Today we’ll be taking a brief look at the impressive Samsung I9230 Galaxy Golden. Now I’ve told you quite a couple of times that Samsung was going to release an Android smartphone with two screens and a flip-phone format. I actually think this was a great idea – we need more variety in the Android world. Personally, I was getting somewhat bored with how things have started to look: all phones are in the same format with minor design differences. I’m not saying it’s bad necessarily, but it is getting dull.
Some people may argue that this phone is a bad one due to its design. However, the phone has many advantages. There are some disadvantages about it too, but we’ll get to those in a second. First off, the presence of a physical keyboard is really helpful, especially if you have the disadvantage of rather large hands. Onscreen keyboards, no matter how many I tried, have all tended to disappoint me. Some would say that others like Voice-to-Text or Swype are effective, but not if you’re not a native English-Speaker. While I personally have no problems with the language, my friends aren’t so lucky, therefore I have to resort to taking 5 minutes to write a 2 sentenced text. With the Samsung Galaxy Golden, I’d say that’s no longer an issue.
SUMMARY
While this phone is a good one, it does come with its fair share of disadvantages / problems. One of the main disadvantages of the Samsung Galaxy Golden is its pricing. While it may not be so strong of a phone, it certainly costs as much as the best smartphone on the market ( revolving around the 700 dollar margin, or even more ). I hope that this model of Android smartphone catches on so that in the future, flip-smartphones will come at a cheaper price than they currently are. Part of that large price could be dictated by the presence of two displays on this device. However, if we stop and debate how much everything is worth it would take forever. Moral of the story is: the phone is good, not a great phone but certainly a good one, and it has some neat new features that are welcome on the market – it’s only drawback: it may be a tad overpriced.
GENERAL
As far as general features go, this phone is a standard 2G and 3G supporting smartphone which uses a Micro-SIM card. The Samsung Galaxy Golden is available for purchase as of September, having been announced in August.
BODY
As far as size is concerned, the Samsung Galaxy Golden isn’t a very large phone. This device has the following dimensions, actually: 118 x 59.5 x 15.8 mm ( or 4.65 x 2.34 x 0.62 in ) and it weighs somewhere at 179 g ( or 6.31 oz ). All and all a pretty standard phone, as far as I see it, although other may disagree with me ( I do tend to prefer slightly larger phones than others, however ).
DISPLAY
The type of screen n this device is Super AMOLED ( both of the screens have it, both of them with 16 million colors ). As for the size and specifics, each screen is slightly different. They differ in size, more than anything: the main one is a 3.7 inch wide screen, where as the external one is a 3.5 inch screen. Both screens share the resolution and possibly the pixel density as well ( I have yet to test this, so we’ll leave it at a “maybe” ). The resolution they both use is of 480 x 800 pixels, and as far as pixel density goes: I think the main one has a pixel density of around 252 pixels per inch, which is pretty good by my standards.
SOUND
As far as audio is concerned, the Samsung Galaxy Golden has nothing out of the ordinary. This phone has no hardware-based or software-based audio enhancements on it, and while the audio quality of this phone may be okay, a bit of extra audio quality is always welcome.
DATA CONNECTION
The connectivity of this device is good. It has both GPRS and EDGE and also, its internet speed is the standard you’ll find on most top-dollar smartphones. The Wi-Fi of the Samsung Galaxy Golden is 802.11 a/b/g/n with DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot and the Bluetooth version of this phone is v4.0 and it also has A2DP and EDR on it. This phone also has NFC on it and a Micro-USB v2.0 port as well, the USB port having support for MHL.
MEMORY
The memory of this device is good, but again, depending on the angle from which you view it, cannot be classified as great. The internal storage is at around 16 GB and it can further be expanded upon via the MicroSD card slot, which uses any card of up to 64 GB. The RAM of this device is in a quantity of 1.5 GB ( while it pales in comparison to the 3 GB found on the newer phones, it still is enough to run just about anything decently enough ).
CAMERA
The main camera of the Samsung Galaxy Golden is an 8 MP one, and a phone also has a secondary 1.9 MP camera on the front. The main one can record video in 1080p full HD at around 30 frames per second and also has stereo sound recording on it. Some of the features of the main camera include: autofocus, LED flash, geo-tagging, touh focus and face and smile detection.
BATTERY LIFE
The battery of the Samsung Galaxy Golden is a standard Li-Ion 1820 mAh battery. Since the phone is relatively new, tests have yet to be carried out to see how long it can sustain the phone. Also, in order to clarify: when I say “standard” battery, I actually mean it’s the remove-able kind. Amazing how rare this has become among the newer phones ( which practically proves a point that newer phones are meant to be replaced as often as possible – used to be when the battery died for good, you just got a new battery instead of a new phone ).
HARDWARE
Hardware-wise, the Samsung Galaxy Golden is a pretty good device: it has a Dual-Core 1.7 GHz Krait processor, a Qualcomm MSM8930 Snapdragon 400 chipset and an Adreno 305 graphics card. While that may not seem so much when compared to the newer phones, it is quite capable enough as to handle most of the games and all of the apps currently out there.
SOFTWARE
As far as software is concerned, the Samsung Galaxy Golden is doing quite well. This device has Android OS v4.2 Jelly Bean installed on it, which is one of the best versions out there. No news as of yet whether it will be capable or not of handling a better and newer version.
FEATURES
As far as features go, this phone is packed to the brim with them. The Samsung Galaxy Golden has a ton of sensors ( Accelerometer, Gyro, Proximity, Compass and Barometer ), it uses HTML5 for the browser, it has Stereo FM radio with RDS support, Java through MIDP Emulation and GPS with full support for A-GPS and GLONASS alike. As far as messaging goes, the Samsung Galaxy Golden is capable of the following: SMS ( with Threaded View ), MMS, E-Mail, Push Mail, IM and RSS. This phone is also available in only one color: Black and Gold ( black cover and body with golden rims – looks really nice ).
I’ll offer you a brief list here of what this phone is capable of:
- SNS integration
- MP4/DivX/XviD/WMV/H.264/H.263 player
- MP3/WAV/eAAC+/AC3/FLAC player
- Organizer
- Image/video editor
- Document viewer
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa
- Voice memo/dial/commands
- Predictive text input (Swype)
This concludes our little review of the Samsung Galaxy Golden. I hope it has proven helpful to you and that it has at the very least offered you the tinies bit of extra information about the device.
