Samsung Captivate review

Back in February, I met a stranger at a McDonald's in a Wal-Mart for my first Craigslist purchase, completing my transition to manhood.

Only technology is worth such a dangerous risk to life and limb, and at first I was underwhelmed with my purchase: the Samsung Captivate, an Android smartphone for AT&T.

As time has passed, I've found myself liking the Captivate more and more. But the key question remained: can a phone running the Google-provided Android software replace the iPhone in my heart?

Not quite. But it's a ton of fun regardless.

* * *

To answer the question on every iPhone lover's mind—why?—embrace one simple reality: I'm a nerd, and I wanted to try Android for myself. Buying the phone off Craigslist kept my contract status with AT&T intact, meaning I'm still just a few months from freedom.

Second: the iPhone had lost a bit of its luster for me, for multiple reasons. First, I've been using one for years, and wanted to see if anything better was out there. Second, my 3GS is limping to the finish line. The headphone jack is getting loose (for now, the sound's still fine), the white plastic case is riddled with cracks, and the battery life was sinking fast. I figured I'd spring for a battery replacement, and the Captivate could hold me over for a bit while Apple took it apart and sealed it back up. (I was later told at the Apple Store that I just needed to restore my phone, and for the most part, that was right.) I've been upgrade-eligible for the iPhone 4 since it came out, but at this point I'd rather wait for the 5 before taking a punch to my soul in two-more-years-of-contract form.

So, enter the Captivate. Many of its internal specs rival the iPhone 4's: sixteen gigs of storage, 1 GHz processor, half a gig of RAM, 5-megapixel camera, and 720p video recording. It's missing the front camera and the absurdly sharp 3.5" Retina Display of the 4, but it has a 4" Super AMOLED panel of its own with unparalleled black levels. (Seriously, even a movie like Batman Begins looks detailed on it.)

The hardware was superb: the larger screen makes for a bigger footprint, but the Samsung is very thin, and at first it seemed to match the iPhone 4 in innate desire to leave my hand. I've since adjusted, for the most part, though thankfully it's impressively durable, including when a coworker dropped it several feet the first Monday I had it.

The software, however, is a different story. It's not awful, it's different, and it was particularly painful at first when I tried to use the Captivate like an iPhone. It's no iPod in terms of media playback, even though the somewhat-cheesy Samsung music player is actually an improvement on Google's default offering. Its camera is not a touch-and-go affair like the iPhone's; rather, it has a bunch of settings, similar to a digital camera. Once I got used to it, it's actually quite good, though the video recording quality can't match the iPhone 4 even if it smokes my 3GS. Here are some random shots to demonstrate:

However, Android taught my phone a few tricks the iPhone doesn't know. Free turn-by-turn navigation, with spoken directions, awaited me in a Google Maps upgrade. It works great. It's pretty annoying, too, with how much it talks, but it works. The Gmail app is fantastic, and comes very close to replicating the Gmail website on your desktop. However, the e-mail program for your other accounts is a piece of, um, garbage, so I went to the Market, where I found the competent K-9 Mail, which is plenty good for my work account.

The most impressive Google app, though, was Listen, the podcast manager/player. By default, the podcast management on an iPhone is a pain. Some iPhone users complain about having to plug their phones into their computers to sync content—personally, I like having a fresh backup of my contacts and pictures. But downloading podcasts in iTunes on your desktop, and then syncing, is by far the most straightforward way to get podcasts you like on your iPhone—while you can download individual episodes from the iTunes app on the phone, there's no sense of subscriptions on the device, nor any way to automate grabbing new podcasts.

So Listen is an app that lets you subscribe to, check for, and download or stream podcasts, even over 3G. It's really cool. I pulled down a 50-meg episode in a couple of minutes while driving, and listened to it right away. It's funny that Google beat Apple considering podcasts are, you know, named after iPods.

However, while Apple itself doesn't match Listen, the battle wasn't over. Listen was so good, you see. that I started looking for equivalents on iOS. And then Gizmodo posted about Instacast on the App Store, which was infinitely times more expensive at $1.99, but which completely smokes Listen, which has a confusing UI and imprecise navigation.

And that's the big downer on Android, coming from an iPhone: it's not the same as iOS, which is fine, but the app situation is still a bit behind. Official big-time apps, like Facebook and Twitter, are just enough behind their iOS counterparts that you notice (TweetDeck for Android is nice, though). And the selection is weaker. There's no Instacast on the Android Market, no Tiny Wings, no Instapaper, no Simplenote, and no Calvetica.

