's sort of encapsulated in these squares and then go ahead and scroll through whatever you'd like and when you download apps from the marketplace they still show up in these squares you can customize these pages any way that you like the captivate does or excuse me the fascinate does feature uh four capacitive buttons across the bottom and i'm not the biggest fan of capacitive buttons oftentimes i had to sort of tap them twice to make sure it worked so wants to light it up and once you register the touch uh that's a little bit of a small detriment to the galaxy s series of devices but certainly not a huge negative running this hummingbird processor this phone is blazing fast probably one of the fastest phones that i have ever tested really just works quite well and speaking of speed let's go and take a look at the browser because the browser is really fast on this device and as you can see right there there's a big flash logo unfortunately this does not yet support flash 10.1 uh that will supposedly come with the upgrade to uh 2.2 it's android 2.2 froyo which will support flash it does have a fantastic multi-touch browser though which really is capable of great pinch to zoom and i think this is really where you see the processor speed a lot of times with multi-touch devices particularly android if the phone is underpowered you're going to see a little bit of delay i want to use your multi-touch gestures here it is almost instantaneous and just works very well uh you can see probably that the screen's got a bit of a tint to it that is one of the i think downside the super amoled display it's got a bit of a blue tint to it uh which is going to give you better visibility and direct sunlight for some people it might be a positive uh for me it sort of hinders the experience of using this gorgeous screen but not nearly enough that would hinder it that i wouldn't want to use the device just something to keep in mind it's going to make the pictures and the text look a bit warmer i suppose let's go ahead and jump back here uh one other thing to notice about the samsung fascinate is the back of it uh features a plastic back which i found to actually come loose every now and then if i actually snap it back into place perhaps that's a promise to my review unit uh you can see right there there's a little speaker uh the speakerphone volume is not incredibly loud i've certainly tested many phones with better speaker phone volume so if you rely on sticker phone when you're in a car you might want to invest in a bluetooth headset it's usable when you're in a quiet environment but if you have ambient noise around it's going to be a bit more difficult to use the phone is very very very thin and very easily pocketable i think this 4 inch screen may actually be the perfect size it doesn't create too much bulge in your pocket if you put in your purse not going to take up too much room really just worked very well overall i'm extremely thrilled with the samsung fascinate and definitely representative of my view on the galaxy s series advice as a whole if you don't like the way this phone looks with touchwiz uh with android being open you can customize it to your heart's content and really make it look and feel your own which is one of the really big selling points of android i've been a big fan of the phone i enjoy the phone i'm actually using uh the phone as my daily driver and i can recommend it wholeheartedly so on a one to five scale i give this phone a very very very solid 4.75 almost five just due to some build quality issues that was fixed this phone would be a very solid five and i can completely recommend this with two enthusiastic thumbs up if you're a verizon user in the market for an android phone you definitely owed yourself to take a look at the samsung fascinate i'm john rettinger from technobuffalo be sure to check us out for all your tech news i'll see you in the next video bye\n"