Well, Samsung was nice enough to send me their new Samsung Galaxy S phone to review so before I start I wanted to say that this review is 100% my opinion, they just asked me to give an honest review. So… here goes!

First of all, I would like to talk about how it looks. The phone is awesome. It’s slick, almost as thin as the new iPhone 4 but not as flat, which I kind of liked a bit more while holding the phone to make calls or play with all the apps. The device looks to be a little less than a quarter of an inch taller and the same wider, but it definitely still has that small phone feel. The screen however, has about a half an inch more property vertically and maybe a tiny fraction of an inch horizontally, which for me is a big seller. And as for in-hand feel, it did feel pretty lightweight, making it seem a little bit more plastic-y. Then again, some may see that as a good thing — less weight to carry around and stuff in your pocket, etc.

Then of course, there’s Samsung’s Super AMOLED Display (Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) which basically translates to: one vivid, ultra-bright display. They even boast 80% less reflection, which was hard to compare to my iPhone 4, but the phone sure was clear and crisp.

Lets talk about some of the product specs, you’re basically looking at a high speed processor. In fact, it’s a 1GHz Processor which Samsung claims, “helps power everything from games and streaming movies to HD video.” I can confirm that the actions on the phone were pretty quick. There were a couple times that I noticed a little lag, but that could be from the OS, not sure. It took lightning quick pictures which were super crisp, the camera is 5 MP so you’d be able to get crisp pictures of almost anything you want out of normal photographic use.

Next up is the software, the Galaxy S is running Android 2.1 which I’d never really played with much until now. I mean, I’ve got friends with Android phones, but I haven’t really been interested enough to try it out. It was surprisingly nice and pretty easy to use/navigate. There’s a handy Google search bar on the home screen to you can jump right into a search without opening an app or browser first. Also cool about Android is that there seems to be a lot more customizations that one can make to their phone to truly personalize it. I’m really impressed.

Access to applications is pretty nice too. You’ve got a whole separate page for all of your applications which is pretty nice and organized, especially since you can switch to list view. With dozens of apps on my phone, it’s not easy to remember exactly which pages have which apps on them, but list view makes it pretty simple. Not that it’s a pain on the iPhone or anything, it’s just a nice option on the Galaxy S.

Speaking of applications, a lot of people compare Android to the iPhone in terms of available applications, the iPhone having many, many times more apps available. I don’t really see this as a problem. When i searched for apps on the Samsung Galaxy S in the Android marketplace, I was able to find an app for everything I needed.

I’m not as concerned about hardware specs as I am about user experience, and in my experience, the phone was great. As i mentioned earlier, the only bad part was the lag that i noticed a few times. Other than that, I thought it was a pretty good choice for a smart phone. However, for those of you who do want the specs, here ya go:

Network

HSUPA 900/1900/2100
EDGE/GPRS 850/ 900/1800/1900

Dimension

64.2 X 122.4 X 9.9 mm (119g)

Display

4.0” WVGA(480×800) 16M SUPER AMOLED
mDNIe(Mobile Digital Natural Image engine)

Android 2.1 (Eclair) / Android Market

Social Hub

Integrates SNS, email, and calendar accounts