{"id":13862,"date":"2012-10-24T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T14:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=13862"},"modified":"2013-02-07T14:18:31","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T20:18:31","slug":"review-samsung-galaxy-reverb-more-than-a-dull-echo-of-siii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/column\/review-column\/review-samsung-galaxy-reverb-more-than-a-dull-echo-of-siii\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Samsung Galaxy Reverb Envokes S III But Echos The S II"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, 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<\/a>. Instead, we have a phone that feels like someone put some S III polish on an original Galaxy S.<\/p>\n

First Impressions<\/strong>
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

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This is a joke, yes?<\/p><\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

The Software\/User Interface<\/strong>
\nI’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\u00a0Samsung’s ubiquitous skin.<\/p>\n

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Nasty Samsungs. They trickses us!<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What’s different, however, is that Samsung doesn’t appear to have included the overly aggressive auto-correcting\u00a0 system that was on the S III. This makes the Reverb a lot easier to enter data on.<\/p>\n

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.
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All in all, this is a standard\u00a0 Samsung Android experience, for good or ill.<\/p>\n

Performance<\/strong>
\nI 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.<\/p>\n

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At these speeds, 3G may be false advertising.<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\n
\nThe 5 MP rear camera on the Reverb may have a smaller megapixel count and feature-set than the 8 MP shooter that’s in the S II, but it carries over some of the features of the S II, like smile detection and panoramic shots along with some cute effects filters thrown in from the S III’s camera app. I’m spoiled from reviewing cellphones with much better cameras though. While the Reverb tries, it’s just not up to par with the S III, iPhone, or the HTC One line.<\/p>\n

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Note that this was taken through slightly tinted glass.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The full-sized for this one is a little softer than I’d like, and colors are off a little.<\/p><\/div>\n

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This picture was sharp enough that I could read the text on the pen. Not bad.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Normally, I’d review any sort of unique features now, but the fact of the matter is that there is basically nothing unique about the Reverb. It’s a basic Samsung smartphone and that’s that.<\/p>\n

Hackability<\/strong>
\nAs of this writing there is no news on rooting the Reverb, so don’t expect to run Cyanogen or any other custom ROMs on it. I don’t think Virgin’s user base includes a lot of the XDA Dev crowd, so this is hardly a deal-breaker.<\/p>\n

The Strengths<\/strong>
\nSamsung has managed to stick a fast chip in a decent chassis and aim it at the budget buyer. However, …<\/p>\n

The Weaknesses<\/strong>
\n…the Reverb is only a good phone in the context of Virgin, and even then, it’s a bit overpriced at $250. The comparable\/superior HTC One V is a mere $199 (and is on sale right now for less). The Reverb fails as a budget model for that reason.<\/p>\n

Additionally, taken and compared to about any phone on any other network, be it contract or pay as you go, there are scores of phones I would recommend before the Reverb. That’s based on specs, skin, camera, and that aforementioned price.<\/p>\n

Wrap Up<\/strong>
\nWhile it’s pretty cool that what we consider a basic smartphone is something with more than enough enough power for the average user, it also raises the bar for what we should expect. A phone like this, with absolutely no standout features and a price that’s about a $100 too high, is not something I can recommend in good faith to anyone not completely married to Samsung’s ecosystem yet wants to be on Virgin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1085,1917],"tags":[815,297,3221,1539,3458,61,3409,1541,1874],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13862"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13866,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862\/revisions\/13866"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}