Samsung Intercept – Smartphone for budget users
It has almost been a year since Samsung brought their first Android phone, Samsung Moment to the market. Since then, the company has been making a lot of Android phones. The display of this handset is 3.2 inches big but it is not AMOLED screen. The text seems a bit fuzzy but that is not a big issue. The phone has a responsive and smooth capacitive touch screen display and the pinch to zoom feature works really well, courtesy of Android 2.1. The gesture will be really useful when you will use the Web browser. The accelerometer is also there but you don’t get it in all the applications. However, you will it for apps like photo gallery and browser.
Beneath the display, there are Android sensor hot keys which are laid out in a row. They relate to search, back key, home and menu. Long press of the home button gets you the task manager and it shows you the apps that are running. You can also easily handle your multitasking work from here. But, I found that there was a lot of lag when I closed or opened the task manager. It happened occasionally and I quickly got frustrated.
The Samsung Intercept, just like the Acclaim, has optical track pad which can also be used as a square select button. This is like a mouse; you can use it as an alternative to the touch screen. This mouse pad is flanked by Send and End/Power buttons. On the left, you have the microSD card slot and volume rocker button. On the top there is the charger jack and the right side has camera key and 3.5 mm headphones jack. The camera along with its self portrait mirror is located on the back.
Sliding the Samsung Intercept on the right will reveal a full four row QWERTY keyboard. I really liked it since the buttons are spaced apart from each other. This makes typing really easy. The arrow buttons are highlighted in gray. If you do not want to use the physical keyboard, there is the virtual keyboard as well which has both landscape and portrait modes.
Samsung Intercept has features like multimedia and text messaging, voice commands, speed dial, speakerphone, GPS, stereo Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and 3G. Also noteworthy is that this phone has just EV-DO Rev. 0 and not Rev. A. Google WebKit browser is also there and it supports Flash Lite along with the pinch zoom feature. For purchasing and downloading music, there the Amazon’s MP3 store and you can load the content on a microSD card or put it on the phone directly through USB. The player interface is quite similar to other Android phones.
Samsung Intercept has a 3.2 megapixel camera and its photo quality is nothing spectacular. The picture is sharp enough but the colors look drab and there is no vibrancy in them. There is no flash for shooting in low light conditions either. Finally, I tested this handset on call quality and found it to be quite impressive.
