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Samsung Galaxy S Review: Image Gallery, Video & Media

   

 

Being an Android phone and all, the Samsung Galaxy S handles Media pretty well.

Ofcourse there’s more to add to that. Here’s a little more about Music, Images and Video on the Galaxy S.

Music:

Samsung Galaxy S Review

The music player on the Samsung Galaxy S handles all sorts of Music formats. Ranging from Lossless audio formats FLAC and WAV and other audio formats like Vorbis, MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, MID, AC3, XMF and IMY. That’s quite a handful.

Samsung Galaxy S Review

Music Album art is displayed nice and large on the gorgeous Super AMOLED screen, along with all your basic Play/Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward functions. You can adjust volume from this screen, or go back to the list of songs. The Galaxy S also has 5.1 Channel sound but you have to have your headphones on for it to function.

Samsung Galaxy S Review

Support for creating playlists, along with automatic playlists like recently added, recently played, most playedetc is present. You also have the option to sort by All songs, Artists, Genres, Years, Composers or Album. As you’d expect really.

You can also share the track via Bluetooth or Email, Set it as a ringtone for a contact or profile.

There’s several Equalizer presents, ranging from “Auto” to Normal, Rock, Pop, Jazz, Dance, Classic, Live, or one Custom present that you can edit. You can also choose sound “effects” such as Normal, Wide, Concert Hall, Music Clarity, Bass Enhancement, or Externalisation. There’s even a cool visualization that you can enable, but we preferred looking at the Album Art.

Also worth mentioning, is that in Landscape orientation, the whole UI changes to a very cool Coverflow-ish menu and swipe that up and you get to an even cooler circular song-scroller UI (check out video at the bottom of this post for a look at it).

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And dont forget, because you can Multitask on Android, you can continue playing music while using another app, or carrying out some other function. The Music automatically pauses when a Phonecall comes in, and fades back in when the call is over.

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Music clarity is pretty good through the headphones that come with the Galaxy S. Although, we could have done with a little more bass. No complaints really. The loudspeaker is average loudness, but since it’s placed at the rear of the device, does get muffled quite a lot when placed on a flat surface, or against the wall of your pocket.

Images:

Samsung Galaxy S Review

The Image gallery on the Samsung Galaxy S is a pretty slick piece of work. Images are arranged in a grid pattern with their thumbnails. The device uses the built in accelerometer to sort-of lean the gallery ‘towards’ you as you move it around. Small minor thing, but noticable. It also automatically randomly places one of your taken images as a blurred out background, which is another great effect.

You can also arrange your images in a ‘pile’ sorted according to date taken, etc (check the video at the bottom of this post for a demo of this).

All the basic functions are present, such as sharing a picture, uploading or emailing it, deleting, editing, looking at it’s Geo-location if tagged, setting it as a contact’s display picture, cropping or rotating it, viewing details, etc.

Samsung Galaxy S Review

There’s also a nifty slideshow feature which looks pretty sweet when you’re using the TV-Out function of the Galaxy S. And did I mention, you can pinch to zoom in/out too? The transitions are very slick, with no slowdowns or lag whatsoever.

The Image gallery also pulls in all your Google Picasa Albums and Images though, whether you like it or not. Unfortunately there doesnt seem to be a way to get it to pull in my Flickr Albums, because that, I could totally use.

Video:

Samsung Galaxy S Review

Video is probably the best part about the Samsung Galaxy S. Supported video codecs include mpeg4, H.264, H.263, Sorenson codec, DivX HD/ XviD (the first mobile phone to do so), VC-1 and supported video formats include 3GP (MPEG-4), WMV (Advanced Systems Format), AVI (divx), MKV and FLV. And they all look great on the 4 inch Super AMOLED screen. I suppose that PowerVR graphics processor might have helped too (90 million triangles per second that makes it the fastest graphics processing unit in any Android phone).

