Samsung Galaxy Pro Review

In the world of smartphones Samsung currently (and un-officially!) reigns supreme with their Galaxy S II featuring a mammoth processor and glorious screen, so naturally Samsung has brought out a number of different new smartphones under the ‘Galaxy’ name to build their brand on, of which we have one for review; the Samsung Galaxy pro. The Galaxy Pro is for people in the market for an affordable, touch-screen smartphone which runs Android and has a QWERTY keyboard, so if you are one of these people, you’ll find this review very interesting indeed.

Review: Build Quality, features

The Galaxy line of smartphones from Samsung have always had mixed reviews regarding build quality because whilst solid and sturdy, they haven’t in the past shipped with the highest quality of materials such as brushed aluminium or chrome. Unfortunately Samsung is sticking to tradition here and the Pro is an all plastic design, which needless to say isn’t all that bad. Around the front fascia of the phone you’ll find a matte plastic, around the sides a chromed plastic and towards the back a textured plastic which is excellent for grip, although could be aluminium to make the handset a little heavier at least. Moving on to weight, and this handset isn’t weighty at all, weighing in at 103g and this allows you to whip it out of your pocket pretty quick indeed.

The selling point to this smartphone is the keyboard, naturally, as this handset comes at a time when Android is only just starting to compete with Blackberry in this form factory (QWERTY Candybar). Samsung has designed this keyboard so you get a considerable amount of tactile feedback from it and you do, with each key press going ‘click’ and the board itself being very sturdy and non-flexy. Overall I rate this keyboard as one of the best I have ever used.

The Samsung Galaxy Pro measures 4.28 x 2.63 x 0.42 (108.6 x 66.7 x 10.65 mm) thick which adding to the pocketable point above makes it very nice in the hand, and it also ships with a 2.8″ touchscreen display, a 3MP autofocus camera and an 800MHz processor.

The display itself measures in at 2.8″ and this makes it very small indeed and landscape by default given the aesthetics of the handset. When in use the display is bright enough and surprisingly it is visible outdoors although not in direct sunlight, as with the majority of LCD phones, however this is the point where I stop saying anything good on the display part. When it comes to responsiveness this display is one of the worst I have ever come across by far and sometimes it decided to not respond up to 3 times to swipes and gestures. As noted in our sister site review, the display also has PPI count you’d expect to see on a Nokia N97, meaning it isn’t great by any measure.

Software, benchmarks

The Samsung Galaxy Pro comes shipped with Android 2.2 Froyo which is starting to get a bit boring now, however it does have to be stated that other than speed, Gingerbread isn’t all that different. The Pro is shipped with TouchWiz 3.0 UI, Samsung’s customized skin that overlays the user interface you’d normally find on a pure vanilla Android device.

On benchmarks the Galaxy Pro performed quite good getting 54fps on Neocore, 45fps in Nenamark1 and 662 in Quadrant (somewhere in between a Nexus and Galaxy S).

Call Quality, being a phone

Moving away from features and we’ll concentrate on how this handset performs as a mobile phone. Overall call quality is good and we had no problem hearing one of our authors on the other line whilst in a busy cafe, and he reported that he could hear me clearly too, which is great. Due to the keyboard of this handset texting is also very good, which means it is very good for Skype and IM clients too. Thanks to an 800MHz processor the Galaxy Pro is also ‘okay’ at the speed in which it renders web pages, although I am stumped as to why the screen is so dismal when you think it has 800MHz to play with.

Pricing

The Samsung Galaxy Pro can be purchased SIM-free on Play.com for £209.99, and is available on contract for as cheap as £12 in some places. Search for ‘galaxy pro sim contract’ in Google and hit up the top result to see what I mean.

Verdict

Overall this handset will favor heavy texters and low-end Blackberry users looking to try out an Android device. For anybody wishing to convert from an iPhone or BB I wouldn’t show off a Galaxy Pro to sway would be consumers, with thanks to a lucklustre display, however with this in mind the Galaxy Pro does have a good keyboard which is one of the best i’ve ever used and scored pretty good all round in benchmarks.

Rating: (6/10)