Introduction:
It’s devices like the Samsung Galaxy Gio that helped Android gain so much ground in so little time. They are a better bargain than the uber-smartphone and find their way into people’s pockets a lot easier. With that goal in mind, the Galaxy Gio must be an all-round pleaser of a phone.
They may soon be running out of names for the Galaxy lot. But it will be when number plates start to fall short that they’ll know they’re in trouble. Back to the point though. Boy number S5660 is called Gio. He’s a teenager – mischievous and fun, too young for a suit and tie.
It’s a decent offer for the midrange: with a good enough version of Android (2.2.1 Froyo), good enough screen, a powerful 800MHz processor and a great connectivity set, ranging from 3G to GPS. There’s little to complain about, save for the imaging skills perhaps.
Here’s the rest of what the Galaxy Gio has to offer.
Galaxy Gio Specification:
- Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
- 7.2 Mbps HSDPA support
- 3.2″ 16M-color TFT capacitive touchscreen of HVGA (320 x 480 pixels) resolution, multi-touch
- 800MHz ARM 11 processor, Adreno 200 GPU, Qualcomm MSM7227 chipset; 278MB of RAM available to the user
- Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread) with TouchWiz 3.0 UI
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b, g, n with Mobile Hotspot functionality
- GPS with A-GPS connectivity; Digital compass
- 3.2 MP autofocus camera with geo-tagging and face-detection
- QVGA@15fps video
- microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
- microSD slot (up to 32GB, 2GB in box)
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- Accelerometer and proximity sensor
- DNSe sound enhancement
- Stereo FM radio with RDS
- Document viewer
- Smart dialing
- Swype text input
- Samsung Apps
Main disadvantages:
- No Camera LED Flash
- Poor video recording (only QVGA)
- Not supporting Adobe Flash Player
- No sensor for auto-brightness
- No support for DivX/Xvid video support
Galaxy Gio is actually not very different from the Ace, it's just ace to win the camera and screen that is wider.
- Galaxy Ace = 5.0 MP Camera + LED Flash, 3.5" Screen
- Galaxy Gio = 3.2 MP Camera, No LED Flash, 3.2" Screen
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Galaxy Gio simple design |
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Galaxy Gio back cover |
Material used is plastic that has become the hallmark of Samsung. It is possible to suppress the price of Gio. The screen also has not been using Gorilla Glass is known for its resistance to scratches, so you should use screen protector since the initial purchase Gio.
Galaxy Gio just have a hardware button on the front is the Home Button (not trackpad!) And 2 pieces that are capacitive buttons (Menu button on the left and the Back button on the right) that is responsive to the touch. Press and hold the Home Button to bring up the panel that contains the app / games that last time we open. Galaxy Gio can also take a screenshot of the display screen without the need for third-party applications. The way is press home button and power button and release when it vibrating.
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Front side button |
Power button is on the top right side. Initially we need adjustment because it is usually the location of the Power button on the side of the phone. Pressing and holding will bring up a shortcut to silent mode, turn off your data connection, Flight mode, and Power Off.
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Power button |
On the right side there is also a MicroSD slot, so no need to turn off Gio first, but need unmount SD Card.
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SD Card slot |
Location of the volume buttons on the left side of Gio. The buttons are very soft and very easily depressed. Even sometimes I accidentally hit the volume button when I want to press the Power button. Similarly, if Gio a little bump on the left side, the volume will be easily depressed. Volume buttons are close to the hole for the phone hanger.
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Hole and volume button |
Locations in the rear speakers. Therefore, the position of the speakers as this will reduce the volume of sound produced when Gio is placed in a supine position, especially in the soft as a mattress pad. In addition to the speakers, on the back there is a 3.2 megapixel camera without LED flash.
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Camera and speaker |
On the top side, Gio has 3.5 mm headphone hole that is commonly found on the phone today. So we can use our own favorite earphones like beats.
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Earphone jack |
The bottom there is a microphone and a micro USB port to charge Gio and transfer data.
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Microphone and Micro-USB |
Screen
Galaxy Gio has a screen measuring 3.2 inch TFT LCD that is capacitive with 16 million colors and 320 x 480 pixel resolution. Gio screen brightness level is pretty good, even though the sun was still pretty. The resulting color was fairly good for tables of Gio-class smartphone, unless it has been compared head-to-head with top-end smartphones like the Galaxy S with its SuperAMOLED or Retina Display owned by iPhone 4. In addition, the viewing angle is also pretty good. You could say, in essence, the display including Galaxy Gio got okay.