Other cool Android features include apps like Chrome to Phone, which let you click a button in Chrome on your computer and immediately open the same page on your phone, which is great if you have to go but want to finish that article. You can also push apps to your phone from the Android Market website. I really liked voice actions, too; the voice recognition is quite good, and phrases like, "Navigate to Coors Field" just work, which is insane.

I really missed Visual Voicemail, though, but I eventually switched to Google Voice for my voicemail with no ill effects on either phone (I switch between the two without mercy).

So if it's just a bad iPhone impression, why do I like the Captivate so much?

Because I broke it.

* * *

In a sense, the Captivate came broken. I'm not talking about the abysmal battery life (guy kept in a box for a few months before selling it; the battery has recovered, but it took forever to charge and burned out in a few hours at first). I mean that the software on the phone, as it came from Samsung and AT&T, was terrible.

Being on an iPhone, I'd almost forgotten how much carriers delight in messing with you. So of course my phone had a few non-removable AT&T apps for stuff like navigation, even though there's no way it's better than Google's free offering.

The problem, really, came down to Android itself, or rather, the way it's used. Android is free and open-source, so any manufacturer can use it. Most try to differentiate their Android phones by making their own modifications. This has two negative effects:

1) It makes your phone slower.

2) While Google updates Android frequently, you can't get the upgrades until your manufacturer and carrier re-add their speed bumps and deem it fit for public consumption.

This was particularly key for me, as the Captivate was on Android 2.1 when I got it. Though 2.3 is out, it's only on very few phones (basically just the Google-led Nexus phones), but 2.2 was a major upgrade in speed and some functions. For example, voice actions and Chrome to Phone don't work on 2.1.

In many ways, Android is like Windows, particularly before Windows 7. It competes with a more simple Apple system, and OEMs like to mess it up for some reason.

Like Windows, Android has a reputation as being for "power users"—it's had many features the iPhone hasn't, such as multitasking, from day one. Okay, fine. But I like to micromanage my wireless networks. So, for instance, I'll switch off 3G before a long phone call, especially at home. 2G uses significantly less battery, and I'm told it sounds better, at least from this here apt. You know how you switch off 3G on the Captivate? You don't! I guess you just hope to wander into an area where the 3G signal is dead, because then it will switch itself. When the official 2.2 update rolled out…nothing changed on this front. Also, the Samsung battery meter was bad enough that it's worth mentioning. It's more like a dumbphone meter with a few different stages of charge vs. uncharged, except it looks like it's trying to show a percentage, and in that it's not very precise. You can always check the percentage manually by drilling down a few stages into the Settings menu, which never gets old.

Anyway, complaint, complaint! Here's the thing. I'm not the only person annoyed by AT&T/Samsung's lame decisions, and some of those people are programmers, and some of them are quite good. Online you can find what are called ROMs, which are reworked versions of your phone's software that you can install, and there are different ones available for many Android phones. And some of them are really, really good. A coworker who'd rooted and tweaked his EVO into oblivion found one for me called Serendipity, which was, I think, on version 5.12 by the time I tried it. It was based on a 2.2.1 version of Android that let me switch off 3G, install a battery percentage meter, and which ran like butter. (It was such an improvement in smoothness over the way the phone came it's almost unbelievable.) It had a bug or two, but they were less annoying then the bug in Samsung's 2.2 that kept me from sending picture messages to certain people.

After a while, I learned what I could, then decided it was kind of weird to have two phones, so I figured I'd sell it. Using a program on my PC, I began the restore process, but when it ran long I got impatient and yanked the USB cable, and killed my phone completely. Nothing would get it to turn on again; it just kept flashing this odd phone and computer error icon.

Whoops.

Well, the community around this phone is so cool, they had a fix for that, too. What you have to do is manually force the phone into download mode. All the normal methods I'd destroyed, except some weird failsafe involving attaching resistors to the micro USB port. Seriously. A trip to Radio Shack, a sacrificed USB cable, and some software loading later, the phone worked again. It was so nerdy, but so cool. I've been attached to it ever since.

Since then, it's caution to the wind, and I tried another cool ROM based on the Galaxy S II software (the Captivate is part of the original Galaxy S line). It was great, but not quite ready for prime time, and I'm back on Serendipity, now on 6.4 and better than ever.

So I didn't get the world-class experience it would take to dethrone Apple, but it was awesome anyway.