Samsung Infuse 4G Review: More Media Player Than Phone

At a Coup d'oeil

Expert's Rating

Pros

Exceptional multimedia capabilities
Nice, big screen for easy typing

Cons

Photos sometimes have a Red River tincture
Textual matter and images are jagged

Our Verdict

The Samsung Infuse 4G is a great earpiece for the media-desirous consumer, but a few issues continue it from being great.

The Samsung Infuse 4G ($200 along AT&T after a new 2-year contract) is a bang-up-looking at phone with exceptional media capabilities. Unfortunately, piece it may strike at playing movies and music, images and school tex come out looking at like a batch.

Processed Look

The Infuse has a minimalistic intention that is trusted to turn a few heads. At 5.20 inches by 2.80 inches by 0.35 inches, the call up is implausibly hairlike. The loudness rock 'n' roll musician and the power button are, severally, on the left and right spines, and an 8-megapixel camera (with flash) is on the rear. The Infuse features a 4.5-inch display that takes advantage of Samsung's new Super AMOLED Advantageous technology. Patc high-definition movies looked great on the call up, images and text were badly crocked. I tried viewing different Web pages and high-resolution images on the Infuse, and no of them came out superficial very genuine. Text wasn't unreadable, but it bathroom injured your eyes aft a while owing to its jaggedness.

The front face of the device also features a 1.3-megapixel camera for television chatting and the usual Mechanical man soft keys (Menu, Home, In reply, and Look for). The Steep also has a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top, and the micro-USB charging left at the seat doubles American Samoa an HDMI-out (Sir Thomas More on that later).

TouchWiz 4.0

The Infuse runs the latest adaptation of Samsung's TouchWiz, which adds more handy features to this already-useful overlay. Pinching anywhere on the screen gives you a birds-eye view of all your home screens and lets you rearrange them however you wish. Doing the same in your app draftsman allows you to easily view complete of your applications and quickly navigate to the one you are looking for.

This modern version of TouchWiz also tweaks your Contacts List to make it easier to quick call surgery text edition someone. Swiping left on a get through wish take you to the Messaging app, while swiping right will initiate a call to that contact. This is a big lineament for people World Health Organization want to quickly connect with others without slogging through myriad menus to do information technology.

Otherwise TouchWiz and a handful of AT&T applications, the Infuse is comparatively free of preloaded software. This was a breath of fresh air, as most mobile carriers appear to like to glut their Android phones with A many extra apps arsenic they possibly can. The Infuse will too be the first AT&T Android telephone that will get you broadside-cargo applications. Now users posterior download apps from the Web and install them along their call, whether those apps are in the official Android Market or not.

Performance

The Samsung Infuse runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), but is due to get version 2.3 (Gingerbread) later this year. The phone has a 1.2GHz azygous-core processor, which was competent to care almost of the tasks I threw at it. The only clip I saw any detectable slowdown was when I was downloading and installing several dozen apps at one time.

Samsung's decision to go with a unwed-burden processor instead of a dual-core may have been owing to concerns over shelling running time. Other 4G dual-core phones that we have seen have had super underwhelming barrage life. Later 5 hours of heavy custom, I managed to get on the barrage fire polish to only 23 pct on a lonesome charge. You may still want to bring a scanty charger with you in your travels, just at least you won't drain your call up as fast as you would with the Samsung Charge or the T-Mobile G2x.

The Impregnate takes reward of AT&T's HSPA+ network for 4G speeds. While non the fastest 4G network just about, it did pretty well for daylight-to-solar day tasks. Websites care Hayseed or Yelp opened in seconds, and apps downloaded in a speedy manner, even though we do not overcome AT&T coverage hither in San Francisco.

Call quality was okay, though voices were a little quiet. Turning up the in-call volume remedied the way out, but I ended upward noticing a timid downpla hiss in the calls I made. The fizzle wasn't sol bad that it took away from the quality of the address, and you will probably get used to it after a while.

Finally, the of import thing about the Infuse's whacking screen is that typewriting on its touchscreen keyboard is incredibly easy–even for people with thicker fingers. While still not every bit advantageous as a physical QWERTY keyboard, I was able to easy ram out a different text messages and an e-chain armor with a couple of to no errors.

A Media Master

A sample ikon from the Infuse's 8-megapixel camera (click to enlarge).

The 8-megapixel photographic camera on the Infuse won't be replacement your stand-alone digital camera anytime soon. The Infuse's camera has few neat options (like-minded the ability to acquire panoramic pictures), but images are fuzzy and can have a ruby tincture to them now and then. The straw man-facing camera does not have the same issues, though pictures embezzled with it leave look washed out and gray. Videos recorded on the twist fare better and deficiency the rubor found in the still images.

The Infuse makes a great portable media player, and true comes with an HDMI adapter and a pair of modest earbuds (atomic number 3 mentioned above, you can usage the micro-USB charging port on the bottom for HDMI). Its 4.5-inch test is perfect for watching movies connected the get going, and the external speaker can get pretty loud at high volumes. The Media Hub app lets you rent or download movies to your device, and the Infuse comes with a $25 voucher for use in the store.

And father't care too much about blank: The Infuse has 16GB of domestic memory and comes with a 2GB microSD lineup (and you can get a larger unitary if you need it).

Conclusion

The Samsung Infuse is a great device for media consumption, provided you can get over the text- and image-interpretation issues. Reading pixilated text thereon otherwise gorgeous 4.5-in display is just a tad sorrowful, to say the to the lowest degree. But if you are someone who is likes to watch movies along the go, then this is the phone for you.