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 Smoothest Android UI To Date
I’ve tried the big names. The G1, Droid X, HTC Incredible, EVO 4G, and even newcomers like the Dell Streak. The one thing all Android phones I’ve laid my hands on have in common is varying degrees of a choppy UI. Some are worse than others but they all exhibited it. The choppiness is really apparent when compared to the iPhone. Scrolling through apps, or down web pages would just feel choppy - as if we weren’t running at a smooth or constant frame rate. I had no idea if it was an Android thing, a driver issue or something else entirely. The fact that it varied so much depending on hardware/software meant that there was no easy solution.
For example, the HTC Incredible got pretty close simply by ditching a number of animations. In fact, there’s even a setting within Android to do this:
The Galaxy S did it the old fashioned way though: a lot of software tuning and faster hardware.
Tap the icon in the lower right corner to bring up a list of applications and swiping through them feels just like an iOS device. It’s smooth. There are occasional dropped frames but it’s rare. Scrolling down web pages is still choppy though.
Remember me talking about Samsung learning from Apple? These are the learnings. Even the app list in Samsung’s custom TouchWiz Android UI mimics iOS. You get pages of apps that you flip through left-to-right, there’s no vertical scrolling.
You still get multiple home screens, but swiping between them is fairly smooth as well. Occasionally I’ll get a hiccup or two but overall, it’s the best I’ve seen on an Android phone.
Samsung clearly put a lot of attention to making this aspect of the Epic 4G as Apple-like as possible, and I believe it delivered. I’d say you get around 90 - 95% of the scrolling feel of the iPhone 4, which is to say that it’s close enough.
The polish extends beyond the smoothness of the UI. Individual apps feel more appliance like and less PC like. The dialer UI is very clean and does sensible things like automatically look up phone numbers in your contact list as you dial them in - this applies to both number matching as well as T9-like text matching. The camera app hides unused customization options unless you ask to see them. Samsung modified the notifications pulldown to include a widget that lets you enabled disable WiFi, 4G, Bluetooth and GPS. It’s the little things like these that really make Samsung’s TouchWiz UI a friendlier face on Android.
There’s a fine line between polish and oversimplification however, and in some areas Samsung does cross it. Samsung’s custom Android UI does things like removes all ability to see percentage of battery life remaining, all you get is a visual indication but nothing more. Even going into the Android battery info menu you can’t get that level of detail, you’ll have to turn to a third party app.
Samsung also removed all support for recording call length in your call log. On other Android phones you have a record of how long each phone call lasted, but Samsung removed it entirely. It keeps the UI ultra clean, but at the expense of functionality.
Sprint does its unnecessary evil and equips the Epic 4G with Sprint spam right out of the box. You'll occasionally get a Sprint icon in the notification bar telilng you about the latest news from Sprint. Tapping on it will bring you to the Sprint Zone (pictured above).
The Epic 4G’s icons are all custom designed and they all feel very modern and web-2.0-ey. You get bold colors and big boxes around each icon that make the app launcher feel like a grown up toy rather than a PC OS shrunk into a smartphone. The downside is that the individual app icons aren’t very memorable or distinguishable from one another. Colors are great for organization, but too many and you lose all semblance of order.
Ultimately if you’re trying to give someone a more iOS-like experience on an Android phone, Samsung gets the job done. Its custom skinning is the closest you can get to iOS without giving up the flexibility of Android.
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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...