We’re still shaking our heads and sighing longingly on the performance of Samsung’s Galaxy S II , a phone that wowed us in Europe but likely won’t be coming to American shores for it slow — and who knows what it’ll appear like when it does. But don’t get too down, dear reader, because here comes another slice of Samsung and this slab has that very same 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display tucked in there. It’s rather less slim, rather less classy, and rather less quick than Sammy’s latest world-conquering wunderphone, however the LTE-equipped Charge is a correct contender in its own right. Read directly to see why.
Hardware
The Droid Charge is unquestionably a little a handful, as you’d expect with its 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 display. Still, we wouldn’t call it a huge phone by today’s standards. It’s .46-inches (12mm) at its thinnest, though it swells slightly in slightly flare on the bottom (out to about 14mm). That’s inside the same ballpark of the recently-released Thunderbolt , which we’re thinking a lot of people will cross-shop this with. The Thunderbolt is available in at about .52-inches (13mm) thick, however the taper and profile at the Charge makes it seem thinner.
It’s considerably lighter, too, 5.04oz (143g) versus 6.23oz (177g), though that relative lightness comes at a value: a somewhat plasticy build. It certainly doesn’t feel as bad as that Samsung flip-phone you had back in 2002, the only you rocked until your dog got ahold of it, but when compared with the metal and unibody offerings seen elsewhere the Charge lacks any feeling of prestige within the hand.
It doesn’t feel bad; there’s a comfy taper about it, slightly bulge on the bottom that shifts the heart of balance of the telephone downward toward the middle of your palm when holding it. It’s quite comfortable to hang, helped by the graceful, glossy back that, sadly, seems somewhat susceptible to scratches.
When held this manner the ability button at the right side and the quantity rocker at the left fall to fingers quite readily. But, and here’s something of a shocker, those aren’t the simplest physical inputs here. At the phone’s chin, that is designed with a touch of a sharp goatee, you’ll find four honest-to-gosh buttons. Touch them and so they actually depress! Some might call this a dated throwback to the olden days of cellular telephony, others will quite appreciate their presence. We love them, though we do wish they lit up a piece brighter.
Display
The buttons can be a bit dim, but there aren’t any issues with brightness on that display, which again is 4.3-inches of Super AMOLED Plus goodness. Resolution will not be jaw-dropping at 800 x 480, though the contrast is. Blacks are, naturally, perfectly black and the brights are borderline blinding in a darkened room, while viewing angles are unlimited. Even outdoors inside the screen is kind of readable. We had no problem composing shots when the sun finally broke in the course of the clouds and lit up our weekend.
However, color reproduction can leave a little to be desired. At the default, automatic-brightness settings, white sections of the display instead fall toward green. Remove that toggle, dial up the brightness and also you get way more pure shades — just be sure you squint slightly before popping at the display in a dimly-lit area. The colour-tweaking feature found at the Galaxy S II ? Sadly not here, though the display remains mighty impressive even without.
Performance and battery life
The Charge is unfortunately not a member of the twin-core militia, but despite its 1GHz Hummingbird internals we found it to be quite responsive. , snappy. It won’t blow your mind with ridiculous benchmark scores but, more importantly, it never left us waiting. In reality benchmark scores were something of a mixed bag, leaving us unconvinced that they’re correctly reflecting the performance of the telephone. Quadrant delivered scores around 1,000 and Linpack 13.8 MFLOPS — at the poor side. Neocore, meanwhile, managed 56.8fps and Nenamark 45fps, while the Sunspider Javascript benchmark completed in a decent 6,194ms. Again, most significantly the telephone feels quick to exploit — it’s no 0 Atrix 0 , however’s certainly on par with the Thunderbolt.
Relating to battery life, there’s no competition. The Charge blitzed through an entire day of what we’d consider typical use, coming off the charger at about 9am and never getting slotted back in again until 9pm the subsequent night. Yes, you read that right, two working days of what we’d consider average use with GPS and WiFi on, shooting and videos, all powered by a single 1,600mAh battery. Granted, we weren’t running our performance benchmarks on the time, but we were hammering the LTE antenna to get some speed results.
And what results they were! On LTE we managed a maximum download of 15.1Mbps down and three.9Mbps up, enough to shame your average cable modem. And people with loads of friends (or plenty of tablets) can share that reference to as much as 10 devices.
Oh, and if you’re 1 still worried 1 concerning the GPS performance of your Sammy handset, fear not. The Charge didn’t exactly impress us with its geolocation abilities, occasionally struggling find a lock when in an occluded area, say on a porch or inside near a window. However, once within the clear it found enough orbiting birds within the sky quickly and accurately.
Software
0 The Charge comes with Android 2.2 Froyo installed and, yes, that’s slightly a disappointment today of Gingerbread, however the light customizations applied here by Samsung help to maintain it looking somewhat fresh. The telephone’s lock screen has you dragging a puzzle piece to get access to the foremost OS, though missed calls and other events will pop up here and, in case you put them of their place, you’ll be taken right to whatever event caused them to look within the first place.
A healthy seven home screens are on offer, and pinching on any of them zooms you out to work out all of them from high, high above. By default the center one is your go-to screen, but you could choose any of them to take that place. Samsung adds a number of custom widgets to the mixture, but nothing too mind-blowing, like a dual-clock in order to inform you what time it’s at home and afar, plus a role manager widget that’s handy in the event you think you’re better at memory cleaning than Android.
The cool accelerometer-augmented gestures for zooming and moving at the Galaxy S II are sadly not here, however there are various inclusions here which are a little less wanted — a giant amount of icons for bloatware and game demos that can not be removed. They’re not exactly filling the telephone to capacity, but having three full pages of apps for your phone the primary time you boot it up seems somewhat excessive.
Camera
1 Out through just a little chrome highlight at the back of the telephone peers what we believe is identical eight megapixel sensor that earlier impressed us at the Galaxy S II. It impresses us here, too, capturing bright, clear images even if lighting conditions are not up to optimal. Tap-to-focus quite naturally works, but we were pleasantly surprised to locate that the camera used auto-focus when capturing video.
The payback is slightly of focus noise injected into your footage, a form of tapping you may hear inside the sample above, but we didn’t find it to be too obtrusive. However, the automobile-focus is just a little slow, so we still preferred manually focusing by tapping. Video quality is again quite good, not quite the 1080p stuff that the Galaxy S II can deliver, but there’s only much you are able to do with a single core processor.
Wrap-up
7 The Droid Charge is a complete sleeper. We’ll be perfectly honest that we weren’t expecting to be wowed but, well, we’re certainly impressed. When it comes to performance it’s kind of on par with the recently-released Thunderbolt, but battery life is much superior and, while the Super AMOLED Plus display has its quirks, we expect they simply add character. The imaging sensor ’round the back is top-notch and, overall, it is a brilliant phone. The only disappointment? A plastic design that probably would be looking a little rough after a couple of months on your pocket.
After which there’s the price: $300 on-contract puts the 32GB Charge in an unfortunate tie for the location of Verizon’s costliest smartphone. That tie is, without a doubt , with Apple’s 32GB iPhone 4. That’s $50 greater than the Thunderbolt, which also comes with a similar collection of gee bees. Definitely worth the extra? Given the battery life and display improvements here, we’d be inclined to claim yes.
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