Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica

Introduction Samsung had a slow start in Android but they are making up for it with some impressive high-tech devices. But the All-star team is certainly not leaving anyone behind and the Galaxy Spica just got its update to the latest Android 2.1. Now it's as ready as ever to hit the competition. And it hits hard.

Devices like the I9000 Galaxy S and the I8520 Beam certainly have the lead but it's down to the foot soldiers to clean up the mess when super AMOLEDs, Snapdragon and WVGA projectors leave the scene.

Speaking of those - you'll know that when it's Samsung and a Galaxy, the middle name is Android. It holds true for the I5700 Galaxy Spica much as it did for the first-born Samsung droid – the I7500 Galaxy.

The Spica goes by the name of Galaxy Lite in some markets, but this has nothing to do with processing power. It packs a faster CPU than the original Galaxy and, as a matter of fact, 800 MHz is better than most droids get.

The phone we’re reviewing is no news really, but Android 2.1 certainly is. Given the OS upgrade, the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica is obviously planning to stick around and turn the brightest star in this galaxy. Let’s see what it’s got under the belt.

Key features Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support 3G with HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps Android OS v2.1 Eclair, upgraded from v1.5 Cupcake 3.2" capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution 800 MHz CPU 3.15 megapixel autofocus camera Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and GPS receiver Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate Standard microUSB port for charging and data Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) microSD card slot, up to 32GB support Standard 3.5mm audio jack Great DivX/XviD video player Limited smart dialing Voice dialing Equalizer presets are a first in the Android realm

The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica normally comes with the Android Cupcake (v1.5) but you can upgrade it to the new Éclair (v2.1). That’s exactly what we did. Anyway, the Spica is still a first-gen droid on the outside: plenty of buttons and an average touchscreen – in both size and resolution.

A thing to definitely note is TouchWIZ. In their first go at Android, Samsung were not too keen perhaps on customization. Under Android 2.1 the Galaxy Spica is a different story. It has the company’s custom touch interface on top of Android and although it’s not a complete overhaul, the first impressions are quite positive.

The rest of the package is standard Android with some of the improvements ver. 2.1 implies. The Spica offers a wide range of connectivity options, including HSDPA support, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. You can transfer files over Bluetooth as well. Another Éclair goodie is not there however – the Spica’s 3.2” capacitive screen does not support multi touch. The Live wallpapers feature is also not present.

Media have always been a Samsung forte and the 3.5mm audio jack and 3MP autofocus camera is the least the Spica can offer to assert this claim. What users will certainly cheer is the DivX/XviD video support right out of the box.

The Galaxy Spica is made of high quality plastics. The rubbery back is soft to touch and surprisingly tends to attract fingerprints more than the glossy frame up front. However, in either case fingerprints are rather hard to see and quite easy to clean.

Almost the whole front of the I5700 Galaxy Spica is taken by the 3.2” capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution. The original Galaxy came with an AMOLED display, the Spica has got a TFT unit. Still it’s got some nice image quality.

Of course, the Spica screen fails to match the wide viewing angles and great contrast of the I7500 Galaxy. Another surprise is that the Spica disappoints on sunlight legibility too.

Still, the display is bright and vibrant, with pleasing solid colors indoors. It’s a capacitive unit with silky smooth response. Most importantly, thanks to the latest version of Android, the Spica screen has true 16M color support and the color banding issues plaguing earlier Android phones do not affect it.

Above the display we find the centrally located earpiece. There are no ambient light and proximity sensors on the Galaxy Spica.

Below the screen there are a handful of buttons. A D-pad with confirm button is surrounded by no less than six hardware keys. Typical for the early Androids, the Spica has actual Call and End keys, along with the standard foursome: Home, Menu, Back and Search buttons.

The front hardware buttons are generously sized and have a very pleasant click. Our only gripe is with the Home key, which is right at the very corner. It’s therefore hard to keep a solid hold of the phone when you need to press it.

