REVIEW | Samsung Fascinate Mobile Phone

Samsung Fascinate is a mobile phone that belongs to the Samsung Galaxy series of mobile phones released on all major carriers in US. Samsung Fascinate was released on Verizon wireless. The phone is sleek looking light weight in all black color.

Pictures of the phone are shown below

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The phone looks great with super amoled sharp and crisp screen display at 480x854.

Extra details are shown in the video



The phone comes preloaded with many standard Android applications and some enhanced application from Samsung. Additional applications can be installed through the Android application market. For some reason the applications are not arranged in alphabetic order. Pre-installed applications show up in alphabetical order in the beginning and the newly installed application appear at the end of the original applications.

Here are some of the Phone screen captures showing the installed applications on the phone

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A typical application screen for example for Latitude application looks like this

From SAmsung Fascinate Miscellaneous Pictures

The phone comes with standard "Setting" application. It allows to set wireless networks, Call options and other Android OS specific settings that are available on the phone.

From SAmsung Fascinate Miscellaneous Pictures

This screen layout is same as in other Android OS based phones such as Google Nexus One and Droid X.

Some details about the Phone's internals are available through the standard "Settings" application. However, more details about Phone's hardware can be obtained through another application "Android System Info" that is freely available on the Android market. Looking inside the Samsung Fascinate through this application provides some very useful information about the Phone's hardware that includes information about its Battery, CPU, Memory, Camera and Sensor system as shown in the pictures

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It shows that the Phone comes with an ARMv7 Processor that runs at a clock speed of 1000 MHZ, a total RAM of 325MB and Android 2.1 Eclair operating system. It also provides camera details and lists many of the supported picture sizes e.g. 1920x2560, 1200x1600 and 480x800. Another screen shows the details about the available sensors within the Camera.

The Camera/Camcorder application on Samsung Fascinate mobile phone is one of the best I have used on Android based cell Phones. It provides options to take single snapshot pictures, Panoramic pictures and multiple shots in quick succession with one single snap. The internal menu system for this application takes some time to learn because it includes sixteen screens with many options that may be confusing at first but allow to practically set everything about a picture.

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These pictures were taken at different locations at different times to test the picture quality of Samsung Fascinate mobile phone.

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Overall picture quality is great and competes very well with current crop of stand alone digital cameras.

The Camera also allows Panoramic shots and here are some sample shots

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The Panoramic shots are large images with size around 2000x400 Pixels. This creates a problem in embedding them in a blog post due to limited space. To avoid this a possible work around is to use a standalone Pan and Zoom display widget.

Here are some examples using the Zoomify display widget

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Youngstown State University Campus

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Butler Arts Museum at Youngstown State University Campus

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Youngstown State University Campus

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STEM college Building at Youngstown State University Campus

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Samsung Fascinate also allows multiple shots, a maximum of nine shots with a single snap. This is a convenient feature to capture pictures of moving objects. It can also be used to create a Panoramic view by stitching several pictures together that have over lapping scenes. Here are a series of pictures that were shot using this options

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The following Panorama is created by using pictures shown above with the help of Adobe Photoshop CS4.

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Upon comparing the two approaches to create panoramic pictures, it becomes obvious that Samsung Fascinate mobile phone offers an easier and better option for creating Panoramic pictures.

The Samsung Fascinate's default search engine is Bing from Microsoft as shown in the picture below

From SAmsung Fascinate Miscellaneous Pictures

This option can not be altered. Bing is a decent option but it is not a match for Google search engine. This default search option will not allow users of Samsung Fascinate cell phone to get full Android OS experience.

Samsung Fascinate at the time of testing was still running Android OS Eclair version 2.1. The linpack benchmark in MFLOPS for Samsung Fascinate is 8.123 while for Google Nexus One running Android 2.2 Froyo is 33.426 as shown in the picture below

From SAmsung Fascinate Miscellaneous Pictures

That is considerably higher for Google Nexus one even though both phones are running the same ARM processor at 1000 MHZ. Android Eclair 2.1 OS leads to slow performing Samsung Fascinate Phone. The big difference in performance shows up when playing Youtube videos on these phones. The videos can not be played in high quality mode on Fascinate as they are on the Google Nexus one.

There were some inconsistencies noted while sharing the pictures between Picasaweb and Samsung Fascinate. It simply failed. Also there were times when the Phone simply hung up and had to be rebooted. Considering this the phone needs the Android OS 2.2 upgrade to improve its performance and also to get the promised option to use Google search on the phone.

The phone has excellent call quality. It worked great everywhere because of solid wireless network performance from Verizon. In the final conclusion it is a great phone that performed well in every department on the Verizon wireless network. It will only improve with the coming upgrade of Android OS to version 2.2

I will highly recommend this phone it will only get better after the OS upgrade that is coming soon.

For additional information please also read "Review : Samsung Fascinate Mobile Phone Sound and Camcorder Application "