Just like the Music player, you can use all the basic functions like Play/Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward. You can adjust the volume and turn on the 5.1 Channel dolby surround if you’re wearing headphones. There’s also a ‘fit to screen’ option if your video doesnt fit the aspect ratio that great. And, you can skip to any part of the video by tapping on the right point of the scrollbar.

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Videos are arranged by date, in a list format by their thumbnails and title. And the Galaxy S remembers where you last left off while watching a movie, and will resume from that point when you next play it.

Here’s a video overview of Media on the Samsung Galaxy S. Just to give you a better idea :

So that’s basically it for Media on the Samsung Galaxy S.

Samsung Galaxy S Review

Have any questions about the Samsung Galaxy S and how it handles Media? Something we might have missed? Let us know in the comments y’all.

   

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Author Description

Clinton Jeff

Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories. Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus or on Facebook or Twitter:

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How do you turn the media player off permanently. It is suspect to interferring with my vehicles bluetooth system/Bluetooth Ipod. Any suggestions welcome.

Was just wonderinr if theres a way to add music to your pictures or slide shows and send them as a sms or mms

Can you create video playlists on samsung galaxy s? This is a deal breaker for me as I have a ton of learning materials in short 2 minute videos that i wish to group together. Cheers

I have synced my music to my new Galaxy S and can get it to play but don't know how to stop the music playing. I have pressed pause then gone out of Music Player but when I go back in, the song that was playing is still sitting there in pause mode. Can you please help?....Thanks....Joan....at aljosi@optusnet.com.au

Hey Joan did you get a reply to your question about the stop function? I have got the same problem. It's probably something really simple but I can't find the stop button either. Thanks. Karen at pringlk@hotmail.com

I need help getting my media player to stop playing randomly.... I would like the songs to be played as they are listed on the list.

I want to use PULL email on my Galaxy S (aka i9000). I have set the email timing on the phone to NEVER but whenever i go to the email file to look at an email it starts down loading again! NB I am synchronising to Outlook 2010. Welcome advice on how to get Pull email on demand only.

Great review but I have a question. I have my songs in a playlist and listen to them as i go to work. I then stop the music player. When I start it back up at the end of the day to go home, it doesn't resume playback from where I was up to. I have to manually search and then start it. Is there a way around this or is there a better music player app that will resume playback. Thanks Heaps.

Hey there! There's an app called "LauncherPro" that does the job well enough on the homescreen and menu :) Check it out.

what is the app to turn off the touchwiz UI on the galaxy called??????

Thanks a lot guys! This is exactly what I wanted to hear, the music player is alright and the equalizer and 5.1 sound makes it maybe even better than the default one. I wouldn't use it very much thanks to services like Spotify or Grooveshark with their own apps. I am really happy that the video and gallery are vanilla though, cause I have kinda bad experience with Samsung's own implementations of these on their Windows Mobile devices. This Galaxy S really seems tempting now! Thanks again for your professional and very helpful replies. :)

Heh thanks for the reply Vinit :) @Hakarishi: Yes the Touchwiz UI is all over the Music player, but it works quickly enough so no worries at all in this case. There's an app to turn off the touchwiz UI on the galaxy already btw :)

these guys have played with regular android phones and I'm pretty sure they have Nexus one and Desire too (sigh...) the music player is different... it's totally overhauled but the gallery and video player is the same vanilla android... with a hell lot of codecs support. yes the touchWiz icons isn't that cool but pretty much everyone is saying it very useful and samsung has done a very good job.

I know that you may not have a chance to play with a regular Android device like the Nexus. But what I would like to know is, if the music player, and the gallery are just like the regular in all Android phones (maybe with some Samsung tweaks here and there) or it just completely new stuff not to be seen on other devices. The same question to the video player. Is it a default video player from Android (with more codecs support built in and higher resolution) or a completely new, additional one? The icons are different though, hopefully people at XDA developers will enable an option to turn TouchWiz off, so it looks like more like an Android than an iPhone. Thanks!

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