Had the Samsung Galaxy S come out last month, its massive Super AMOLED screen would have wiped the floor with all the competition, without breaking a sweat, or garnering a fingerprint. Then the iPhone 4 came along and redefined just how sharp a smartphone screen should be. Can it still go head to head? Read on and find out in this part of our Samsung Galaxy S review.
Read the rest of our Samsung Galaxy S review
Samsung Galaxy S review
Samsung Galaxy S review: Android 2.1
Samsung Galaxy S review: Build and battery
Samsung Galaxy S review: Ultimate buyer’s guide
On its own merits, the Samsung Galaxy S’ screen is astounding. At four inches wide, it’s one of the biggest on the market (Though Sony Ericsson, HTC and Dell have larger rivals), and it gives you plenty of space for your fingers to run across – Samsung’s made the phone pretty skinny so it doesn’t feel like a brick in your pocket. Just as importantly, it’s relatively sharp, at 800×480 pixels (not 854×480 as some Android phones are), so pictures, text and websites never look grainy as they do on cheaper phones.
It’s also capacitive, as you’d expect from a high end smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy S: we found it highly responsive, with an easy to type on screen keyboard. It’s multitouch friendly too, so can recognise two finger pinch gestures for fast zooming in and out of pictures, websites and Google Maps, and Android 2.1 keeps up with these perfectly.
But the real selling point is the Samsung Galaxy S’ display is that it’s the second ever Super AMOLED screen on a phone (The Samsung Wave also has one), and the biggest one yet. AMOLED is a tad different to traditional LCD in how it produces colours, and while it’s more expensive to produce, it’s generally considered to produce deeper, richer colours.
Here, the Samsung Galaxy S doesn’t disappoint. The 4-inch display is awash with colours that makes icon and websites sprout off the screen. The first time you turn it on, you’ll stare at the Gmail icon on the homescreen and wonder just how it’s possible to be that red. There’s a tendency to oversaturate bright colours, but in day to day use, we found it still made websites far more attractive and videos more enjoyable to watch – from a very wide angle too, we might add.
Until recently, that’s been at the tradeoff of poor visibility in sunlight: stick a Samsung Jet out of the shade and you’re simply met with an opaque white screen. But Samsung’s Super AMOLED tech (It’s name for it, not ours) supposedly stops this from happening: in reality, you’ll still want to cast a shadow over the Samsung Galaxy S with your head when outdoors, but in a pinch, it’s still visible.
As we mentioned earlier however, the iPhone 4’s LCD IPS screen has stole alot of thunder from the Samsung Galaxy S this month. We’ll have more details for you on the iPhone 4’s Retina Display in our upcoming review, but if you’ve missed the hubbub, at 3.5-inches and 960×640 resolution, it’s far sharper than the Samsung Galaxy S. Images really do seem like they’ve been painted on, and while we’ve shown you photos of it up close against the Samsung Galaxy S, we really urge you to see for yourself in a store – it’s phenomenal.
But is it better than the Samsung Galaxy S’s screen? If you’re hawk eyed, you will begin to notice the grain and edges of text and icons on the Samsung Galaxy S, but you’ll never see them on the iPhone 4. If you’re really fussy, this could be a dealbreaker, but when held from a reasonsable distance, we do think it genuinely comes down to personal premise, about how exaggerated you like your colours. And we’d still recommend the Samsung Galaxy S over the iPhone 4 for video fans, simply because its file format support is so broad.
Frankly, if you’re basing your buying decision between the two on the display, we suspect you had other reasons for wanting that flagship smartphone instead. Just know that if the Samsung Galaxy S only has the second best screen on the market right now, it was a photo finish.
Read the rest of our Samsung Galaxy S review
Samsung Galaxy S review
Samsung Galaxy S review: Android 2.1
Samsung Galaxy S review: Build and battery
Samsung Galaxy S review: Ultimate buyer’s guide
