Samsung Gravity Smart review

On this age of ever-expanding screen real estate, dual-core processors, and 3D cameras, the rush to pack more features into every smartphone seems an irresistible force. But this technological ratcheting-up effect isn’t absolute, and actually, there are many people that prefer a more pedestrian device. Person who simply gives them access to email, social networks, and apps without forcing them to pay an arm and a leg for hardware they’re in no position to understand. It’s these people who Samsung’s after with its new Gravity Smart, because it offers a bowl filled with Froyo at a bargain basement price. However, the question remains whether Sammy provides an agreeable Android experience at a sub-century price point. Read directly to discover if this budget-minded slider is a worthy addition to the legion of phones powered by Google’s little green bots.

Hardware

Samsung’s Gravity Smart is the evolution of the company’s Gravity feature phones, and is the primary handset inside the line to run Android. As such, the device has features that follow its forebears, with a landscape QWERTY keyboard just like the Gravity 3 , and a capacitive touchscreen just like the Gravity T . The Smart’s screen is a three.2-inch, 480 x 320 panel flanked by silver T-Mobile and Samsung logos. Also on its front is a black mesh earpiece, capacitive buttons for menu, back, and search, plus a tactile home button.

The display is neither exceptional nor subpar. Viewing angles are quite good — just like the LCD on our daily driver, an HTC Thunderbolt — but colors appear washed out when put next to raised-end displays, and blacks are nowhere near as inky as what you notice on Sammy’s AMOLED screens. Additionally, the step down in screen size from the large 4.3-inch LCD on our Thunderbolt to the three.2-inch panel at the Gravity Smart was quite an adjustment. We frequently found ourselves wishing for more screen real estate while reading emails and surfing the internet.

Inside, the Gravity Smart packs WiFi 802.11 b/g/partial n (meaning it only does accelerates to 72Mbps) and Bluetooth radios, plus quadband GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and 1700MHz AWS antennae — so no HSPA or globetrotting 900/2100 UMTS radios here. In our experience, that hardware and the phone’s earpiece provided good call quality — the folk we talked to had little difficulty hearing us whether we had two bars of signal or five, and on our end the dulcet tones of family and friends came through crystal clear.

Except its ebony face, our phone was appropriately dressed with a rose-colored exterior (it is a T-Mo phone, in any case). The metal rim across the screen has a satiny finish, while the matte plastic battery cover and buttons provide a delightful, grippy feel. A volume rocker resides at the left side of the device, while a micro-USB port and tool button sit at the right. Both the amount and tool buttons protrude barely enough that our fingertips easily found them (but not quite a bit as to negatively affect aesthetics) and supply precise feedback with each press. Up top is a three.5mm headphone jack ringed in chrome, and at the back you will find a three-megapixel shooter, a single LED flash, an embossed Samsung emblem and a diminutive dual-slotted speaker grille. Although the Smart is priced as an entry-level Android device, we must say it is a handsome handset, pink color notwithstanding — the chrome accents are tasteful and add a dash of luxury, and its matte finish is a welcome change from the shiny and fingerprint-prone skins found on other phones.

Slider / Physical Keyboard

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One place the Smart shows its budget-based roots, however, is its slider mechanism. The motion is mushy and there is no satisfying snap into place when opening or closing it. The slop in its movement didn’t exactly inspire confidence once we considered its long-term durability, particularly in comparison to the rifle bolt precision of the hinges on higher-end phones just like the 1 Droid 2 1 or 2 Xperia Play 2 . It isn’t all doom and gloom, though, as it is a spring loaded affair that we easily operated with one hand — just nudge it halfway and the mechanism does the remainder.

Pushing the slider up reveals four rows of letter keys that we found preferable to using 3 Swype 3 or the stock Android keyboard, but BlackBerry and Sidekick fans will find the Smart’s grid wanting. Firm button presses were met with a brief throw and a pleasant click, and touch-typists will appreciate the nubbins at the “J” and “F” keys. Unfortunately, we found the rest oval keys to be indistinguishable, and we routinely got lost among them, which caused lots of typos while banging out emails and texts. We also wish Samsung hadn’t swapped out arrow keys for a group of shortcut buttons. While it’s nice to have search, email, internet, and Facebook only a tactile tap away, we’d much prefer the power to navigate text by button in place of touchscreen.

