Samsung Galaxy Portal I5700
With Samsungs Galaxy Portal i5700 it is easy to mix it up with Samsungs Galaxy i7500 so it needs to justify itself other than the price. It is not the best looking phone out there but it sure does comes with a lot of features all blended in this one device. The handset is the appropriate size measuring 57 by 115 by 13mm, although it may seem bigger due to its rather blocky design. The screen has the same 320 x 480 resolution and it certainly is very impressive for a handset in this price range. It has TFT capacitive touch screen rather than OLED with 16M colors. TFT screen means the color are not as bright as an OLED and it would be hard to see in sunlight.
Coming over to the core features of the handsets of this category it’s not lacking anything that needed to be there. It comes with 3.6Mbits/sec HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, an accelerometer for flipping the orientation of the screen and a digital compass.
There are a lot of buttons placed at the bottom of the handset and few of them were in fact just not that important to be there in the first place. For instance, the buttons to receive and end calls are completely unnecessary as it being a touch screen handset it would have been better if the button were just placed on the screen like most of the touch screen devices. The diamond shaped navigation button is not that good either because the other handsets in this category offer a more sophisticated way of scrolling either by efficient optical tracker or a tracking ball at the bottom.
Galaxy portal certainly offers more speed as it uses an 800MHz chip. The difference is fairly noticeable as the lists scroll quicker, web pages pan more smoothly and the phone copes better with lots of applications running at once. The phone comes with just 180 MB internal memory while previously Galaxy came up with 8 GB internal memory. Well to be fair the handset does come a 1 GB Micro SD card and extra Micro SD cards are not that expensive as well.
The phone offers a 3.2 Megapixel camera but it takes an age to set focus and save photos. The picture results are a little grainy as compared to its rival phones. The battery life isn’t so bad but it certainly matches to the battery life of Apple iphone 3gs. The phone is a good catch for a handset in this price range because of its fast processor and impressive screen.