The release of the Samsung Galaxy S brings another excellent addition to an Android smartphone already crowded with stunning mobiles. The Galaxy S should hold its own amid the strong competition.

Look and Feel
The Samsung Galaxy S is a huge phone packing a 4″ Super AMOLED display and supporting up to 16 million colours, and this really is the best selling point of the Galaxy S. You won’t see any other display as vivid or bright as this, and for watching films or TV shows I’m not afraid to say this is the best option you have in today’s market.

Additionally, the capacitive touchscreen also provides a slick and quick touchscreen experience, helped by 1Ghz of processing power. Surprisingly, the brains of the Galaxy S is squeezed into a handset that is just 9.9mm thick and weighing 118g. This helps to set it apart from both the Desire and Xperia X10, both of which definitely feel like giants. Despite having only slightly smaller dimensions, the Galaxy S feels that bit more palm and pocket friendly.

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Functionality

The HTC Desire has quickly established itself as the Android smarthphone to dethrone in order to claim dominance of the market. While HTC’s offering seems as untouchable as the iPhone once was, the Galaxy S possesses some impressive functionality that means it can definitely compete with the Desire.

Samsung have delivered an impressive UI with their TouchWiz overlay on the Android OS. This offers multiple customisable homescreens and plenty of widgets that can be employed for quick displaying of information or access to programs.

While this would be expected to slow down performance, the Galaxy boasts a 1GHz Hummingbird processor that actually outperforms the Snapdragon used on the Desire. The difference isn’t huge, but the extra bit of power means that excessive multitasking doesn’t lead to quite as much slowdown as is sometimes felt on the Desire.

One of the interesting features included is a Swype keyboard. This has been included on a number of other Samsung phones, and has received praise from many reviewing sites. Instead of tapping individual keys to type out a message, with the Swype keyboard, you glide your finger over the relevant keys and it selects what it believes is the intended word from your movements. This works surprisingly well, and has been proven as a success with the world texting speed record recently being set on a Samsung Swype keyboard.

Another nice little touch is the ‘Daily Briefing’ widget. This is one of those good time-saving streamlining features which you can populate your home screen with. In this case it displays weather, news, stocks and your daily calendar events in one widget. You can then tap on any one of these and be taken through the detailed display on them. This isn’t particularly revolutionary, but it is delivered in a slick little display that works perfectly and is great for an at-a-glance update on things you might have to go through a couple of screens to find out otherwise.

Elsewhere, the phone has a good 5 Megapixel camera with HD video recording support, a media player that supports most file formats and the usual array of social networking and messaging capabilities you would expect from a smartphone.

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy S is one of the best phones to come out this year. If you are looking to buy a new phone you are spoilt for choice at the moment. Until we hear more about Apple’s OS updates, there is no doubt that Android is the best operating system to go for. If you choose this as your Android phone, then you’ll be getting a good looking, slimline phone with impressive power and a UI that delivers that power in a functional and easy-to-use package. The Galaxy S probably nudges ahead of the Xperia X10 and I would put it right alongside the Desire as the best smartphone available at the moment.

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