Samsung Galaxy S Plus: Review ~ Modern-Techie : Technology Hub

Introduction

Someone has just finished off a six-pack of energy drinks. The Samsung Galaxy S plus is nearly identical to the original Galaxy S, save for the different chipset, which packs a faster 1.4GHz processor.

Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus official photos

Samsung's bespoke Hummingbird chipset has been swapped out for Qualcomm MSM8255T Snapdragon. The "T" means it's a faster version of the vanilla MSM8255 chipset found in a good deal of Android phones. With a clock speed of 1.4GHz, it could be up to 40% faster. We'll see how they measure up though, as they have slightly different architectures.

Qualcomm's chipset comes with Adreno 205 graphics instead of the custom PowerVR SGX540 in the original Galaxy S. We expect a slight difference in graphics performance too. Also, the new battery can hold up to 10% of extra juice, for a total of 1650 mAh.

Other than that however, you can't tell the Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy S Plus apart - not even with a caliper and scales. Here's a summary of what the S Plus has to offer, complete with a feeling of deja vu.

Key features

Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G support
14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA support
4" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of WVGA (480 x 800 pixel) resolution, PenTile matrix
Super slim at 9.9mm
Android OS v2.3.3 with TouchWiz 3.0 UI customization
1.4GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255T chipset
512 MB of RAM
8GB internal storage, microSD slot (up to 32GB cards)
5 MP autofocus camera with face, smile and blink detection
720p HD video recording at 30fps
Wi-Fi 802.11 b, g and n support
GPS with A-GPS connectivity; Digital compass
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v3.0
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Great audio quality
FM radio with RDS
1650 mAh Li-Ion battery
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Document editor and file manager come preinstalled
Secondary video-call camera
Swype predictive text input
Full Flash support for the web browser

Main disadvantages

No flash for the camera
No dedicated camera key
Fingerprint prone plastics
Virtually unchanged year-old design
Adreno 205 GPU is weaker than PowerVR SGX540 in the original

We were quite pleased with the original Galaxy S, but the bar has been raised beyond reach by the new super flagship, the Galaxy S II. The Galaxy S Plus is a new and improved edition but one that will hardly make a big splash.

It's still a phone that can make a solid impression though. The 4" SuperAMOLED screen with WVGA resolution is a great performer to this day and at 9.9mm of thickness, the S Plus is a proud member of the sub-centimeter club.

We've already seen the Samsung Galaxy S Plus in action. An early premarket sample, running at just 1.2GHz, showed promising results as an alternative to dual-cores this year. If you're curious, you can check out the article here, but we'll be running the benchmarks and other tests anew anyway, so you may just read on as well.

Opening the standard box

The Plus suffix hasn’t brought anything extra to the bundle. There's the mini-sized charger, a microUSB cable and a nice looking, one-piece headset with a single button remote.

The Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus box contents

It should be noted that the Galaxy S Plus comes with 8GB of built-in memory, so not having a microSD card in the box is not a problem.

Design and construction

We imagine someone at Samsung took the blueprints for the I9000 Galaxy S, scratched out "Hummingbird chipset", wrote "Qualcomm MSM8255T" over it and handed it in as the I9001 Galaxy S Plus draft.

It takes a trained eye to tell the two apart. The silver strip around the phone's face has a lighter color in the Samsung Galaxy S Plus than in the original version and the pattern on the back is slightly different (less conspicuous, and perhaps more mature). Oh, and the "with Google" label is now gone.

Not that the Galaxy S and S Plus are not attractive gadgets, they are, but the design is already a year old. Also, there's no obvious way for others to tell that you have the newer, better model and not the old one.

Spot the differences: Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus and the original Galaxy S

The phone uses the same SuperAMOLED WVGA (800 x 480) display as the original. You get to enjoy excellent image quality and viewing angles on a 4” diagonal. The downside is it’s based on the old PenTile matrix with fewer subpixels than the updated SuperAMOLED Plus screens. But guess what, it’s still good enough by our books.

It’s still a SAMOLED unit we’re talking about here, so the contrast ratio is theoretically infinite. This achievable in practice only in dark rooms, otherwise reflections from external light sources get in the way.

Anyway, the brightness is above average though not as bright as some LCDs or the AMOLED screen on the Nokia X7. The results were almost identical to the original Galaxy S readings, with a difference of just a few nits. This is probably due to slight software differences in adjusting screen brightness and on top of a reasonable margin of error. If you put down the sciency measuring tools though, the two screens are virtually indistinguishable in all aspects.

Below the screen are three Android keys - the hardware Home key, flanked by the touch-sensitive Menu and Back keys, which are backlit in white.

The layout of controls is the same as in the original too. The Power/Lock button is on the right-hand side. It's small but protrudes, so it's easier to press, and its position makes it comfortable to reach in both right and left hand use. Accidental presses are unlikely.

The volume rocker, which is easy to reach though a bit stiff, is on the left and just above it is the lanyard eyelet.

The top features the 3.5 mm headset jack (left uncovered) and the microUSB port, which is protected by a sliding cover. The bottom only features the mouthpiece.

