AT&T fans can finally rejoice with an Android smartphone that's competitive with Android offerings on the other U.S. carriers. The Samsung Captivate is the best Android smartphone on AT&T today, and while there are other solid offerings, such as the HTC Aria, the Captivate offers much more power, a larger display, better battery life, and 16GB of on board storage.
The Captivate seems to offer it all, from a 5 megapixel camera to a 1GHz processor and a Super AMOLED display. It's a beauty all around and was a pleasure to use during my testing experience. However, I did have a few problems with call quality, and its user interface hung from time to time while exiting applications - a bug I hope gets fixed through a firmware update in the future.
Let's take a look at what makes the Samsung Captivate the best, and most compelling, Android smartphone on AT&T while addressing some of its flaws, too.
Hardware
Samsung did a bang-up job with the design of the Captivate. The Samsung Captivate has a premium feeling industrial design. The front face sports a large 4-inch
The back of the phone has a sturdy metal battery cover with an attractive faux carbon fiber design. Below and above the battery cover are two gun metal gray colored areas that accent the battery cover nicely. A 5 megapixel camera sits just above the battery cover. The microSD card slot is under the battery cover, and, thankfully, I didn't have to remove the battery to access it.
The Super AMOLED screen is incredible. Photos and videos look amazing on the screen, and colors really pop with vibrancy. I've heard some complaints that the colors were are too saturated, but they looked OK to me. Samsung's Super AMOLED display is also viewable under sunlight. I did find that I had to squint at times, but it was much easier to view than a standard AMOLED display, which is nearly impossible to view under glaring light.
Usability
The Captivate runs Android 2.1 with Samsung's TouchWiz 3.0 user interface on top. TouchWiz 3.0 adds a lot to Android 2.1 and while I think it's a little less polished than HTC's Sense, there are a host of features that even Sense doesn't offer, such as the ability to customize the main application menu.
The Captivate provides seven different homescreens that I was able to customize with Android and Samsung widgets. TouchWiz 3.0 also let me quickly tweak the homescreen so that I could set how many homescreens were available (7 is the maximum), and rearrange them. Similarly, there are four touch sensitive icons along the bottom of the screen that are defaulted to the Phone, email, browser, and applications. However, the email and browser icons can be swapped out for any application of your choice. I chose to add Google Voice and the camera applications in their place, and it made it much easier to launch the apps without digging through menus.
As I noted earlier, the main application menu can also be customized. Android, by default, just lists the icons in alphabetical order and there's no way of tweaking it. However, the TouchWiz 3.0 interface on the Captivate provides three options, a customizable grid, an alphabetical grid, or an alphabetical list. I chose the customizable grid and lined all of my applications in the order I like them. Samsung sorts the applications into pages, too, each with 16 application icons on them. I loved the user interface and it was very intuitive to use, and Samsung spiced it up a bit by adding colorful backgrounds to each icon.
The Captivate provides a rather robust address book application, that, like all Android devices, links your contacts with their respective Google accounts if you choose to allow that. However, the Captivate also lets you sync up with Facebook and Twitter accounts, too. I wish that Facebook photos were pulled down automatically, as they are with the HTC Sense user interface, but that's not the case. I was, however, able to view some status updates from friends, but not photo albums and associated Facebook content.
To unlock the phone, without a security combination, I simply had to slide my finger across the display moving a UI overlay off the screen. If I had a missed text or phone call, there were small puzzle pieces present on the lock screen, and if I dragged one of them into a puzzle piece hole, it would automatically launch the corresponding application. I loved this feature, as it eliminated the need to unlock the phone, and then launch messaging or my call log, just to see what I had missed. Similarly, if music is playing while the phone is locked, there's a small half-CD logo at the top of the screen. Dragging it downwards lets the user pause/play or skip songs without unlocking the device. It even displayed a small thumbnail of the album that was playing.
Despite the phone's zippy 1GHz processor, I did notice some sluggishness while backing out of menus to the homescreen. This could sometimes take a second or two, which could be frustrating if I accidentally clicked the homescreen icon and didn't mean to. Similarly, the photo gallery loaded in about 2-3 seconds, which was a bit slow feeling. There were also hangs when exiting a number of applications to return to the homescreen. However, in 3D games such as Crusade of Destiny, the framerates were solid and the processor held up without any issues.
