Samsung Epic 4G Touch Hands-on and Quick First Impressions [Video]
Apologies in advance for horrible focusing on my camera’s part and a couple of shots where the entire phone wasn’t in view while looking at the software. Also, please allow an hour or two for full HD video to process.
Our friends at Sprint dropped off a little gift for us to share with you guys. It’s the Samsung Epic 4G Touch, Sprint’s keyboard-less version of the original Epic 4G and their version of the Galaxy S II. Quick first impressions? Sure. This phone is amazingly fast. Samsung’s work on TouchWiz UI on top of Android 2.3.4 must have been long and hard because they’ve constructed arguably the smoothest and most user-friendly user interface on top of stock Android.
I’m sure a lot of that is backed by Samsung’s extremely powerful (twice as powerful as competing chipsets, apparently) dual-core 1.2Ghz Exynos processor. In my 30 minutes of gleeful playtime I was unable to produce lag, stuttering or freezing in any application. I applied a live wallpaper to see if it would fall to its knees from me flipping back and forth with an animated background, but to no avail. Needless to say, this makes me smile.
I wondered if that would be different if this had qHD resolution, but I’m not so sure that would make a huge difference. Yes, you read right – the 4.5 inch display on this phone only has WVGA (800×480) resolution.
The result of so few pixels being stuck into such a large screen is overall bigger text, icons and everything. It might be a desirable look for those who struggle to read small text without glasses, but it really disappoints me to think about how much nicer and spacier everything would look overall with qHD.
Thankfully, the display is Super AMOLED Plus so a lot of would-be negative effects that would come about with this disproportionate combination of screen size and resolution aren’t present here.
You’d have to be looking really hard to spot individual pixels, and if you’re like me and can barely see even with strong glasses, a microscope would have to do the trick. That’s backed by very deep contrasts and vibrant colors. As stretched out as everything looks, it all still looks very good.
There are other small things about the phone that make the experience that much better, too, such as motion control. It’s more than a novelty – it’s actually useful. Pinch to zoom takes a backseat to moving the phone back and forth, and panning homescreens to place a widget or icon is no longer the most painful experience ever. Pinch to zoom is still in, but I’m most certain you’ll enjoy this method a lot more.
Other goodies inside the Epic 4G Touch are its 2MP front-facing camera, 8MP rear camera with LED flash and 1080p video recording, 16GB of internal storage, 1800mAh battery and the microUSB MHL port for HDMI-out.
I had a chance to play with the camera for a quick minute. Still photos are beautiful, 1080p video is even better. The camera sensor inside picks up the color accurately and the software helps it achieve great white balance.
Playback of 1080p videos were stutter-free and you could really see the high resolution sensor at work with how crisp and clear footage was. Samsung’s on the top end of the spectrum in the camera department, we’d say.The quick hands-on video is above, but stay tuned for continued coverage in the coming days and weeks, including benchmarks, the full review and more.
A couple more things I forgot to mention in the video:
- Battery is definitely removable and there’s a microSD card slot beneath the battery door.
- There is an LED notification light, thankfully. Hard to see in images but it’s there.
- No keyboard as the name suggests.
