The Samsung Epic 4G Touch For Sprint. The Best Android Smartphone on The NOW Network. See why in our Review!
Hardware & Design
The Epic 4G Touch varies a bit from the original Galaxy S II design with a 4.52” Super AMOLED Plus display which is just beautiful to look at with great colors and clarity. Viewing pictures and video content will be an enjoyable experience. There are very few buttons on the device with just the volume and power as physical buttons. There is only two ports with the micro USB port on the bottom and 3.5 mm headphone jack on top. Audio quality coming from the jack sounds great and on part with a standalone MP3 Player. Even though the phone has large display at 4.52” its still keeps a thin profile with a light weight to it. The sleek and sexy overall look makes it an attractive device.
For cameras you have a 8 megapixel rear facing camera with LED flash and 1080p video recording. The quality is excellent from this camera with nice sharp still images and great HD video quality with excellent audio while recording. Above the display there is a 2 megapixel from facing camera for video chat which we put to the test in our review video and as well in our camera test post we did of both cameras which we have include in the review below
Internally there is a 1.2 GHz Samsung Exynos dual-core processor which is blazing fast and smooth and gives you super fast boot up times. It’s on of the best processors I’ve used on an android device. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, 4G WiMax Data, 1800 MAh battery and 16 GB of built-in storage that is split up into 1.97 GB of storage for apps, 11.50 GB of storage for content like music, pictures and movies. The rest is the operating system. There is 1 GB of ram with 836MB available for running applications. Supreme hardware with stellar design makes a great overall phone package.
Software & Usability
The software running on here is Android 2.3 gingerbread with Touch Wiz 4.0 implemented on top of it. Much of Touch Wiz is what you have seen before but with some improvements to performance and user experience. Navigating through desktops is easier now with being able to hold down on the desktop number row and slide across between desktops to reach the one you want faster. This same feature is also used in the application tray as well which is useful for when you have a lot of apps installed. You can now resize widgets as well and a ton more widgets to choose from .
Now lets says you’re not totally into customized UI that vendors put on these phones. Well if you go to Sprint IDs and choose the clean ID you’ll an full stock android experience which many of you will prefer. You are also able to uninstall all the preloaded software that it comes with so you can get rid of those Sprint apps if you don’t want it.
Samsung has also resigned their email app to work more like desktop e-mail. When you setup your e-mail though the client you will see all of your e-mail in a much more organized listed that the standard regular android e-mail client and when you turn the phone landscape mode it will split the screen with your email list on the left and the current e-mail your viewing on the right side. This is especially useful for those that are use Microsoft Exchange for e-mail.
They’ve included a photo editor that gives you pretty good amount of options in manipulating photos on your device. There is also a video editor now that lets you edit HD video that you record on the phone. It has a full timeline and included preset themes to make video creation faster and easier but they will export in 720p. I also did some gaming on here with NOVA 2 HD and its pretty good it’s not the fastest and load times take a bit but the games look good and they are playable.
Battery life is pretty good on the Epic 4G Touch. In my test I was able to get about 16 hours on a single charge with about 10% battery left. This is using the phone for text, 2 e-mail accounts, phone calls, streaming music and videos and doing web browsing with 3G and using 4G on and off when available. For power users this should work out well for you. For moderate user you can get probably in the 20s in hours for battery life. Call quality is also excellent with clear audio from both ends of the phone call.
Overall a solid software package from Samsung and improving every part of Touch Wiz to make it even a better experience. I didn’t have any lag or freeze ups while using it and the UI experience was more immersive than before.
Overall
Without question the Samsung Epic 4G Touch is the best android smartphone on the Sprint network. The phone lives up to the hype that the Samsung Galaxy S II line of phones. With the beautiful hardware and excellent software package if you are going for a high-end phone on the Sprint network the Epic 4G Touch is the choice period.
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