Samsung has that that it plans to upgrade the Captivate to Android 2.2, but it hasn't said when.
Calling / Data
During my testing in New York City, call quality was often a mixed bag of sorts. For one, the actual discussions were solid and I could hear my callers just as well as they could hear me when the signal was strong. However, I had three dropped calls during my testing period, and a number of times where the call would get too fuzzy to understand my caller for a few seconds. Overall, though, I was satisfied with the call quality and the dropped calls have become a usual problem in New York City, primarily due to AT&T's overloaded network. While sitting at my desk in my apartment, I usually had a -51 dBm reported signal strength, which is very strong. The speakerphone was also loud enough for my tastes during a call with a AT&T support.
Data speeds were sufficient while surfing the web, and I usually was able to maintain a strong enough 3G signal during my testing to stream Pandora while cabbing or walking around New York City. Using our standard benchmark from DSLreports.com/mspeed, the phone averaged a download throughput of 965Kbps. That's on the slower side compared to other smartphones, even others from AT&T that I've tested, but I didn't experience many times where I noticed the network was slow while using it for normal activities.
Messaging
The Captivate served up a good messaging experience. It's default QWERTY keyboard reminded me a lot of the one on the T-Mobile Garminfone, and it was generally very easy to type on both in landscape and portrait modes. I tried the Swype keyboard for a few days, which is also preinstalled, but ended up not using it because it was a pain to use while entering URLs.
The Captivate comes with a chat applications preinstalled, including Google Talk, AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. However, I suggest you go to the market and install the full versions of MSN, Yahoo, and AIM, since they are installed as part of an AT&T chat application that lacks in functionality.
I was able to setup both my work IMAP account and my Google email account in under 5 minutes. The email system is very easy to use, and the device also supports POP or Exchange servers. My biggest gripe with Gmail on Android is that to reply to an email, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the email message. This isn't the case with POP/IMAP accounts on the phone, and only with the Gmail client, but I've noticed how much it's beginning to bother me when I want to reply to longer messages.
SMS/MMS texting offered up a good experience. The messages are threaded in colored bubbles on a black background, and MMS texts are automatically included in the conversation as well. I was generally pleased with the entire messaging experience, bu while entering text and editing text, I did notice that there wasn't an easy way to control the cursor. Instead I kept having to poke at the screen with my finger until I was able to get the cursor just where I wanted it.
Apps / App Store
The Captivate, like all Android devices, has access to the Android Market for application downloads. There are a bevy of solid applications in the market, but I wasn't impressed with some of the preinstalled applications. AT&T loaded the device with its bloatware again, including AT&T Family Map, AT&T Maps, AT&T Navigator (how many map applications do we really need?), AT&T Hot Spots, MobiTV, AT&T Music, Mobile Video, Mobile Banking, Where, and Yellow Pages Mobile. I have yet to use any of these applications as there are apps in the Android Market that are better than nearly all of those. AT&T needs to learn from T-Mobile USA and install applications that people will actually use. The T-Mobile Vibrant, for example, comes preinstalled with Slacker Radio, Sims3, and a full version of the movie Avatar.
For navigation, there are two solid applications available, Google Navigation and AT&T Navigator, which is powered by Telenav and costs $9.99 per month. Both offered voice-guided turn by turn directions, and it's up to the user which application they prefer to use. Both have pros and cons, but I typically gravitate towards Google Navigation since it's free.
Like on the HTC Aria, Amazon MP3 isn't preinstalled, which seems like an odd choice given that it's usually loaded as a default application on Android phones. I was able to download it from the Android Market, but it still feels a bit shady that AT&T would hide the application in hopes that you'd use its own lacking music application.
The Captivate comes with a Media Hub application that will eventually serve up full length movies and TV shows, but Samsung hasn't activated the application yet. A spokesperson told me that Media Hub will be available at the end of the summer, or in the fall.