A short press on the Search key will open the Quick Search Box while a longer press will start the Voice Search app. The Home key on the other hand will either bring you back to the homescreen (upon a single press) or will launch the task manager (if you press and hold).

The 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera lens is sunk and enclosed in frame which is the only means of protection against scratches. It is placed in the top left corner, so your support finger tends to occasionally smudge it all over. The loudspeaker grill has a small knob, so it doesn't get muffled on a flat surface.

Under the rear cover, both the SIM compartment and the memory card slots are easily accessible on the sides and you don’t have to remove the battery to get to them. The Galaxy Spica supports microSD and microSDHC cards. It had no problems handling our reasonably full 16GB microSDHC card.

The battery is massive - 1500mAh are said to keep the Galaxy Lite up and running for up to 650 hours and allow up to 11.5 hours of talk time. In reality we had to charge the phone rather often – almost every day at some point when testing was getting too intense.

Overall, the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica handles nicely even if it's not the most compact of phones, and the hardware controls are quite comfortable. It sits well in the hand and feels sturdy. We have no reason to question the phone's long-term durability.

The capacitive screen is nicely responsive and the effective 16M color support does make a difference. Early Android adopters will know what we mean. The Éclair update hasn’t brought multi-touch support though.

Android, the TouchWizzard The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica is the first Android handset to have a taste of the Samsung home-brewed TouchWiz UI. Tweaking up a few parts of the interface in terms of both functionality and looks, it’s a pretty decent first try.

The changes start from the homescreen where up to nine panes are available to fill up with widgets. Unlike the HTC Sense, you don’t have to use all the screens all the time so if you don’t need that many deleting the extra ones will speed up the navigation.

Another cool extra of the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica is the option to set any of your (currently active) homescreens as the default one (that would be the one to always go back to by pressing the home key). Besides, you can easily rearrange the whole screens, instead of having to move the widgets around.

Samsung have also added 6 widgets of their own, available under “Samsung widgets” when adding content to your homescreen. Those include three different clocks (analogue, digital and a dual digital, showing two time zones at the same time), an internet widget holding a few bookmarks, Memo widget, which enables quick notes and a photo frame. Those hardly contribute a great deal to usability but they are still nice to have at hand.

Next, the Galaxy Spica has four buttons docked on the bottom of its homescreen typical TouchWiz style. They give you quick access to the dial pad, messaging, phonebook and web browser. Those move to the top when you open the main menu and are thus always visible. You are free to rearrange the four icons but removing them or replacing them with others isn’t an option.

Additionally, the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica packs the updates brought by Android 2.1, like several new widgets. There’s no sign of the Live wallpapers and you will have to root the phone and install an additional homescreen app to enable them. Unfortunately, users report their performance is not that good so it's not really worth the fuss.

The new Android version and the TouchWiz overlay aside, two of the key assets of the Galaxy Spica platform have remained unchanged. The Task switcher and the notification area look exactly the same as in the previous versions. Get this right, we are not complaining here – those are just great to have around and really boost the Android experience.

The general user experience provided by the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica running on Android 2.1 is pretty good, but the generally inconsistent performance is a pretty big issue at this stage. Apparently the handset is pretty well prepared hardware-wise (you can see the benchmark results below) but the software needs quite some further optimization.

Some of the apps are fine even at this stage and the interface is pretty snappy but exceptions like the camera and the gallery are too great to overlook. We will speak about that in more detail later in the review, but those tend to lag much more often than we would have liked.

If we had to guess we would say that the low amount of RAM (rumored 128MB) doesn’t allow much stuff to be cached and so needs to be loaded every time.

And now for the promised benchmark results. As you can see from the screenshots below the Galaxy Spica has just about the performance that you can expect from an 800 MHz CPU. In terms of pure computing power, it ranks well above of the 600 MHz HTC Legend but falls short of the 1GHz Snapdragon inside the XPERIA X10.

Phonebook is the usual good stuff A typical Android-running smartphone, Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica packs a phonebook with extensive functionality and practically unlimited capacity.