Camera

While the slider was lower than luxurious, the three megapixel fixed-focus shooter actually punches a bit of above its weight class. Samsung has made a degree to enhance the camera capabilities in its handsets, and it shows within the Gravity Smart. There is a plethora of settings — including white balance, 13 scene modes, and exposure compensation — to make sure pictures prove how you want. Plus, you will get trippy with a negative picture effect and do a little photographic time traveling with black and white or sepia shots. When the lighting was good, we were ready to get quality results out of the phone’s modest sensor. Video recording was predictably less impressive, as resolution is proscribed to 320 x 240 and, again, it is a fixed-focus affair. So, you will not exactly be getting Spielbergian results, nevertheless it works just fine for capturing YouTube fodder.

Software, Performance, and Battery Life

As we’ve said before, the Gravity Smart runs Android 2.2 swathed in Samsung’s custom 0 TouchWiz 0 skin. The telephone also comes loaded with less bloatware than many phones, but there’s still several stock applications that can’t be removed — why can’t all carriers follow 1 Sprint’s lead 1 ? Among these irremovable apps are the useful (cloud and group texting courtesy of 2 Bobsled 2 ), the playful (Tetris, Bejeweled 2 and Uno), and ones lets do without (Highlight, a news aggregator, and Glympse, which shares your location and allows you to track your pals). There’s also free 3 TeleNav GPS 3 , which has similarities to Google Navigation, but when you pony up $2.99 a month for the premium version, you get added functionality like traffic camera alerts and real-time traffic updates. Overall, the telephone provides the quality TouchWiz experience you’ve seen elsewhere.

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Underneath the phone’s pink facade beats the identical Qualcomm MSM7227 heart present in the 5 HTC Status 5 , only its CPU is clocked at 600MHz, which pales compared to higher-end single and dual-core silicon running at 1GHz or more. There’s also 512MB of RAM and a 2GB microSD card included, though media mavens may have as much as 32GB of space if their wallets allow. Innovative silicon it isn’t, and the benchmarks reflect that fact: 588 in Quadrant, 9.7 MFLOPS in Linpack, 33fps in Nenamark, and 51.7fps in Neocore. So, while the Gravity Smart can still get you your Angry Birds fix, it sometimes struggled to maintain while we were fighting multiple enemies and casting spells in Inotia3.

Additionally, attempts to feature app shortcuts and widgets to the house screen were met with a several-second delay before populating the list of decisions, and infrequently the telephone would lose the input commands completely, forcing us to redo the method. Otherwise, the phone’s performance was unremarkable; we experienced some lag swiping between screens, but pinch-to-zoom and scrolling while web browsing were fairly smooth.

A beefy (for a phone this size) 1500mAh Li-ion battery provides power for the complete shebang, and it displayed superb battery life during our testing. With the screen set at 50 percent brightness, WiFi and GPS on, Facebook automatically updating every hour, Twitter polling every fifteen minutes, and push email enabled, we got just over seven hours of battery life with a looped video playing at 60 percent volume. During a regular day’s use creating a few calls, capturing, websurfing and checking email, the Smart survived with slightly below 1/2 its juice left. Impressive, especially in comparison to our Thunderbolt, which requires a charge at least one time each work day.

Wrap-up

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In our opinion, Samsung’s Gravity Smart is a serviceable handset. Although saddled with Android 2.2 (do we get Gingerbread, please?) and modest hardware underpinnings, the telephone provides a comparatively agreeable experience. Sure, there’s some lag in its operation and its screen isn’t as vivid as others we’ve viewed, however does provide excellent battery life and a physical keyboard — two features that we predict may be quite attractive to many. Throw in a sub-$100 price and shapely exterior, and you have a recipe for an honest entry-level Android smartphone.

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This post is tagged: bargain basement price, capacitive touchscreen, dual core processors, irresistible force, Social Networks