Mobile News

Release Date: August 31st, 2010

$249.99 w/ 2 year contract
$499.99 – no contract price

Battery:

The Samsung Epic 4G is an Android phone with a very good battery life, which is something that most cell phone fans are looking for. Android is one of the hottest platforms on the market, and the Samsung Epic 4G doesn’t disappoint in this area at all.

However, there are things that can cause you to lose some battery life very quickly. The Epic 4G is WiMAX capable, but this is something that drains battery life very quickly. In addition, if you decide to use the Epic 4G as a wireless hotspot, battery life will also suffer. Like other smartphones, you will want to make sure that you turn off the most battery draining features if you want to preserve battery life. Wi-Fi, 3G, and WiMAX will indeed drain the battery, but these features offer so much functionality to the phone that you shouldn’t just skip over them.

Memory and Processor Speed:

Compared to other smartphones, the Epic 4G doesn’t offer as much on-board memory. However, there are plenty of opportunities to add expandable memory. A 16GB microSD card comes with the phone, so smartphone fans should have more than enough memory to store important applications as well as the usual audio, video, and pictures.

As far as the processor speed goes, this is really where the Epic 4G shines — there’s a 1 GHz processor supported by Android 2.1 — there may be an update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) in the works, but news is still vague on this note.

Screen:

There’s one word to describe the screen — massive. At 4.3-inches, you are definitely get a lot of real estate for the money. Even though the price tag might throw you off the Epic 4G, the screen’s vibrancy and size should be more than enough to keep you interested. It’s something that can definitely pay off in spades, especially when you’re really trying to browse the best that the Web has to offer or even just viewing pictures from friends and family.

Form:

Like many other smartphones on the market, the Samsung Epic 4G is a full keyboard phone. The QWERTY keyboard factor is hidden by a slide-out feature. When you don’t need to use the pull out keyboard, you can simply keep it closed and save space. The phone is a big chunkier than other smartphones, but when you’re a heavy text messaging user, this type of bulk is actually a good thing. After all, how many times have you had a phone slip out of your hands while you’re trying to send that very important text message?

Camera:

What’s a smartphone without a camera? On top of getting all the goodies from the Android platform, you get to round out a fantastic phone with a fantastic camera. What’s interesting is that you get not just one camera, but two — you get a very sharp 5 megapixel camera in the back, and a low-resolution camera in the front. Why would you want two different cameras? Well, everyone’s taken at least one self-portrait of themselves in the mirror. This actually helps you take better self-portraits — use the front-camera for those pictures and the back camera for the “real” shots of everything else.

Other Features:

* Android 2.1 OS
* Email, Text Messaging
* Speech-to-text messaging
* Music Player