Samsung Focus Overview
While the Samsung Focus is definitely a breed of its own, the Windows 7 device is still not a "phone to save us from our phones," as you've probably seen in the ads that are splattered all over the Internet. A phone to save us from our phones would be no phone at all, though we can say that the Samsung Focus makes it easier to manage all of the primary categories, hence minimizing time taken to search for things. We loved the minimalist interface and Samsung's first attempt at a Windows Phone 7 phone definitely ranks among the many attractive smartphones on the market. The Samsung Focus also brings a 5-megapixel camera with 720p HD video recording to the table, as well as a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen. Is the latest Microsoft march a whole new phone revolution, or just a spiffed-up way to handle all of the emerging multimedia content that is making its way into our pockets and purses? Let's find out.
Samsung Focus Design
The Samsung Focus is an enticing slab of 4-inch Super AMOLED goodness. That's the primary steering wheel—a sleek, smooth, top quality capacitive touchscreen display that flaunts an 800x480-pixel resolution and 50,000:1 contrast ratio, just like Samsung's Galaxy S phones, only the Focus give us a little more real estate. Colors are bright and text is very clear. We get three haptic feedback buttons on the bottom of the display—Back, Home, and Search (Bing, not Google). The Samsung Focus has one of the nicest displays on the market, no bones about it.
The Samsung Focus is also thin and glossy, and just begs to be touched. Screen sensitivity is excellent, and the back panel is composed of a smooth plastic compound with shiny clearcoat. Just like so many other smartphones in this class, the Samsung Focus has a rocker style Volume control, Power/Lock button, Camera button, 3.5mm Audio jack, and Samsung's trademark USB terminal that is enclosed with a sliding door. Underneath the back panel, the Samsung Focus has a 32GB MicroSD card slot, although Windows Phone 7 has yet to support any type of microSD card (if you insert one, it'll be bricked). It's easy to access the SIM card, but a bit more difficult to get at a MicroSD card without removing the battery.
The Samsung Focus does not offer a MicroSD card out of the box, for the reason explained above, but the phone has 8GB of NAND Flash for storage. The Samsung Focus, despite its killer looks and beautiful screen, does not appear to be as rugged as one would like, so you'd really have to take care of this baby.
Samsung Focus Software and Interface
Windows Phone 7 is a totally different experience when you compare it to Android or iOS4, and we have to say that we liked it a lot. The Samsung Focus is one of the quickest phones we've tested with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and the phone's Windows 7 interface paralleled its speed delightfully. Nearly every action featured an animated transition like a page peel or slide, so we were given a very interactive experience. The Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7 was just such a polished, professional way to organize and interact with all of the necessary attributes on a phone while purging the unnecessary content. Is it a revolutionary interface? Definitely not, but Windows Phone 7 is an excellent operating system that should become very popular.
We'll start with the home screen, where we are exposed to square and rectangle shapes that represent different categories like Phone, People, Messaging, Mail, Internet, Pictures, Marketplace, etc. The shape icons are a plain color that is selectable and the background is black—very simple. However, the icons are live, meaning Facebook profile pictures and message notifications will appear in real time. Now on a traditional Android phone, we're bombarded by widgets and applications that clutter the multitude of home screens on the phone. Not with a Windows phone. After all accounts are setup and networks are configured, the Samsung Focus feels like we're on autopilot at times.
Let's take People for example. When we tap People from the Home screen, we are greeted by an alphabetical list of our contacts from Windows Live, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Outlook, and any other contacts that happen to be configured. We can select a contact and write on their Facebook wall, send them an email, view their website, or view their live feed. You can also add a contact to the Home screen to keep track of your favorites, and we were blown away with how easy it was to find someone and communicate with them. The same thing happens when we tap Pictures. We get a "What's New" column with feeds of all our contacts' latest uploaded pictures, and we can even browse our Facebook albums in addition to the Camera Roll.
Samsung Focus Multimedia
The Samsung Focus also offers Xbox LIVE with gamer avatars and profiles, Xbox LIVE games, and Spotlight feed. On the Music and Video side, the Samsung Focus siphons the best parts of the Zune to bring synching content from a computer, which is very similar to iTunes. The cool thing was that we could sync our iTunes library from a Mac with a Windows 7 phone. But, it's imperative to know that a Windows software download needed to be executed, or else the Focus will not even be recognized by a PC when connected via USB.
We also can't forget about Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. With Microsoft Office, the Samsung Focus allowed us to create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files and share them via Microsoft's SharePoint server. With Internet Explorer, we not only got pinch and zoom, but we could tap and hold on an image and send it as a text or in an email right from the browser. Unfortunately, we didn't have Flash, and could not load YouTube videos in a browser, which is big these days, since any high-end Android 2.2 phone is capable of that. YouTube quality is very good though, but a free YouTube application needs to be downloaded in order to access it.
All in all, the Samsung Focus is one of the best phone interfaces we've seen yet, and wait until we get to the camera section.
Samsung Focus Call Quality/Battery Life
After making a few calls with the Samsung Focus, it became apparent that the phone is well equipped in the quality sound department. No issues to report here, as calls were clean and highly audible. When it came to battery life, that was a different story. Obviously, the Samsung Focus's 4-inch Super AMOLED screen is a battery life sucker, so you'll have to monitor your usage of big applications in order to conserve. If only every phone had the stamina of a BlackBerry.
Samsung Focus Image/Video Quality
The Samsung Focus has a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and is capable of recording and playing back 720p HD videos. We will tell you that the Samsung Focus performs excellently in bright light, especially in Macro mode. We discovered surprising detail from this phone's images, and colors were natural. In low light, the Samsung Focus did not exhibit the level of sensitivity we had hoped for, however, especially when we shot side by side with the recently reviewed BlackBerry Bold 9780, which proved to be far more sensitive in low light than the Focus.
720p video was not as impressive as we would have hoped either. In bright light with static subject matter, the Focus performs well, but any trace of movement made us feel like we were on the verge of an epileptic fit. This is because the Samsung Focus records at 24fps, so motion is choppier. Low light sensitivity is also not as strong as other phones we've seen, so unfortunately, we can't say that the Focus is a prime 720p machine. It takes videos that are larger in resolution than most phones, and that's about all we can say about that.
The Samsung Focus camera interface is great though. We can actually scroll through pictures we had just taken and scroll to the last frame, which is the live camera, so there's no need to jump back into camera mode—we're already there. We have some basic color modes, a Wide Dynamic Range setting, Auto Focus, Flash/Video Light, and a few other image controls. One thing we did not like was the fact that all of our camera settings would be reset after we had left camera mode. The camera mode on the Samsung Focus is definitely sleek and easy to use, but it's not the best we've seen. One great thing is that we can access the camera from a locked or asleep state, superseding the need to rifle though an unlock screen.
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