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Home > Android Phone Reviews > Product Title
Samsung Captivate Glide
What's hot: Good hardware keyboard, solid performance.
What's not: Key travel minimal on keyboard.
Reviewed December 1, 2011 by Lisa Gade, Editor
in Chief (twitter: @lisagade)
Can't get enough Samsung TouchWiz and Super AMOLED goodness? Wish the original Captivate or Samsung Galaxy S II had a hardware keyboard? Samsung's latest mid to high end Android smartphone on ATT gets you some keyboard love. The Samsung Captivate Glide has a slide-out hardware keyboard married to a 4" Super AMOLED display, Android OS 2.3 Gingerbread and a 1GHz Nvidia dual core Tegra 2 CPU. Not too shappy for $149 with contract.
Despite the Captivate name, this isn't last year's single core Hummingbird CPU; rather it's fairly competitive with a dual core Tegra 2 that gives you admission to Tegra Zone games and solid performance. Our only beef with the Tegra 2 is its unwillingness to play 1080p high profile MPEG4 video, something that dual core Snapdragon and TI dual core CPUs happily do. But it can play 1080p standard profile video and lower resolutions just fine. Not that you need 1080p on the 800 x 480 display, but you just might want to use Samsung's solid DLNA wireless streaming to a smart HD TV, or dig up an MHL adapter for HDMI out.
The phone's Super AMOLED display is as always colorful and contrasty. Text looks sharp enough and the phone has a fairly neutral color cast. While 800 x 480 won't set the world on fire, it's a good match for the 4" display size. Sound through the speaker is good with less distortion at max volume than the more expensive Samsung Galaxy S II and Skyrocket on AT&T. Gaming is smooth and this Android smartphone is a capable multimedia device.
The Captivate Glide scores a very respectable 3137 on the Quadrant benchmark and a decent but not record challenging 4438 in the Sunspider JavaScript test. It runs Android OS 2.3.5 Gingerbread with the latest and greatest Samsung TouchWiz software, complete with motion control.
It has an 8 megapixel rear camera that's quite good, though it's limited to 720p video recording, and there's a front 1.3MP front video chat camera. The phone has WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 and a GPS that works with Google Maps and Navigation as well as AT&T Navigator and Family Maps.
The phone is very light for a full QWERTY slider, and as we've come to expect from Samsung, it's clad in obvious plastics. It doesn't look or feel cheap, but the patterned drab gray plastic back doesn't create gadget lust or envy. The keyboard is large and easy to use, though key travel is very shallow (the price we pay for thinness). Still, it's not bad and is worlds better than the budget Samsung DoubleTime's keyboard.
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