The handset is unable to display the SIM contacts unless you choose to import them but that is basically our only grudge against it. You can search the available contacts by either flick-scrolling the list, using the alphabet scroll at the side of the screen (courtesy of Samsung and the TouchWiz UI) or by pressing the hardware search key and typing a part of their name.

Telephony is doing fine The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica caused us no trouble during calls. There were neither reception issues nor in-call voice quality drops.

There is some kind of smart dialing on board but it’s not exactly useful. Once you tap in some digits the Galaxy Spica shows the contacts in your phonebook whose numbers contain them. Now, we don’t know if you have the habit of remembering the numbers of your contacts but we certainly don’t.

Gallery could’ve been better The Galaxy Spica gallery automatically locates the images and videos, no matter where they are stored. Images and videos stored in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder, which is very convenient - just like a file manager.

The Samsung I5700 lacks the cool 3D view that we saw in the Nexus One but it offers two options for the image thumbnails. You can either go for 24 small image thumbnails or 12 larger ones.

The gallery supports gesture controls like scrolling images or finger panning so you can alternate images without having to return to the default view. Just swipe to the left or to the right when looking at a photo in fullscreen mode and the previous/next image will appear.

There isn’t pinch-zooming but the one-finger zoom more than makes up for it. There is also double tap zooming if that’s what you prefer.

Video player does the DivX/XviD thing The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica is among the best performers in the Android family as far as video playback is concerned. In addition to packing a dedicated video player app (though playing videos through the gallery is still possible) it also has DivX and XviD video support, which is very rare in the Google OS family.

Performance with higher-res videos is really good, the Galaxy Spica handling VGA videos at 30 fps with little to no issues. 720p crosses the line but having such videos on your handset is pretty unlikely anyway.

Music player: overdue update is here The TouchWiz UI has reskinned the music player on the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica. The interface consists of several tabs for the sorting options: current playlist, all tracks, playlists and albums, artists and composers. You are free to remove those you don’t need, to make the interface easier to navigate.

Audio output loud and clear The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica is not only pretty loud with hearphones connected but also capable of providing high quality audio output.

The cut-off extreme bass frequencies and the higher-than-average intermodulation distortion are its only shortcommings but none of them is too bad actually. And the rest of the readings are just great and comparable to the best in class.

Disappointing 3MP snapper The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica wears a 3-megapixel autofocus camera lens on its back for a maximum image resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. It’s one of the things that got downsized compared to the I7500 Galaxy.

The LED flash got dropped too and while the Galaxy Spica has a dedicated shutter key, it cannot be half pressed. Instead of half pressing, you press to lock focus and release to capture. As of Android 2.1 the Android camera interface has been swapped out for Samsung’s own touch-cam UI.

It keeps the most commonly used options a touch away – things like mode switch, scenes, ISO and brightness. These icons can be hidden but the viewfinder has black bars at the sides, so only half the icon is actually covering up the frame.

Extra features like geotagging, white balance, color effects and so on are accessible from the settings menu.

We have two complaints and one bug to report. The complaints are simple – the auto-focus is slow and the camera is generally laggy. The bug however is more, um, bugging – when you turn on the camera the exposure is way off and the photos end up overexposed.

The way to fix it is to snap a throwaway photo and the exposure for the second photo will be okay. It’s a very annoying software bug that should be fixed or you’ll end up throwing away a lot of badly exposed photos.

You shouldn’t expect too much out of 3MP photos, but the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica performs very well in its category - if you manage to avoid exposure problems that is. Noise levels are kept in check and there’s a fair amount of resolved detail. Colors are good but you can spot signs of oversharpening.

CIF video recording The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica captures CIF videos (352 x 288 pixels) at 15 fps. Videos are recorded in low bitrate so there are a lot of artifacts, banding and the video is choppy – good enough for MMS and nothing else.

