Samsung Galaxy (i7500) review

Is Samsung's first foray into Android territory, the Galaxy (i7500) out of this world or just another wannabe?

Samsung Galaxy

And, while the virtual QWERTY keyboard was very responsive and pleasant to use (we were speed typing after a while), the fact you had to open up a sub menu to get to numbers was a bit of a pain. But, again, one that you could live with if you had to.

Locked out

Our screen also kept locking if the phone was inactive for seconds, and the lock/unlock key wasn't as responsive as we'd have liked every time we wanted to kick start our phone back into action. That said, these niggles don't make the phone completely unbearable or unusable. A quick glance at the settings menu showed us this was set to 30 seconds, so we quickly changed that and moved on.

In the main, the 3.2in capacitive screen was very responsive to our requests, only behaving like a stubborn teenager who doesn't want to go shopping with its parents once or twice during the review process.

Wonderful worldwide web

Browsing the web was a delight, with a speedy response and easy navigation. IT PRO rendered beautifully on the large display, with our only complaint being having to resist pinching our thumbs together and out again on the screen. Nope, no multi-touch here, just the plus and minus zoom buttons. It's a shame, but we can live with it.

The handset handles the transition from portrait to landscape speedily both in the browser and when it comes to images, which aids the user experience.

The five megapixel snapper is where this handset really excels and from the maker of the Pixon we'd expect nothing less. The camera tries its best to handle different conditions and worked well both inside and outside, our only gripe being it didn't handle light sources near subjects too well, resulting in a bright blur set apart from the clarity of the main subject.

Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.