Samsung Fascinate Guide

Seeing that Samsung's Galaxy S cellphones have landed at AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, Verizon Wireless is last in line--which is not necessarily a bad thing, considering Verizon customers have many strong Android phones from which to choose, including the Droid X, Droid 2, and Droid Incredible. So what on earth does the Fascinate provide the party on Big Red? This handset has the same vibrant AMOLED screen we loved on the earlier models, and in contrast to AT&T's Captivate and T-Mobile's Vibrant, this model includes an LED flash and mobile hotspot feature.

Design
In the of the Galaxy S devices, the Samsung Fascinate most closely resembles the Vibrant. The handset comes with a clean and attractive slate design with rounded corners, which is slim and lightweight at 4.92 inches tall by 2.53 inches wide by 0.39 inch thick and 4.1 ounces. Though we dubbed the Vibrant as the sexiest of the series, in a few ways the Fascinate is much better.

Display
Like with the other Galaxy S devices, the Fascinate's AMOLED screen is, well, fascinating. Its 4-inch display dimensions are between the Droid 2 (3.7 inches) and the Droid X (4.3 inches), even though it contains a lower 800 x 480-pixel resolution when compared to 854 x 480 for the two Motorola devices.

Keyboard
The Fascinate offers two strategies for input: Swype or the stock Android keyboard. The latter is not hard to work with, even in portrait mode, but after you experience how quickly you possibly can compose messages using Swype, it would be tough to switch time for whatever else.

Interface
Like the remainder of the Galaxy S series, the Fascinate runs using Android 2.1 with Samsung's TouchWiz 3.0 interface. The latter is obviously improved from previous versions, with some enhanced functionality and also a more polished look. To start out, you will find new widgets, including one called Feeds & Updates and another called Buddies Now. Feeds & Updates streams updates from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and you will tend to display content derived from one of,two, or all three of the social-networking sites, and also set the refresh rate, ranging from 30 minutes to once per day. Buddies Now could be such as a favorites list and lets you immediately call or text those contacts, and also reply to any one of their updates.

Music and Video
The TouchWiz mp3 music player is touch-friendly and simple to navigate. It showcases album art nicely, too, with an iTunes Cover Flow-style user interface. Sound was clean over my own earbuds, and decent via the external speakers. One among the most intriguing features of the Fascinate is the Samsung Media Hub, which could accompany all the Galaxy S phones. Media Hub is Samsung's reply to iTunes, a store for choosing music and video. Unfortunately, Media Hub is not yet on the market to users at the moment; as outlined by my contact at Samsung, Media Hub will launch this fall. Customers will be able to download the service via an over-the-air update.

Camera
The Fascinate contains a 5-MP camera, but unlike those two phones, the Fascinate carries with it an LED flash that worked well; even in a totally darkened room, the flash provided enough light to use fairly decent pictures at short range. In the light, pictures were more desirable. The Fascinate's camera also did a great job adjusting the aperture when we moved the phone from the street to the bright blue sky; the street wasn't shrouded in darkness, nor was the sky beaten up.

Battery life
The Samsung Fascinate ships that has a 1,500mAh lithium ion battery that has a rated talk-time of 7 hours and up to 13 times of standby time. In our battery drain tests, the smartphone provided 6.5 hours of continuous talk-time using one charge. During our review period, however, there we were able to get an entire day's use outside of the smartphone--e-mail, Web browsing, music playback--before the need to recharge at the end of the night. Read another cellphone review.