Samsung Fascinate Cell Phone Review

Additional Features

The camera on the Fascinate is identical to the cameras on the Captivate and the Vibrant, which are also part of the Galaxy S family with one exception. The Fascinate has an LED flash, while the Captivate and the Vibrant have none. If you will be using your phone to take pictures, this is an important feature.

Although the Fascinate has no dedicated camera button, the on-screen buttons work quite well. The 5.0 megapixel camera has autofocus, adjustable white balance, anti-shake, blink detection, metering, and 10 shooting modes. The shooting modes have some interesting settings. There is a beauty mode that adjusts the contrast to smooth facial features, and AddMe setting that takes one picture then uses the on-screen guide to compose and take a second picture to combine into one. There is also a Cartoon mode, a Vintage mode, and a Panorama mode.

The Touch-to-Focus mode was especially useful. You simply frame your picture with the object you want to focus on near the center of the screen, touch the screen, and the camera will autofocus on that person or object.

All of these various setting give you a lot to play with and if you take time to learn how to use the setting effectively, this phone will produce some very nice photos. We found the quality of the photos to be better than the Droid X, Droid Incredible, or other Droid phones we have reviewed. Close ups in bright light were very good. Although the LED flash really helped to light up dark environments, photos taken in such areas were often still prone to some noise. This was when we remembered that we were using a camera on a phone rather than a dedicated digital camera.

We were impressed with the quality of the 720p videos that the Fascinate produces: they were smooth and crisp with good color reproduction.

The Fascinate has WiFi (802.11b/g/n), Stereo Bluetooth 2.1, and an AGPS radio. We were, however, unsuccessful in getting voice-dialing to work over Bluetooth.

We love the Android OS with its seven customizable home screens, apps, and widgets. The Android Marketplace continues to grow offering a multitude of apps to suit any need.

Samsung ads their own TouchWiz overlay to the Android OS. Our personal feeling is that this is quite unnecessary. We only found two areas where we thought TouchWiz skin was an improvement on the OS. The first was the integration of Swype, a great aid to speedy typing on a touch screen. The second is the opening screen, shown in Figure 10, which lets you view messages and missed calls on the main screen after you drag a puzzle piece into place.

Figure 10: The puzzle screen

The TouchWiz also presents the most commonly used shortcuts for Phone, Contacts, Messaging and Applications docked at the bottom of the screen, as seen in Figure 11. These remain on screen no matter which screen you are viewing.

Figure 11: The Fascinate app screen

In a few areas, the Touch Wiz interface actually detracted from the OS. In Figure 11 you can see that it adds colorful backgrounds to each of the apps. While this might be nice on a regular screen, this screen is so bright and clear, that the added color actually makes it a little too colorful, detracting from the overall look of the page.

One other thing that bears mentioning about the TouchWiz interface is that the default search engine is set to Bing, as shown in Figure 12. Bing also appears as the homescreen widget and is defaulted to in the browser. We were quite surprised by this. Since this is a phone based on Google’s operating system, we expected to see Google as the default search engine. Unfortunately, we could find no way to replace Bing as the default search engine. This seemed unexplainable, especially since Google is the defacto standard in the search engines. We felt that Samsung should have at least given the option to use another search engine.

Figure 12: The Bing search engine on the Fascinate

In another seemingly ridiculous move, this phone defaults to Verizon Navigator instead of Google Navigation in all areas. Although we were told that this could be changed, there was no obviously simple way to do this.

As with other Android phones, setting up email was easy. The Fascinate supports Exchange, so there is no need to worry no matter what type of email connectivity you have. Although perusing the Web on a larger screen like the Droid X is slightly better, the Samsung Fascinate gives you the ability to pinch to zoom and to double tap to zoom, so surfing is smooth and easy.

The Fascinate also has 3G Mobile HotSpot capabilities for up to 5 device (with an additional monthly fee) and DLNA with Allshare. ThinkFree Office is included for viewing/editing Microsoft Office docs.

The Buddies feature on the Fascinate will aggregate friends from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Google. This phone also allows you to combine all of your contacts into one list. A unified calendar combines information from Outlook and Google Calendars along with Facebook birthdays. Skype Mobile is also supported.

As with other Android phones, this phone is quite capable for use as a music player, but it lack the simplicity of sync’ing, playlists, and other software capabilities offered by Apple and its iTunes software.