Samsung Gravity SMART Review, Specs, Price, cell phone reviews, Samsung Gravity SMART As the first Android-powered handset in the successful Gravity product lineup, running on Android 2.2 Froyo, the Samsung Gravity SMART is perfect for T-Mobile customers who are looking for an affordable, yet functional messaging device. Built to deliver a premium messaging experience, the Gravity SMART comes equipped with Group Text and combines a spacious, horizontal, four-row, slide-out, QWERTY keyboard with a 3.2-inch touch-screen display featuring Swype for easy text input, even with the keyboard closed. In addition, pin it notes enables customers to pin important messages to Gravity SMART’s home screen for quick reference.
Keeping in touch with friends and family is easy and fun with the Gravity SMART, which features integration with popular social networking sites and a full HTML Web browser for posting and viewing status updates. The Gravity SMART also includes a 3-megapixel camera with LED flash, digital zoom and a camcorder for capturing photos and videos.
Hardware
Samsung’s Gravity Smart is the evolution of the company’s Gravity feature phones, and is the first handset in the line to run Android. As such, the device has features that follow its forebears, with a landscape QWERTY keyboard like the Gravity 3, and a capacitive touchscreen like the Gravity T. The Smart’s screen is a 3.2-inch, 480 x 320 panel flanked by silver T-Mobile and Samsung logos. Also on its front is a black mesh earpiece, capacitive buttons for menu, back, and search, plus a tactile home button.
The display is neither exceptional nor subpar. Viewing angles are quite good — similar to the LCD on our daily driver, an HTC Thunderbolt — but colors appear washed out when compared to higher-end displays, and blacks are nowhere near as inky as what you see on Sammy’s AMOLED screens. Additionally, the step down in screen size from the massive 4.3-inch LCD on our Thunderbolt to the 3.2-inch panel on the Gravity Smart was quite an adjustment. We regularly found ourselves wishing for more screen real estate while reading emails and surfing the web.
Inside, the Gravity Smart packs WiFi 802.11 b/g/partial n (meaning it only does speeds up to 72Mbps) and Bluetooth radios, plus quadband GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and 1700MHz AWS antennae — so no HSPA or globetrotting 900/2100 UMTS radios here. In our experience, that hardware and the phone’s earpiece provided good call quality — the folks we talked to had little difficulty hearing us whether we had two bars of signal or five, and on our end the dulcet tones of friends and family came through crystal clear.
Camera
While the slider was less than luxurious, the 3 megapixel fixed-focus shooter actually punches a little bit above its weight class. Samsung has made a point to improve the camera capabilities in its handsets, and it shows in the Gravity Smart. There’s a plethora of settings — including white balance, 13 scene modes, and exposure compensation — to ensure pictures turn out the way you want. Plus, you can get trippy with a negative picture effect and do some photographic time traveling with black and white or sepia shots. When the lighting was good, we were able to get quality results out of the phone’s modest sensor. Video recording was predictably less impressive, as resolution is limited to 320 x 240 and, again, it’s a fixed-focus affair. So, you won’t exactly be getting Spielbergian results, but it works just fine for capturing YouTube fodder.
Software, Performance, and Battery Life
As we’ve said before, the Gravity Smart runs Android 2.2 swathed in Samsung’s custom TouchWiz skin. The phone also comes loaded with less bloatware than many phones, but there’s still several stock applications that cannot be removed — why can’t all carriers follow Sprint’s lead? Among these irremovable apps are the useful (cloud and group texting courtesy of Bobsled), the playful (Tetris, Bejeweled 2 and Uno), and ones we could do without (Highlight, a news aggregator, and Glympse, which shares your location and lets you track your friends). There’s also free TeleNav GPS, which is similar to Google Navigation, but if you pony up $2.99 a month for the premium version, you get added functionality like traffic camera alerts and real-time traffic updates. Overall, the phone provides the standard TouchWiz experience you’ve seen elsewhere.
Underneath the phone’s pink facade beats the same Qualcomm MSM7227 heart found in the HTC Status, only its CPU is clocked at 600MHz, which pales in comparison to higher-end single and dual-core silicon running at 1GHz or more. There’s also 512MB of RAM and a 2GB microSD card included, though media mavens can have up to 32GB of space if their wallets allow. Cutting edge silicon it’s not, and the benchmarks reflect that fact: 588 in Quadrant, 9.7 MFLOPS in Linpack, 33fps in Nenamark, and 51.7fps in Neocore. So, while the Gravity Smart can still get you your Angry Birds fix, it sometimes struggled to keep up while we were fighting multiple enemies and casting spells in Inotia3.
A beefy (for a phone this size) 1500mAh Li-ion battery provides power for the whole shebang, and it displayed superb battery life during our testing. With the screen set at 50 percent brightness, WiFi and GPS on, Facebook automatically updating every hour, Twitter polling every fifteen minutes, and push email enabled, we got just over seven hours of battery life with a looped video playing at 60 percent volume. During a normal day’s use making a few calls, taking pictures, websurfing and checking email, the Smart survived with just under half of its juice left. Impressive, especially compared to our Thunderbolt, which requires a charge at least once each work day.
Samsung Gravity SMART Price :
US: $ 325 (Update December 2011)
Samsung Gravity SMART Specifications:
* Dimensions: 114 x 59 x 14 mm
* Weight: 130 g
* Android OS with 800 MHz processor
* Display/ Screen: 320 x 480 pixels, 3.2 inches
* Multi touch, full four-row, slide-out QWERTY keyboard
* 152 MB storage, 278 MB RAM
* Upto 32GB microSD storage
* Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
* Bluetooth enabled
* 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels, LED flash with GEOTAGGING
* Standard battery, Li-Ion 1500 mAh: 364 hours stand by time and 5 hours talk time
