Samsung Infuse 4G review

We’re just stepping into the swing of spring, flowers blooming and skeeters biting, but already it has been an awesome year for Samsung — if we ignore the entire lawsuit thing . Only some weeks ago the corporate dropped at us our highest scoring Android phone yet, the Galaxy S II and, while that handset has not appeared on American shores, we were graced with the Droid Charge , which offers LTE speed, strong battery life, and an on-contract price that slightly exceeds its design.

Not so with the company’s latest assault on American carriers. It is the Infuse 4G, it’s $199 on-contract, and it has a decidedly high-end feel. It even looks a little bit just like the S II — in case you squint. Here is its own phone, though, a huge 4.5-inch screen setting it except for its predecessors, and an enormous battery inside giving it lots of life. But is it really nearly as good because it looks?

Hardware

We were about to close up the Charge and ship it away when the Infuse 4G arrived in its little orange and white box. While these are very similar phones in plenty of ways they certainly do not feel in any respect related. The Charge has that pointy chin, cheeky physical buttons, and a touch extra junk within the trunk that makes its thoroughly plastic construction feel a wee bit flimsy. The Infuse 4G definitely has most of the same DNA coursing through its chassis but in an exterior that’s way more chiseled and freed from excess anything. It’s definitely been hitting the gym.

It’s just 8.9mm (.35-inches) thin for essentially the mostsome of the most part, swelling to 9.24mm (.36-inches) down on the bottom. This thinness helps to cover the phone’s overall size, that’s considerable. Its gorgeous 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display hasn’t been saddled with much of a bezel, but a screen that enormous is simply going to look on a hunky phone, and that here is. Measuring 132mm tall and 71mm across (5.2 x 2.8-inches) it is a big, wide slice of Android, but no less than at 131g (.29 pounds) it won’t weigh your pants or purse down too heavily.

The telephone is your typical, simple rectangle; bulge on the bottom the best little bit of shapeliness not left behind at the stair-stepper. Otherwise the back is totally flat, livened up by some texturing that makes it a pleasure to carry. Yeah, it’s just plastic, but it surely almost feels classy. Almost.

Stick a fingernail under it and that class peels away, containing a beefy 1,750mAh battery and a slot for a SIM card. Beneath the battery is a microSD card, a measly 2GB that certainly puts off any pretenses of this being a properly high-end device. But, that isn’t the complete storage this has to provide. Internally the telephone has a 2GB hunk for apps, a separate 13GB slice for… whatever, after which the microSD card in addition, which supplies you a grand total of right about 16GB in three partitions.

Mount the telephone for your computer and you may see two shares, the bigger internal little bit of flash and your microSD card, meaning you probably have a variety of tunes you will probably need to split them manually. That is not the top of the area, and Google’s Music app certainly doesn’t care which share the files come from, but it’s in no way as clear as simply having a big hunk of storage. In fact, there’s nothing stopping you from throwing a 32GB card under the battery and using the inner flash memory only for your number of Mystery Science Theater 3000 Gamera movies. Or, you realize, whatever.

The speakerphone speaker is situated at the back, that’s loud and clear, matching the entire call quality that we found to be quite good. Also at the back is the eight megapixel sensor paired with an LED flash, a similar unit we’ve been getting quite aware of lately in both the Charge and the Galaxy S II. Here it records video at a maximum of 720p and, like at the Charge, will auto-focus while recording. You possibly can output that video over HDMI for your HDTV, but you will want to place confidence in a dongle and the telephone needs to be plugged in to the wall while doing it. That’s a bit a bummer.

Display

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Another smartphone from Samsung, another gorgeous Super AMOLED Plus display. This one steps things up a pair tenths of an inch to 4.5, but maintains the 800 x 480 resolution of its predecessors. This implies pixel density is down ever so slightly, but what sticks out here’s the fantastic brightness and contrast of this display. It looks pretty much as good because the company’s other offerings, with deep blacks, searing whites, and infinite viewing angles.

Again the colours are a piece off when the brightness is lowered, and unfortunately Samsung didn’t include the colour tweaking tool that’s found at the Galaxy S II. But, as with the Charge, we found if we kept the brightness up the colours were accurate, the whites bright, and the blacks still inky. That contrast is unquestionably the wonderful thing about gooey organic LED displays, though there’s another important advantage: power consumption.

Performance and battery life

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We were very impressed by the battery life at the Droid Charge and we need to say we’ve been much more enamored here. The Infuse has a touch larger, 1,750mAh battery pack nestled inside and it easily powered us through an afternoon of demanding use. When managed more casually (as a regular user might) it got us through most of a second.

In fact, every phone will struggle to remain alive when getting used as a mobile hotspot, and the Infuse isn’t any exception. It may spew connectivity to as much as five devices over WiFi, but you’d best have it plugged in to something so that it will do it for a variety of hours at a time.

The Infuse 4G is naturally AT&T’s first 6 21Mbps HSPA+ smartphone 6 , its fastest yet, and when all of the stars aligned perfectly we did see some impressive speeds. With full bars in San Francisco we managed a majestic 8.5Mbps down, but that was definitely a rarity. Most tests were within the 2 – 3Mbps range, with uploads at or below 1Mbps. In Ny city we saw similar uploads but never broke the 3Mbps barrier going the wrong way.

Note, though, that these speeds were everywhere, seemingly fluctuating with some unidentified meteorological index and not offering the type of consistently quick speeds we have seen on LTE. And, while the device did generally clock faster speeds than the 7 Atrix 7 when both were showing maximum signal, as a matter of fact the Infuse gave the impression to be struggling just a little for bars comparatively, on average sitting a couple of notch lower. GPS locks were reasonably solid, taking a couple of minutes to determine what state it was in but, after that, lining up the satellites quickly.

With regards to speed at the device, again we’re talking a single-core phone, but at 1.2GHz it’s kind of faster than the Droid Charge. We didn’t really notice that during average browsing behavior, however the benchmarks don’t lie. Quadrant scored 1,103, Linpack ran in 5.03 seconds and scored 16.657Mflops, while the Sunspider benchmark completed in 5,054ms. That’s all at the order of 10 – 20 percent faster than the Charge, which matches to reveal that usually CPU cycles do count.

Camera

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We’re pretty sure the eight megapixel sensor slapped at the back here’s the similar one we’ve already seen within the Charge and the Galaxy S II so we cannot blather on an excessive amount of here, except to mention that it’s still very, brilliant. Pictures look sharp, colors look bright, and the 720p footage this is quite good — if occasionally a little soft.

The camera will auto-focus while you are filming without you having to tap at the screen, and the ever so subtle mechanical noise we heard at the Charge isn’t noticeable here. Try it out for yourself within the video below, but only click play for those who like dogs.

Wrap-up

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The Infuse 4G is another solid offering from Samsung that we predict those of you with wide pockets and huge hands are going to fall in love with. It doesn’t quite reach the blistering processor speeds of the Atrix, doesn’t have a flowery composite back, and is absolutely bereft of laptop pretenses. It does, however, have a blinding screen that’s big and the type of battery life that can finally put your charge anxiety to rest. Maybe, just maybe, you’re able to leave that second battery at home.

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This post is tagged: american carriers, american shores, contract price, junk in the trunk, plastic construction, spring flowers