I spent the afternoon today using a brand new Samsung Captivate Galaxy S phone, on AT&T in the Boston Area. My friend from work recieved the phone today, charged it and asked me to use it for the day and "make it like mine". My impressions are based on the ATT verison of the Galaxy S but I've read they are all basically the same.
The very first thing I noticed on the Captivate is how light-weight and flimsy the phone felt in my hand. I do not know what material the Captivate is made of but it surely would not withstand even a short fall on a hard surface. Also, the physical buttons (few as there are) felt too flush to the device and had very little movement. Immediately I missed the weight and sturdyness of my X.
Also, the phone is a bit thinner than the X but the overall size of the phone is about a quarter inch shorter and roughly the same width as the X so to people who think the X is too big won't find much relief using the Captivate. Unless you find weight of the DX too heavy.
Initially setting up the Captivate was like any other Android Phone but once that was done I realized the Captivate and probably the Galaxy S series in general is not a flagship device like the DX!
Even though the Captivate comes w/ Android 2.1 it felt foreign a bit to me and un-intuitive and clunky. I've read many posts trashing Motoblur and Praising Touchwiz UI and I will never complain about Motoblur again after using Touchwiz, although I still prefer HTC Sense to both.
Simple stuff we take forgranted with the DX are complicated or unavailable on the Captivate. For instance, My friend wanted a song as a ring tone. On the X, simple. Longpress the song and choose "use as ringtone" Long pressing on the captivate had no option for that. In fact, in the handful of hours I had the phone I still didnt set the song as a ringtone.
Setting up accounts was similar but you could not set Yahoo as a phone account like you do on the X. I attempted to set up his Yahoo mail account using the "email" settings and entering all the POP3 info but nothing could get it to connect to his mail. I ended up installing the Yahoo app for him instead.
The App drawer---Looks pretty on the Captivate but is set up as individual screens that you swipe left or right to go to the next screen. Scrolling between those screens was laggy, choppy and slow. I could not fast scroll like you can in the Vertical App drawer on the X.
Browser force closed the first 5 times I tried to launch it, remember this is a brand new phone.
Phone dialer did not work until I did a cache wipe, remember this is a brand new phone.
No Skype built in , Download in market is hidden or missing.
No Flash on the camera
People who think that wifi on the X is flaky would cheer to have the X back after switching to Captivate. This phone lost Wifi @ work every 10 Min. and my X kept the connection solid.
There's been a lot of complaints about speaker/ringer volume on the X and I haven't seen much about it on the Captivate but I can say the ringer on my X at full volume is louder than the ringer on the captivate @ full volume. Music on the Captivate speaker sounded a little muffled, this could have been the quality of the MP3s he had on the phone though.
My point to all this is the grass is not always greener.
I have a lot more but I really don't feel like getting into it all right now. Mayb on a later post.
Dj