Finally, AT&T doesn't allow you to install applications that are not in the Android Market, which means a host of beta products out there are inaccessible. It's an odd choice given that most other carriers allow you to install "unapproved" .apk files to your heart's content.
Browser
The Captivate has a top-notch WebKit browser, and its large high resolution display made browsing a pleasure. Thanks to the high resolution, even small text was usually very easy to read, and the pinch-to-zoom feature made it a breeze to zoom in and out of websites. The phone's 1GHz processor held up to quickly panning around websites, and was able to power through Flash games from Addictinggames.com without any issue.
Android's default browser is very easy to navigate around, and I liked that I was able to quickly save a bookmark by tapping a small icon next to the URL on any website. Oddly, though, this is the only way to access your bookmark list. It's a bit counter-intuitive. When loading bookmarks, I was presented with large thumbnail icons that made it easy to choose which website I wanted to load quickly at a glance.
Camera
I really enjoyed taking photos with the Captivate's 5 megapixel camera. My only gripes are that it doesn't have a flash, and that there isn't a dedicated camera button. However, shots taken outdoors were usually beautiful and I was able to focus in on a specific object by tapping it on the screen. Samsung provides a host of camera options, such as panoramic shooting, that are littered throughout the touchscreen camera interface. I loved shooting panorama views around New York City, and they came out beautifully both on screen and on my computer. Shots taken in low light and at night came out much better than I expected, and I found that the best way to take photos of friends in low light conditions was to manually change the camera's ISO setting. This resulted in lower quality, and a flash would have been the ideal fix, but it generally worked well.
The Captivate is also capable of shooting 720p HD video. A few clips I recorded looked stunning on the phone's Super AMOLED display, and I was just as impressed with the 30fps recordings when I played them back on my computer; both the audio and the video came through well.
Music
Samsung spiced up the Android music player in a number of ways, but the most compelling feature, I think, is the phone's 16GB of internal storage, which means you can load it up with tunes right out of the box. If you need more space, you can add up to a 32GB microSD card on top of that, for a total of 48GB of storage.
The Samsung Captivate also supports full 5.1 surround sound audio; I don't have a set of 5.1 surround sound speakers, so I wasn't fully able to test this feature, but I can say that even the standard audio sounded excellent through the pair of included high-quality ear buds. Volume levels were loud enough to fill my living room with music using the speakerphone, although the audio wasn't very full at higher levels. Samsung's music interface displays all of your music with thumbnails, and I was able to view my playlists, albums, and artists by clicking the respective tabs at the top of the music player. If an album doesn't have art, Samsung displays a small colorful thumbnail in its place.
Battery
The Samsung Captivate has a 1,500mAh battery that is rated for 5 hours and 50 minutes of talk time. For the most part, I was able to get to the late afternoon after a full charge, and that was after using the phone extensively with streaming Pandora, surfing the web, checking email, and playing games. If I used it more moderately, I was able to get through a full day just fine, and with lighter usage, through the night as well.
Generally, the Captivate felt like one of the longer lasting smartphones that I've used in a while, save for BlackBerry devices. You'll want to carry a charger with you if you're bringing the phone on an overnight trip, but you should be able to get to work and back without worrying about a charge unless you're using it all day long.
Reviewer Spin
The Captivate is currently the best Android smartphone on AT&T, and, in my eyes, is the only contender against the iPhone for those that want a powerful device. The Captivate has a lot going for it, from its beautiful Super AMOLED display to its chic form factor and its 16GB of storage.
Its 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor felt speedy most of the time, but the Captivate hung way too much during my tests while exiting applications. It often took a second or two of waiting just to get back to the homescreen. That's a rarity in smartphones with 1GHz processors these days, and while it seems trivial, it was actually pretty frustrating. I hope these hangs are something Samsung can fix with future firmware updates, since they were my biggest complaint with the phone.
I also loved the 5 megapixel camera, since I end up taking pictures of everything these days, but I do wish that it had a flash to really round out its awesomeness.
If you're on AT&T and shopping for a smartphone, and really want to avoid the iPhone, the captivate is one I personally highly recommend and urge you to check out. But like most smartphones, it's not without its flaws.
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