Samsung just loves the Galaxy line. With each generation of Galaxy S flagships, Apple’s main rival has spun off countless side devices. When the Galaxy II was the flagship, there were a bevy of original Galaxy S-based devices. Now that the S III is king, I keep hoping that we’ll see S II generation technology filtering down to Samsung’s interim devices. There’s a little bit of that trickling down with the misleadingly named Samsung Galaxy S Mini, which was announced a little while ago but that’s about it. I was hoping we might see the same goodness out of the Samsung Galaxy Reverb. Instead, we have a phone that feels like someone put some S III polish on an original Galaxy S.
First Impressions
The Reverb is sold in typical Virgin Mobile packaging, and that’s a typical trend for the device. Reverb’s front face reminds me of the Galaxy Nexus, with three capacitive buttons (menu, home, and back), a front-facing camera, speaker, and alert light. The volume button can be found on the left-hand side, along with the microSD slot. I’m fairly happy about the latter as it bucks a recent annoying trend of putting the microSD under the battery door (or worse, under the battery itself). Make no mistake, with only 4 GB of internal storage (of which you can use about 2 GB), you absolutely want easy access to add more.
This is a joke, yes?
The right side is almost bare with the exception of a very welcome dedicated camera button. Add a headphone jack and power button to the top and a MicroUSB port to the Reverb’s slightly curved bottom, and you have a basic phone with no real standout physical features. Even with a fast 1.4 GHz Qualcomm chip under the hood, Virgin Mobile’s $249 seems a little high.
The Software/User Interface
I’m convinced that TouchWiz was created just to vex me. Despite Virgin’s press photos showing the Reverb running plain Android, the actual review unit I received did indeed have Samsung’s ubiquitous skin.
Nasty Samsungs. They trickses us!
The version on the Reverb looks and feels like the Galaxy S III’s Nature UX. However, a little digging shows it’s Touch 4.0, but not technically Nature UX. As always, if you like TouchWiz, you’ll like it on this. However, if you come from a “vanilla” Android 4.0 experience, you can find the little tweaks annoying at best, vexing at worst. Doubly so when Virgin’s site shows this as a TouchWiz free phone. Feels a tad like bait-and-switch.
What’s different, however, is that Samsung doesn’t appear to have included the overly aggressive auto-correcting system that was on the S III. This makes the Reverb a lot easier to enter data on.
For a Samsung phone, the Reverb is almost bare of apps. There’s a Virgin activation app and an account app, aMemo app, Google+ and Google+ Messenger, SprintID, Samsung Media Hub, More Services and Samsung App links, the My Files file explorer that I love, and curiously enough, a VPN client. This is a lot less apps than Samsung loaded on the S series (along with carriers), but a lot more than I like to have preloaded on my phone. I couldn’t delete or hide these pre-loads, something I absolutely miss from straight-up Android 4.0.
All in all, this is a standard Samsung Android experience, for good or ill.
Performance
I love Samsung’s SuperAMOLED+ screens, but am fine with AMOLED. Yet near as I can tell, the Reverb uses neither next-gen screen. Instead, you have a 480 x 800 TFT display. This is the same resolution as the Galaxy S II, but with slightly less screen real estate (4″ versus 4.27″, resulting in slightly higher pixel density of 233 pixels per inch instead of the S II’s 218 ppi). This works well for the Reverb, and to be honest, I had to check to be sure that it wasn’t AMOLED. One thing that I did notice is that colors are less vibrant than on the S III. Also, be careful with the Reverb because that’s not Gorilla Glass on front, and it will absolutely scratch.
At these speeds, 3G may be false advertising.
I had no issues with call quality, which was a nice change – my personal Virgin phone has not been doing nearly as well as of late. Data, however, was 3G when lucky. I had 1x on my top bar more than I like to see. Be sure you live in an area with good Virgin reception. As an MNVO, Virgin phones don’t roam off of Sprint towers.
The 1700 mAh battery inside the Reverb charge was more than sufficient to power the weaker screen. Standby time is rated for 7 days, but I found it to be more like 5. However, when I did need to charge the phone, it charged up rapidly; that’s an under-appreciated feature.
Thank you for a thorough, well-considered review! You explored most of the main points woth considering and I was glad SOMEONE comment on whether or not the display is gorilla glass or not. This little tidbit of information seems to be a Samsung secret, as I’ve not seen it listed in any of the spec sheets I”ve found online. I finally went to the Samsung site to see what I could find out. Curiously, the support agent I asked about it (via chat session) said that, according to Samsung data base, the screen is Gorilla Glass 2 but a subsequent visit to the Corning site listing all phones w/gorilla glass did not have the Reverb listed. Very odd. So I’ll go by your appraisal and be disappointed that Samsung didn’t give this phone at least THAT little embellishment of quality.
Since I need to replace my LG Optimus V, I’ve been doing a lot of research on this phone — and waiting for the price to come down to where it should be. I agree, about a $100 or so too high! It’s currently about $50 off original price (down to $199) but Black Friday and Cyber Mon. are almost here and I’m hoping that Virgin repeats its CM deal of last year (half off). And now, of course, there’s also the Galaxy S2 you mentioned that was just released for $369. It’s now on sale for $299 but will it come down even lower in next few days?
I guess the question is, for me at least, how much more is the S2 worth over the cost of the Reverb? If, for example, the Reverb were discounted to $150 or $125 and the GS2 further discounted to say $250, which do I buy? Tough choice, given a limited budget, but the upside is I’m pretty sure I’ll be happy with either phone. That’s an outcome on a prepaid carrier like Virgin that wasn’t too likely in the not too distant past. Prepaid is the future in mobile!
It’s a dang good question. You might want to try a side-by-side comparison of the two phones on PhoneArena or other such sites.
Personally, I think the S2 has a better screen, so there is that.
Thanks for comments! I ordered the Reverb at $99 price, figuring that the GSII will, most likely, not be discounted too much below the $299 price that it currently is discounted to. I just don’t see the GSII being worth 3x the price of Reverb, esp. when I saw on a video review that the GSII has a limit of 2gb for apps! Why woiuld they impose that sort of limit when there’s so much more space there and Google has begun blocking apps2sd feature?
I’ve heard conflicting reports on how much space is available for apps on Reverb. Can you clarify that for me? One review I saw said it only has 1gb for apps while someone left comment saying it has 1.5gb. I see in your review (and screenshot) it says 2gb available space, but is all of that 2gb available for apps? I guess I’ll find out in a few days when i get my phone but any extra info is welcome. I’ll be sure to post my thoughts on phone after using it for a week or so.
I’ve actually sent my review unit back, so I can’t help you there.
Let me know how you liked it.
Reverb is now on sale for $99.
Samsung Galaxy Reverb is a midrange smartphone. Dimensions are 4.80 inches height by 2.52 inches width by 0.44 inches deep, they provide Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, 5 megapixel primary camera, it will give straight 8 hours and 42 minutes of talktime backup. http://www.techiecop.com/cellphones/samsung-cellphones/samsung-galaxy-reverb-review.html