Hardware
The Transform hardware is pretty good for the most part.it has mostly a plastic build and feel. You can definitely tell its not apart of the Galaxy S line of phone from Samsung but that doesn’t mean the quality of the hardware is bad. You get your standard buttons and ports on the site which feel good when pressed an don’t feel as though they are going to fall off. The 3.5 inch screen had a decent 320×480 resolution which is ok and pretty standard among non high end android phones. The keyboard is a full 4 row keyboard that has good separation between each key and each key is a bit sunk down which takes a bit to get used to. On the front of the phone you have your same 4 touch sensitive buttons that you see on most android phones. You also have a 3.0 megapixel camera on the back with flash and VGA front facing camera on the front for video calling.
Some other specs include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, 2 GB SD card pre-installed, 1500 mAh batter that will give you about 6 hours of talk time and 14.6 days of standby time, and an 800 MHz processor to round out the hardware specs. Good specs for a mid range android device but do the specs work out well with the software?
Usage
Calls sound clear and worked well although the dial pad is changed a bit and I don’t feel for the better. The camera is your standard 3.0 megapixel with nothing to brag about and what you have seen with pretty much every android camera at 3.0 megapixel and the app for the camera your standard android camera app.
The phone comes with android 2.1 which look to be stock at first until you see the Sprint ID icon. The Sprint ID is suppose to be different UI packages to help you customize your phone. You have ones for work, social, play, entertainment, gaming and so on. This seems like a pretty cool idea at first but as soon as you install one of these ID packs you begin to see the drawbacks as performance takes a big hit and you get a very cluttered interface that includes software you may not need to trials. This reminds me of how lot of PCs will come with a lot of bloatware on them. The Sprint ID seem like a good idea at first but it just really gets in the way of the android experience. I would recommending the stock ID as that provided the smoothest experience.
Overall
Samsung does a great job with giving above average hardware for a mid range smartphone but the Sprint IDs from Sprint can hinder the phone greatly. I think that the idea is good but it needs to back and be cooked a bit more before seeing primetime again. Good job Samsung but Sprint you need to go back to the drawing board on the Sprint IDs. It’s a phone that is good and will work for the non power user but you just want to make sure to stick to the stock Sprint ID.
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