The interface of the camcorder is similar to that of the still camera, except that there are even fewer settings. You can set the maximum duration of the clip, set up the self timer, adjust ISO, brightness and recording mode (normal or MMS – which is to say bad or worse).

Connectivity is well covered The Galaxy Spica covers its connectivity basics – worldwide roaming ready quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dual-band HSDPA rated at 3.6Mbps.

Moving on to local connectivity – the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica offers Wi-Fi (b/g), Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP support and USB v2.0. The USB interface is standard microUSB, which makes finding a suitable cable a lot easier.

Android 2.1 enables file transfers over Bluetooth, so there’s little else left to ask for.

The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica supports microSD cards of up to 32GB, though the slot is under the battery cover. Still, for the first loading of the card with all your music, photos and videos the microSD card and card reader combo is the fastest way to do it.

Web browser 2.1 is good but Flash is still missing Android is the product of the Web 2.0 era and its browser is excellent. With its latest iteration of the OS, the level of usability has reached competitive levels.

The user interface is completely minimalistic (it’s the Google way). All you get on the screen is an address bar and +/- zoom buttons. The address bar is placed on top of the page, so scrolling down moves it out of view and the zoom controls auto-hide – that’s essential for web apps because they need to have the whole screen estate to work with.

The Galaxy Spica browser in its latest iteration supports three zoom methods – dedicated buttons, double tap and one finger zoom. Pinch-zooming is missing, despite the native OS support, but some prefer one finger zoom anyway.

The browser supports text reflow – a moment after adjusting the zoom level, columns of text adjust to fit the screen width. Without text reflow you will either have to zoom out until the text fits (but then it’s too small to read comfortably) or scroll sideways to read each line.

The minimalist UI is quite powerful – hit the menu key and six keys pop up. You can open a new tab, switch tabs, refresh the page, go forward, open bookmarks. The final button reveals even more options (text copying, find on page, etc.).

The bookmark list shows a thumbnail of the bookmarked page and you also get a “most visited” list in addition to the history.

Organizer misses a document viewer The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica comes without a document viewer so you have to rely on the Android Market to source one. There are both free and paid versions, but keep in mind that most free versions require an Internet connection to do the job.

GPS navigation The Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica comes with a capable GPS receiver, which gets a satellite lock in about three minutes with A-GPS turned off. A-GPS can speed this up quite a bit, but requires Internet access.

It comes as no surprise that Google Maps come preinstalled. Unfortunately, voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation through Google Maps is available in the US only.

Still, even without Navigation, there is some kind of guidance: your route and current location appear on the screen so you'll reach your destination eventually, but you’ll need a co-pilot to read you the instructions for that one.

Android Market has what you need With the latest version of the OS and the most common screen resolution, the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica has unrestricted access to the Android Market. The number of apps in the market is ever growing and a recent survey showed that it has the highest free-to-paid apps ratio out of all the app stores.

The first screen of the Market shows several featured apps. The Market organizes apps and games into two separate tabs and each tab lists sub-categories (e.g. Finance applications, Arcade & Action games). In each category you can select to view the Top free apps or ones that are “Just in”.

There's a third tab – Downloads – that keeps track of what you’ve already downloaded. Do keep an eye on this tab – when updates become available for an app you’ve installed, a label shows up next to the app name to notify you.

Tweaks & Modding We haven’t had a Tweaks & Modding section in a while, so we decided to drop a few lines about modding your Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica.

Even though the Galaxy Spica runs Android v2.1 it doesn’t have live wallpapers like the Nexus One has (you know, the animated interactive backgrounds).

There’s a way to add them, but it comes at a price – for one you have to root your device and you have to replace the Samsung-made homescreen with a third party issue like Launcher, Launcher2 or aHome.

There are reports that the live wallpapers get laggy sometimes, so they might not be as smooth as on the Nexus One.

Check out this forum thread for instructions and guidance on how to install Live wallpapers on your Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica (including links on how to root it, if you’re into it). As usual, we take no responsibility if any of these tricks goes bad for your phone.