At the back you’ll find the 5 MP camera lens and the loudspeaker grill. There’s no camera flash, nor any camera lens protection just like on the original. The characteristic hump at the bottom of the back keeps most of the phones back (including the camera) slightly away from the surface that the phone is lying on.

You shouldn’t rely too much on this to prevent scratches and it certainly doesn’t prevent fingerprint smudges on the camera lens.

There's a small bump next to the loudspeaker, which somewhat prevents it from being muffled when the phone is placed on a level surface.

Popping the back cover open (careful, those tend to crack near the volume rocker), you'll see the battery and the SIM and microSD card slots. The microSD card slot is easily hot-swappable but the SIM card is obstructed by the battery. You might still manage to pry it out, but it's best to just shut the phone off and take the battery out before handling the SIM card.

The battery is a 1650 mAh Li-Ion unit – that’s 10% higher capacity than in the original Galaxy S. A higher-clocked CPU uses more power and a bigger battery makes sense. Official numbers put the talk time at nearly 13 hours (in 2G, half that in 3G) and and also promise almost a month of standby. Those numbers are quite like those quoted for the original Galaxy S and are as far away from the truth as they were with the Galaxy S.

In our browser battery test, the Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus lasted 4:30 hours. That puts it around the middle of the Android pack, on par with the LG Optimus Black (another single-core droid). Surprisingly (or not), the Galaxy S Plus outlasted the original Galaxy S by nearly half an hour.

The design may be a bit old, but it allows comfortable handling and the styling is clean and uncluttered. The all-plastic build is nothing to be excited about though on the upside, fingerprints are less of an issue in the new edition.
The Samsung Galaxy S Plus is a fairly compact device for a 4-incher. However, if you look at other recent devices, the Galaxy S II shows that a 4.3" screen is possible at roughly the same dimensions too.

User Interface: older TouchWiz does the job

The Galaxy S Plus runs Android 2.3.3 with the custom TouchWiz topping. This is not Samsung's latest launcher we saw on the Galaxy S II but the older version 3.0. There isn’t a whole lot of change compared to the original Galaxy S – which by the way has already received its Gingerbread upgrade too. To get an idea of how the Galaxy S Plus handles, check out the user interface video demo below.

We’ll be reusing texts from past reviews but you should rest assured that we’ve updated all the content to match the Galaxy S Plus specifics.

The homescreen fits up to 7 panes, which can be managed quite easily. A pinch zoom on screen takes you to edit mode where you can add, remove and rearrange the panes as you see fit.
The notification area which you pull down from the top of the screen has seen some visual changes since the Gingerbread update but no new features. You can turn Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sounds and auto-rotation on and off. You also get information about active connections and missed events.
The main menu is basically unchanged from the original Galaxy S, except that the icons have lost their color backgrounds to look a lot less iPhone-like. The menu is side-scrollable, with a 4 x 4 grid of icons on each page, the four docked icons at the bottom visible at all times. You can also opt for a list view. Rearranging apps is very easy to – in edit mode just drag an icon where you want it placed.

In terms of wallpapers you get the standard gallery with a collection of live and static wallpapers that have seen no changes since the Galaxy S days. Some of the live ones look pretty cool on the SuperAMOLED display but they do tend to drain your battery.
Samsung have long added a task manager to their TouchWiz launcher. Complete with a homescreen widget that shows the number of currently active apps, it saves you the need to install a task killer on your own.

Performance-wise the Galaxy S Plus is fluid and very responsive and we experienced no lags whatsoever. You can scratch that one on the 1.4GHz processor as it handles the UI without a glitch.

1.4 GHz processor performance

In terms of synthetic benchmarks the Galaxy S Plus is way ahead of the original 1GHz-running Galaxy S. Using the 1.4 GHz Qualcomm MSM8255T Snapdragon chipset, the retail version of the Galaxy S Plus outperformed the original Galaxy S in almost every benchmark we ran. It only fails to prevail in the GPU benchmarks where its outdated Adreno 205 falls short of the PowerVR SGX540 in the Galaxy S.

Here are the numbers - Linpack, BenchmarkPi, Smartbench 2011 and Neocore.

And now let's check out the GPU showdown. The Galaxy S Plus is running on the Adreno 205 GPU while the original Galaxy S has the PowerVR SGX540 inside (the iPhone 4, for example, is running on the older PowerVR SGX535). We used Nenamark 2 for this showdown. The Galaxy S Plus got a score of 15.9fps (frames per second) while the original Galaxy S outscored it with 27.5fps. So as you can see even if the 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor is better in overall performance over the 1GHz Hummingbird of the original Galaxy S, the GPU performance is in favor of the latter.

We should clarify that both the original Galaxy S and the Galaxy S Plus are running on the latest Android Gingerbread version 2.3.3.

A faster GPU is better for playing high-quality games and videos in the browser so it's definitely a plus - just not for the Galaxy S Plus.

Great organizer

The Galaxy S Plus has you covered in terms of organizer and office features, offering everything from a file manager through all sorts of time-keeping apps to a document viewer.

