Samsung Droid Charge Cell Phone Review

TouchWiz Interface

The Droid Charge uses Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface, which runs on top of the Android operating system. Samsung has its own keyboard, and we really liked the fact that you can use Swype with this keyboard.

As with other Android phones, you get a total of seven home screens that you can customize with various widgets and shortcuts. You can pinch the screen to get a thumbnail view of all the pages, and you can even set any page you like as your home page, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: Thumbnail view of all pages

Samsung also offers video tutorials right in the phone through a pre-installed app called “Guided Tours.” Newbies will find these useful. Some of them are shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Guided tours

The TouchWiz interface also adds several controls to the Android notification screen, which can be accessed by dragging it down from the top of the screen. Icons for these controls include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Mobile Data, and Auto Rotation. Again, newbies will find these useful. Power users might also like the Mobile Data control, which can be used to turn off the reception of email in real time which saves battery life.

The TouchWiz interface has a task manager that appears as an app. This can be used to see the running apps and to shut them down quickly. Samsung also has a functional copy and paste mode, but it is not available in all applications.