Samsung Epic 4G Review: The Fastest Android Phone
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 6, 2010 5:28 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Epic 4G
- Gadgets
- Mobile
The Keyboards
“Wait, this is Swype?”
I read about Swype in Brian’s Droid X review, but Motorola shipped the keyboard disabled by default so I figured it’d be one of those things with a steep enough learning curve to dissuade the impatient. When I first started using the keyboard on the Epic 4G I fell in love. It was by far my favorite Android keyboard. It wasn’t until I finished typing a word and noticed a little info button blinking in the lower left corner of the keyboard that I realized I was using Swype.
Samsung ships the Epic 4G with Swype installed and enabled by default, and I totally get why. The keyboard layout is simply perfect for Android. You get a very simple keyboard with a layout that makes sense, I have absolutely no complaints about it. The keys are both big and well spaced enough on the 4” touchscreen to make typing quickly a non-issue. There’s no And if you want an alternate input form that requires fewer taps, there’s always Swype input.
The virtual keyboard rocks but what Swype lets you do is input characters an alternative way: by tracing a line over the letters of the word you’re trying to type. For example, if I wanted to Swype out the world “them” I’d place my finger over the letter ‘t’ on the keyboard, then draw a line down to h, diagonally up to e, and back down and to the right over to m. When I lift my finger there’d be a slight pause, and Swype would insert the word “them”. There are tricks to do more complicated things: make a little circle around a letter you need to enter twice, or extend a line up above the keyboard to create a capital letter. If Swype is unsure of what you’re typing it’ll give you a list of options to choose from, and manually typing in words adds them to the dictionary.
Swyping "hello"
I personally prefer the traditional typing method of text input but I can see how, with practice, you could be just as fast with Swype.
While Swyping you have to pay more attention to spelling. The iOS style of text input is pretty much tap and forget, if you misspell or mistype something the OS autocorrects. But with Swype, you actually need to know how to spell the words you’re trying to type and know where all of the keys are on the keyboard. I didn’t feel my mental CPU utilization hit 100% as Brian described in his first encounter, but I felt like I was in a constant spelling/key location bee. It just takes some getting used to but I actually liked Swyping when I didn’t feel like typing with two hands.
The downside to using Swype as a normal virtual keyboard is the optional autocorrection (you have to enable it under Swype settings). Instead of getting suggestions inline, you get a distracting popup. Thankfully you can easily switch back to the default Android keyboard just by holding down on any text input box and changing the input method.
The physical keyboard is a nice addition, I definitely appreciate it being there although most of the time I used the virtual keyboard. I’d probably prefer the other Galaxy S variants that lack the physical keyboard, but if you need tactile feedback the Epic 4G’s hybrid model works.
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MJinZ - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
It's an interesting review since it starts out with some good words and ends with, what my impression is - well it's a POS.And I'm sorry Samsung, but a phone needs to last more than 5 minutes and a GPS needs to work. We really could not care about it looking like a damn iPhone. Hell, people buy iPhones for that.
Try harder Sammy.
zizagoo - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
There seems to be an agreement amongst high-end Android users that battery life is terrible within the first two weeks, but then significantly improves after the battery has been conditioned. It's possible that due to the short review period, this never get's a chance to happen, causing an under report of the battery life.It would be fascinating if you did a follow up later on to determine if this is true.
StealthX32 - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
The functional battery life is pretty long. I can pull 1.5-2 days if my use is limited (maybe 20 minutes of calling, 20 or so text messages, little to no browsing). The Hummingbird really does sip power when it's idle.If you're hammering away at it for 4 straight hours, then the battery life is pretty poor.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
But other than emergency situations, are you really going to have a phone like this and only use it that little? I've mentioned before, I wish they could come up with some type of "real-life" battery test that would include a certain amount of talk, text, web, video, etc. per hour. For example, I would be surprised if the battery in my HTC Diamond lasts much more than 2 hrs in 3G browsing, but in my usual day (5-10 min talk, 80-100 text, few MMS, 10-15 min web, many times turned on to check the time) it generally has 20-30% still showing when I put it back on the charger after 15-16 hrs.Dane74 - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
On battery break in: with Lithium based batteries, break in is negligible. The observed better second week battery life comes from playing with less features.I expected better battery life than my spouse's Evo, due to more efficient power usage of the Epic's processor as well as its screen. We found the battery life to be equal, my impression from behavior of both in weak signal areas is that Epic's voice, 3g and its 4G reception is slightly worse than Evo which will cause some additional drain on power.
gvaley - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
My personal experience (6+ device batteries so far, including phones, cameras) shows a 1,8-2x battery life improvement after 3-4 charge-discharge cycles. And it's definitely not due to unbalanced usage. The same holds true for both Lithium-Ion and Lithium-Polymer batteries, although the more I think about it, the more I convince myself that Lithium-Polymer are more susceptible to break in.Ratman6161 - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
I've got an original Droid now running Android 2.2. A while back I picked up a couple of spare batteries cheap online. These are identical to the one that came in the phone. When I swapped in one of the new batteries it was showing up as fully charged already. I started rotating the three batteries every Friday to keep approximately equal usage on each one.I never really noticed any difference. Then again I wasn't specifically looking for that and did not do any kind of test.
AdamPflug - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
I have the Samsung Captivate (not the Epic 4G), but it's still in the galaxy S line. I noticed that I needed at least 3 complete charge/discharge cycles before I got reasonable battery life out of the phone. It wasn't a decrease in usage either, I made sure I kept my usage patterns consistent.My experience with the Captivate now is that I can listen to podcasts all day, read all my work email, do some web browsing, and still have around 60% battery left at 10pm. If they could just fix the GPS issues with a software patch (they say they're going to sometime in September, along with an upgrade to 2.2) the I'll be extremely happy.
Also, I've been pretty happy with the brightness of my Captivate, I wonder if the review took into account the separate brightness settings for the browser app?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
These results were all recorded after discharging the phone more than 3 times (each test was run multiple times). Note that 4 hours of continuous usage can often times yield a pretty long real world battery life depending on your usage pattern. That being said, a phone that gets 8 hours in our tests will obviously last longer with the same usage pattern. While the Epic 4G's battery life may be sufficient, it's lower than we'd like to see for a modern smartphone.And thank you for the correction on the browser brightness setting, that's why the screen looked dimmer at full brightness by comparison. In that shot the Epic 4G's screen was set to approximately 20% brightness. I've made the appropriate correction in the review and credited you with the heads up :)
Take care,
Anand
gvaley - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
Anand, the poor battery life is probably due to Sprint. Other reviews (of the European 3G galaxy S) show maybe the best battery life among Androids. Check this test from a very reputable site: http://blog.gsmarena.com/samsung-i9000-galaxy-s-fu...