As usual Samsung has included the My Files app – a simple to use but functional file manager, which also doubles as an image gallery. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files over Bluetooth. It will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can’t access the inbuilt memory like some third-party file browsers).

The calendar has four different types of view - agenda, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The agenda view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. It’s a very handy tool when you need to check your appointments for the next few days.

GPS is on Google Maps

The Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus comes with a GPS receiver and offers A-GPS for quicker satellite lock.

Google Maps is the titular application and its Street View mode is probably the best part of the deal in places where turn-by-turn voice navigation isn’t yet offered.

Our I9001 Galaxy S Plus came with Google Maps 5.x with Navigation (where supported). While it requires a live internet connection as you go, there’s offline rerouting too – if you stray off your course, Maps will recalculate the route without the need for an Internet connection. You can’t change the destination without connection though. You also get 3D buildings (where that's available), two-finger rotation and tilting, and more.

Google Maps

If the Street View is available in the area you're interested in, you can enjoy a 360-degree view of the area. When the digital compass is turned on it feels like making a virtual tour of the surroundings!

Voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation using Google Maps Navigation is available in select countries and unless you live in any of them the best you can do is plan a route in advance and keep an eye on your current location during travel.

The Google Maps app also offers a rich database of POIs: cafes, restaurants and all sorts of businesses like banks (ATMs too), hospitals, police departments and much more.

Android Market has plenty of apps

The Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus is running the latest available version of Android and has a WVGA screen, giving you access to the whole Android Market (some apps won’t run on older versions or low-res screens).

The structure of the Android Market is quite simple – featured apps on top and above them, three sections (Applications, Games and Downloads). There is also a shortcut up there for initiating a search.

The Applications and Games sections are divided into subsections (e.g. Communication, Entertainment etc.) so you can filter the apps that are relevant to you. Of course, there is also an option of displaying them all in bulk, but you’ll probably need days to browse them all that way.

There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).

Final words

The Galaxy S Plus makes sense for people who don't want to spend over the odds on the latest tech. Samsung is probably right not to make a big noise about it. The phone was first announced as a Russia-bound upgrade of the original Galaxy S. It will be released in other markets too, it is now certain. And we know it does just enough to stay afloat in the competition.

Of course, we don't mean the dual-core heavy-hitters or the 3D and Full HD enabled media monsters. The Galaxy S Plus is still stuck on the old 5MP camera, 720p video recording and the old PenTile SuperAMOLED screen. But it does well to bring a speed boost to an already solid performer. And even though it is no match for dual-core, an overclocked single core chipset is powerful enough for almost everyone.

Users coming from the original Galaxy S aren't too likely to consider the Galaxy S Plus. It's more of an affordable alternative of the current flagship, the Galaxy S II. The Galaxy SL is another copy of the original Galaxy S only without the SuperAMOLED display. We guess it will make no sense for the SL and the Plus to compete on the same markets. If they do, the SL will be seriously disadvantaged by the lack of a SuperAMOLED screen. That can be fine too, if the price difference is right.

Samsung Galaxy S • Galaxy S II • Samsung Galaxy SL

The Galaxy S Plus will feel the heat from the recent crop of Sony Ericsson droids. The Xperia Arc boasts a bigger Bravia engine display, a superior 8 MP camera and the impressive exterior of a true flagship. Still, it does fall a little short of the 1.4GHz processor inside the Galaxy S Plus. And if you think the Arc is in a different league, the Xperia Neo may as well be considered for its imaging.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc • Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo

The LG Optimus black commensurates with the Galaxy S Plus in terms of specs - it has a 4" NOVA display, which means it's much more bright, a 5 MP snapper on its back which produces crisper photos and offers the latest Wi-Fi Direct technology for faster sharing. It does fall short in 3G speed, processing power and offers only the outdated Android 2.2 Froyo.

LG Optimus Black P970

Finally, an old rivalry is likely to be renewed. The Galaxy S vs. the Desire used to be a crowd-pleaser a year ago and now it's up to the Galaxy S Plus and the Desire S to keep it going. The Desire S offers the HTC Sense experience and great build. And let's not forget the HTC Incredible S which closes the gap on the display front as far as size goes. It also brings a higher resolution camera to the table. The Galaxy S Plus has the upper hand in terms of screen quality and processing power, though.

HTC Incredible S • HTC Desire S

Screen and processing power: these are the key ingredients of the Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus. OK, the display is of the old PenTile variety but it's still Super AMOLED. And 1.4GHz is impressive clock speed, only beat by dual core.

The main point for many readers here today is if this slightly tuned-up version of the Galaxy S is worthit better than the original one which is still on sale. Well, you get a plus and a minus - the better processor and the slower GPU. Sure, HSDPA speeds have doubled to 14.4 Mbps but that hardly is enough to justify the higher asking price. And the speed boost isn't that obvious even when you pit the two devices one against the other.

They call it the Galaxy S 2011 edition. It's no more than a slight upgrade. The Galaxy S Plus won't let you down if you take it for what it says on the tin but the same goes for the original Galaxy S.

Modern-Techie : Technology Hub

Thursday 1 September 2011