Samsung is flinging out smartphones faster than we can count these days, seemingly employing a ‘carpet bombing’ approach to find phones consumers will love. The latest is the Samsung Galaxy Pro, designed to scratch that Android with a QWERTY keyboard itch so many have these days – but it’s chosen to do it on the cheap. Will the rows of keys be enough to keep users happy?
The Samsung Galaxy Pro looks pretty nifty the first time you see it, resplendent in black and silver with large, well-spaced keys. In keeping with the likes of the Galaxy S2 and Ace, the back has a mesh design that keeps your fingers cooler during extended use, and helps avoid those dangerous drops.
The screen is large and well-lit within the chassis, and the 11mm thickness makes it pocket-friendly too. We’re not overly enamoured with the plastic construction. The chassis is plastic through and through, and this helps to keep it fairly light at just 103g.
There’s a rather nice patterning on the backplate, but otherwise things are pretty nondescript, design-wise. The Samsung Galaxy Pro is a bit wide for the hand, though, at 66.7mm. Smaller hands will have trouble using either screen or keyboard one-handed.
Keyboard accuracy was a little surprising as we found ourselves making a few too many mistakes when we started using it, but the combination of easy to hit delete key and raised buttons meant we were rattling out texts and emails in no time. The Galaxy Pro’s dinky and dismal 2.8-inch touchscreen is arguably its biggest weakness.
It looks washed-out and dim, and its 320×240-pixel resolution is almost laughable when compared to the screens on other devices in this class. As you might expect, browsing detailed Web pages is a nightmare with such a low-resolution display.
Text is heavily pixellated and images are hard to discern. To make matters significantly worse, there’s no support for multi-touch pinch-to-zoom gestures, so you have to use virtual buttons in order to zoom in and out.
With just 3MP on offer and no flash, you really shouldn’t be looking for greatness. However, there’s autofocus and a reasonable range of shooting modes, including panorama mode, so you do get something to play with at least.
The latter is surprisingly adept at capturing detail at close quarters, although it is rather annoying that you have to manually trigger the macro mode by delving deep into the camera app’s settings. The camera app is one of Samsung’s unique creations and comes packed with scene settings and other modes.
When recording a movie, you’re restricted to VGA quality, so the clips themselves won’t look all that brilliant if you view them on a computer or television. Samsung has decided against including AllShare, its custom DLNA application, so streaming live images to other DLNA-compatible devices is only possible if you download a replacement app from the Android Market.
With a music player and FM radio on-board, basic audio media are covered fairly nicely. The radio has a rather nice user interface involving an old-fashioned tuning image and round ‘button’ that you can use for manual tuning. It’ll auto-scan channels and you can save four favorites.
There’s a handy mute button, which is useful if you are listening through the loudspeaker, all of which contributes to a decent system. If you are listening to the radio you get controls from the notifications bar, so you can switch channels and flip into the main app easily. Then, you can set an auto-off timer so that you can go to sleep with the radio on and it’ll just, well, switch off.
Music playback is a reasonable experience, but it is a bit miffing that Samsung can’t be bothered to provide headphones. The player picked up tunes from an SD card without a hitch, but failed to find our album art.
The loudspeaker is fairly good quality, and there’s an equaliser with a few different settings. The equaliser does make a difference to sound, but it’s another of the annoyances of the small screen that you have to do a lot of scrolling to see all of the equaliser options on offer.
The phone comes with 512MB of internal storage space, and there’s a microSD card slot. A 2GB card is included in the box, but you may wish to replace that with a slightly larger variant if you want to use the phone as a camera and music player. There’s a standard 3.5mm headphone socket on the top of the device, next to the micro-USB charging and data socket. This socket is protected by a sliding plastic door, which we heartily endorse and hope will be a regular feature on future handsets.
It’s par for the course for Android phones to average about a day’s worth of moderate usage before requiring a trip to the wall charger. The Galaxy Pro’s 1,350mAh battery manages to keep the phone ticking over a 24-hour period too. Heavy use will see battery performance head south, but the lack of Flash support and the phone’s unsuitability as a gaming device mean it’s unlikely you’ll use it for much more than texting, phone calls and sending emails anyway.
It began so promisingly for the Samsung Galaxy Pro – tight design and cool keyboard, combined with a low price tag, meant we had high hopes. But even though it’s a trifle more expensive, we’d have to recommend the HTC ChaCha over the Galaxy Pro, which has a superior keyboard, much clearer screen and even throws in Facebook integration to boot.