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Galaxy Gio - Galaxy S - iPhone 4 |
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iPhone 4 - Galaxy Gio (direct sunlight) |
Because it uses a type of capacitive screen, it means Gio screen sensitive to touch and does not need emphasis when it is operating the touch screen. However, I feel sometimes the touch screen is too sensitive. Sometimes the fingers do not touch the screen (there are a range of about 1-2 mm longer), but was responding to a touch screen. This does not always happen, but if there is certainly enough to be annoying typos that result, either press the icon, etc.. In addition to I, a lot Gio any user on the forum suggested the same thing. I had seen similar things happen in the Galaxy S, so it seems this is the problem of Samsung touch screen that is too sensitive.
User Interface + Touchwiz
Galaxy Gio already using Android OS 2.3.6, aka Gingerbread launcher coupled with the typical Samsung TouchWiz. There are 4 icons on the dock, which will remain in place even though we are sliding-sliding homescreen and move to the screen the app drawer. We can have up to seven pages on the homescreen, which is certainly not necessary to the full content of all the shortcut app / widgets for games and will definitely slow down the performance of Gio. We can do a pinch on the homescreen to homescreen display all the available pages on our Gio (similar to HTC's Leap feature display output on Android HTC). From there we can move directly to the page that we want (just touch the desired course page), add new pages, delete the existing page, or move the page from one to another.
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Samsung Touchwiz - Edit mode |
Samsung TouchWiz widget launcher has an exclusive, ie Program Monitor widget. This widget displays the number of applications that are currently running, and click the widget to display the page Task Killer. With this widget you do not need to install the application and other widgets task killer, except wanted a more advanced feature again.
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Touchwiz task manager |
Notifications are one of the things I like about Android. Notifications on Gio has a shortcut to access on / off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Silent Mode, and Auto Rotation screen. Very useful! In addition, the Notifications page will feature a variety of notification that we have not seen / delete previously, such as notifications any unread SMS, no Mention of Twitter, no comment from Facebook, etc.
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Notifications bar |
Press the blue icon with 4 white box in which to open the page App Drawer. All applications and games that are installed can be found on this page. We can move through these icons, both on the Dock icon or App Drawer, by pressing the Menu button and select Edit. After that we just hold down and drag the icon that we want to move its position. In addition, the same as the homescreen, we can also pinch on page App Drawer to display the entire page on the App Drawer. This function is the same, namely to move the position of pages in the same way too, hold the page and then drag to the position / order we want.
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App drawer |
Gio lockscreen page by default only shows the clock, calendar, name of the service that we use, as well as the percentage of battery notification Gio, when the next alarm will turn on (if you have previously set alarm), and two slider to unlock and download Gio Gio silent. Slide left slide to the right we can to unlock Gio while we can slide on the right slide to the left to go to Silent mode. In Settings you can also provide the pattern for unlocking lockscreen.
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Normal lockscreen - Pattern lock |
Keyboard
By default, Gio has 2 keyboard, the Samsung Keypad and Swype. Yes, Gio can use Swype. Keypad for Samsung itself includes pretty good, especially there that we can use emoticons. However, since the screen is only 3.2 inches Galaxy Gio is classified as small for our large fingers, probably will find it difficult to use. For that we can use the Swype keyboard or other keyboard in the Android Market as Smart Keyboard and Thumb Keyboard. To replace the keyboard, first make sure the keyboard is already installed and checked in Settings. Then, click and hold on the text input field to appear a few options. Select Input Method, and select the keyboard you want to use.
Gallery
Gio uses standard with Gingerbread Gallery, with a nice 3D effect and a nice transition effects. Application Gallery will automatically find and display the photographs and video contained on the SD Card, no matter where the location of the folder. Gio already support multi-touch, so we can pinch to zoom-in and zoom-out image. In addition to pinch, you can zoom by double tap or press the + / - is provided.
conclusion
I have been using this for a month or Galaxy Gio. And overall, the performance given by Gio is approximately equivalent to the price that we are redeemed. The processor is 800 MHz but sometimes still rather lag in operation. It may also be affected by the size of RAM available. In addition to RAM, Phone memory full very quickly as well, especially for the customization of the widget so it feels very limited Galaxy Gio. SD Card luggage was still too slow. For the multimedia performance on the field practically does not field Gio, because of poor results and lack of video recording video files that can diplay by Gio (without installing an application video player). For superior value, in addition to price, Gio also has a great screen quality, full connectivity, and can be a good choice for those who want to try Android for the first time. Now we just hope that there are bugs in the Gio can be resolved in the next firmware update.