Samsung Fascinate Review: Verizon's Galaxy S Smartphone
by Brian Klug on October 5, 2010 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Galaxy S
- Fascinate
- Mobile
Speakerphone Volume
We've been testing speakerphone volume regularly on devices using a decibel meter 6" away from the device turned face up. In addition, we've been testing audio quality subjectively. The Fascinate is decently loud.
There's a raised bit right over the speaker output, so sound makes it out and around even if you've got the phone laying on a flat surface.
Earpiece performance and volume is adequate - voice quality is as good on the Fascinate as I've seen on other CDMA handsets in the testing I performed. One place I noticed the Fascinate being a bit quieter than I would've liked was Google Navigation.
Battery Life
The Fascinate doesn't really set any records for battery life, but then again that's partly due to the combination of Super AMOLED and the more power hungry SGX 540. For 3G and WiFi web browsing battery life tests, we run through a series of just over 20 pages every 10 seconds with the screen set at 50% brightness until the device dies. Obviously during 3G testing, WiFi is disabled. During WiFi testing, cellular is enabled. Background applications are also all killed before launching the browser and starting our test. For call time testing, we initiate a call and play music on both ends and wait for the phone to die.
The Fascinate does best the Epic 4G quite handily though.
The Fascinate does have a relatively beefy 1500 mAh, 5.55 Whr removable battery (same as the Epic 4G), but it still doesn't come close to its brethren in some areas. It's still better than the Epic fared with its 4G stack, but it's hard to really nail down why battery life isn't quite as good as the competition, even its Android competition. Either way, it seems like the Fascinate is designed to compete with the Nexus One and Motorola Droid, where it comes close. It can't hold a candle to the Droid 2 or Droid X. Perhaps when we finally get the Captivate and Vibrant - each with GSM/UMTS stacks - we'll be able to tell more about where this battery life deficiency lies.
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Brian Klug - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Chemist1,I actually completely agree with you, 100%. When I joined on to tackle smartphones, my big objective has and still is to nail down testing for everything that's traditionally been subjective - battery life, screen quality, performance, signal strength, e.t.c, and make it just as objective as hardware reviews. Of course, audio (voice) quality is on that list as well.
I've been grappling for some time on an ideal test methodology, one that would give a much better (objective) means of testing actual call quality than - it sounded good. I honestly couldn't agree more that this level of analysis is lacking. Unfortunately, until I've got that nailed down, it's really all I can say. What shape that takes is still up in the air.
I've thought of recording the local ASOS weather station test call (which is so far what I use for measuring speakerphone volume) through both the line-out and speaker, then letting people compare those audio files directly. I've considered using some spectral analysis tools similar to determine the pass bandwidth of these phones (of course this would require some tweaking due to cellular latency and also a land line), and a few other things. If you or other commenters have suggestions, I'm more than all ears, seriously ;)
I've actually done a fair amount of playing with CDMA voice codecs in the past - a number of WinMo devices would let you change from relatively-basic EVRC to better 13k voice codecs and a number of others. That kind of discussion and reporting about what codecs each device are using is where I'd like to go, getting that from Android sometimes is very difficult unfortunately. In fact, only device I've really seen that on so far is the EVO. I'd also like to eventually be able to characterize the difference between 1x voice, GSM and UMTS.
There's a lot more we're trying to add for certain, I/we just have to figure out what the best way of testing those would be.
-Brian
jasperjones - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
You may find this shocking but I highly doubt people will consider audio quality as important as you do when deciding for a smartphone.I faintly remember some study on what consumers are looking for in portable audio/MP3 players. Audio quality was NOT in people's top 5! Design, storage capacity, and three other things I cannot recall right now were more important to them. In an audio device!!
So there you go.
chemist1 - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
jasperjones: Thanks for your comment. Well, one needs to be careful of these surveys, since small differences in wording can significantly change the outcome. But your point is well-taken: audio quality is not a top priority for consumers. Nevertheless, that's not to say that audio quality is of no interest to the majority of consumers, nor that it should not therefore be of significant interest to us. [Please see paragraphs 2 and 3 of my reply to kmmanety.]MacTheSpoon - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Audio quality matters to me, too, thanks for fighting the good fight, chemist1. ;)By the way, I own the phone and I have found the audio to be pretty good for calls so far. At least, I haven't found myself wishing the phone was louder or had any problems distinguishing speech.
Listening to music with headphones...I don't have golden ears, and I don't know how it stacks up to a top mp3 player like a Cowon, but it's definitely not a low-end sound like my iPod Nano 4th Gen or my 2007 Macbook Pro, anyway.
strikeback03 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Kinda like how in CNET reviews of point and shoot cameras image quality only accounts for something like 10% of their final score.Though a lot of consumers probably just assume audio quality is good enough. The majority are going to put compressed music on there anyway and then use cheap earbuds, so a lot of the audio quality discussion that goes on on tech sites is utterly irrelevant to the majority.
cwebersd - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
In addition to measurements of sound quality, how about a simple internal poll? Record sound samples of various phones, post them with obfuscated names for other staff members to listen to and have them judge intelligibility, clarity, harshness, etc. This should give you a decent sampling of real people's observations. Better than just your own.dagamer34 - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Brian, there are some JPEG artifacts in your gallery shots. I doubt the D80 has such visible artifacts on a downrezzed shot.Brian Klug - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Yeah unfortunately the gallery preview images are compressed even though I upload originals from all the cameras. If you click "View original size" you'll get the raw untampered JPEG though, complete with all the EXIF headers and everything you'd get from the camera. Unfortunately I can't control how the engine compresses those images for the gallery preview.-Brian
kmmatney - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
One problem is that the Audio quality changes so much with various factors (signal quality, the phone at the other end, etc..).I would disagree that that the main purpose of these phones is to actually be a "phone". No one cares that much about call quality when they are buying these phones - you just assume it will be acceptable.
softdrinkviking - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Brian, even though there are many factors, I think you can do an, "all things being equal" type of test with a couple of variations.The data will still be meaningful when you are comparing it to other specific phones.