The Samsung Galaxy Fit will be ready and set well before the thought of upgrading ever crosses your mind. The times are long gone when smartphones were scary and complicated. Little green men were a hoax, the little green robots are the real deal. And Samsung are busy carrying out their plan. Match every touchscreen feature phone every Corby and every Star with a droid smartphone. The Galaxy Fit doesn’t have the features to be considered as a business tool. It’s a bottom of the food chain kind of smartphone and it knows it. The friendly little gadget is on the cheap side of smartphones, but keen to deliver complete connectivity and above average imaging. The Galaxy Fit has a 3.31-inch TFT LCD with QVGA (320×240) pixel dimensions. With a pixel density of just 121 ppi, the picture quality was never going to be good. The pixels are just too large and everything appears like 8-bit video games. Samsung should have ideally opted for a higher pixel dimensions display or a smaller display size but they chose neither. It’s not just the pixel dimensions that’s low. The panel quality isn’t great either. The display looks bit dull and images appear washed out. Sunlight legibility too isn’t great and even at maximum brightness it’s not easy to read the display.
The touch response on our review sample was way too sensitive. For example, even when we would want to scroll, the display would sometimes take it as a gesture to select. This behaviour is not uncommon for Android devices, which still have a hard time distinguishing between a scroll and a select gesture but we found the case to be a lot worse on the Galaxy Fit. The Galaxy Fit runs Anrdoid 2.2.1 Froyo out of the box. It will, however, eventually get updated to Gingerbread. As usual Samsung has thrown its TouchWiz UI overlay, which not only makes the icons look pretty, but also improves general usability. There are four buttons docked at the bottom of the homescreen, which stay there even when you open the app drawer.
The Galaxy Fit is a quad band GSM 3G handset. It supports HSPA, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and A-GPS connectivity. The call quality and network reception was good and voices on either side were heard clearly. The Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and A-GPS too worked well. The device we received for review had an issue where if it was connected to the PC, it would automatically go to the USB debugging mode, even if it was disabled. This meant that every time we connected it to the PC, we had to go to settings and disable debugging mode after which the phone would ask us if we wanted to connect it in mass storage mode.
Galaxy Fit has a 5 Megapixel camera with autofocus but no flash. The image quality is decent for the price range the phone belongs to, but we have seen better image quality from 5 Megapixel sensors. The lack of a flash does hurt a lot in the dark and even the video recording quality is abysmal.
The music player supports all major formats except for FLAC, which is found in Samsung’s more expensive smartphones. It also has a 5.1-channel mode and several equalizer presets but no manual equalizer. Audio quality through the headphones was pretty good, although we wished it were a bit louder. Loudspeaker quality was decent as well with adequate volume levels.
The Galaxy Fit has 1350 mAh Li-Ion battery. Even though the phone has a relatively small display and a slower processor to run, the battery life is still mediocre and on par with other Android phones. With all the Google services active in the background and with regular calls, messages, few hours of web browsing, music playback and application usage, the battery went down in a day, that too on a 2G network.
The Samsung Galaxy Fit is yet another attempt by the Android army to storm the lower-end smartphone market. Placed right between the Galaxy Mini and the Galaxy Ace, the fit tries to deliver a solid smartphone performance at a very reasonable price.
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