Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G Review: Live TV and a High Price - ortiztaide1983

If you've of all time had the hankering to watch loaded TV on your smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G (son, what a mouthful) may be of interest to you. The Lightray, a $459 (every bit of August 21, 2012) LTE-compatible phone along MetroPCS's paid network, looks a lot like the Samsung Droid Buck, which we adage on Verizon right over a year ago. The resemblance isn't strictly aesthetic, however, American Samoa the Lightray also boasts similar internal specs to its older Verizon cousin. In a time when you can buy a dual-core earpiece for less than $300, information technology's hard to justify paying close to half a grand for what amounts to a year-honest-to-god phone.

Design

Aside from a hardly a minor differences in design—the Droid Charge has a slightly more pointed floor, while the Lightray has a small, 7-edge retractable TV antenna—the Lightray and the Droid Mission are pretty much the same phone. The front face of the Lightray consists in the main of a 4.3-inch 800-by-400-picture element Super AMOLED display, a 1.3-megapixel foremost-facing photographic camera, and corporal versions of the standard Android navigation buttons (Menu, Home, Back, Search) that we see on beautiful such every Android phone.

The left spinal column of the Lightray is where you'll obtain the volume cradle and the Micro-USB charging port, while the power button and MicroHDMI expansion slot reside on the opportune spine. On the back of the phone is an 8-megapixel tv camera with an LED flash, but I'll let the cat out of the bag more about that later. The back cover comes off to divulge a 1600mAh bombardment, and you consume easy approach to the SIM and MicroSD carte du jour slots.

Even though it's made of plastic for the most part, the Lightray feels well well-stacked. The phone is comfortable to hold, and fits easy in to the highest degree pants pockets. In my tests, each of the phone's buttons had clean the right amount of clickiness, save for the power button, which felt a tad too spongy.

Carrying into action and Specs

With a 1GHz single-essence processor advantageous 1GB of RAM, the Lightray is slightly outdated. Although the single-core processor provides comparatively lag-uncommitted performance, we are rapidly coming an era in which multicore phones are the norm. Developers wish write more and more apps to use this extra processing power, and soon you testament be special in the kinds of apps you can keep going a single-core phone. It's something to consider if you're hoping to keep this earpiece for two years Beaver State longer.

True with its aging specs, the Lightray runs games such as Angry Birds and Synagogue Run without much inconvenience oneself. In my tests, withal, after about 10 minutes of performin a gamey, the phone began to feel hot and the battery had born by about 10 percentage. If you plan to run a lot of apps on the Lightray, you may want to moot keeping a charger handy so that you don't mire without juice. We'll update this page once we've foot race the Lightray through our series of official PCWorld bombardment tests, but for right away I'd estimate that you can get around 4 to 5 hours of use from a single charge.

The Lightray can connect to MetroPCS's LTE network, which theoretically allows it to reach download speeds faster than what you climb on 3G. I pronounce "theoretically" because in my time with the phone, I never managed to reach download speeds quicker than 1 megabit per second in our San Francisco office. Using the FCC approved Ookla Speed Test app, I adage download speeds of just about 0.77 mbps and upload speeds of about 1.03 mbps.

While the Lightray's data speeds were disappointing, its call quality was level and clear, with no discernible static. Note, though, that this was in an area with excellent reception, and that call quality will motley depending happening where you live.

Software program

The Lightray runs Mechanical man 2.3 (Gingerbread), along with a version of Samsung's TouchWiz cover. I've always found TouchWiz to be overly cartoonish, but it does bring few useful features not saved in stock Android. One of my front-runner TouchWiz features is the ability to turn a device's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, profound, or network joining connected or off quickly, all from the notification bar.

Unfortunately, not all of the preloaded software on the Lightray is that useful. The MyExtras app, for example, sends ads to your notification bar and volition periodically indistinct the screen to display a bitty advertisement. It's incredibly plaguy, though fortunately the app can personify uninstalled. Several other "apps" are nothing to a higher degree bookmarks that take you to unique Web pages, though you can also uninstall them.

Amusement

The Lightray is the first phone in the US Government to use Dyle Moveable TV to allow you to watch live localised broadcast television. By pulling out the aforementioned TV antenna and launching the preloaded Dyle app, you tooshie browse localized channels and see what's performin.

When I tried the service here in San Francisco, I was surprised to see how advantageously it worked. Even in areas where I had picayune cell reception, the picture quality on the shows I watched was comparable to what a traditional TV transmitting aerial would offer. Occasionally the image would freeze or become extremely pixelated, but for the most start out it was an enjoyable experience to watch bad daytime TV during my lunch bust. The one drawback is that Dyle doesn't work everywhere, and then you'll want to consult the company's website to see if it's available in your area.

If you'd rather have your own media instead, the Lightray comes with a 16GB MicroSD card that you fire use to memory your music, videos, and photos.

Camera

The 8-megapixel camera along the Lightray works Sunday-go-to-meeting when taking photos in well-lit environments, and it should suffice for your unremarkable inevitably. Photos that I took in darker spaces came out importantly coarse-grained, so this in all probability International Relations and Security Network't the right telephone set if you frequently take pictures while you're at a bar OR any other dimly lit social hangout. The front-facing tv camera works well for video recording calls, but you probably won't want to use it to take pictures because of its poor select.

The Lightray can record picture in 720p, but the quality isn't anything to write nursing home almost. You'll tranquilize notice the occasional jelly effect when you go up the phone around while transcription, though in my tests the phone's microphone seemed well suited for picking up voices. It'll do for a Facebook OR YouTube video, but you probably won't want to use information technology to film your feature film-length opus.

Bottom Line

The Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G is essentially the Droid Charge with scarcely one Beaver State two new features and a so much high price tag. The phone's power to dramatic play live TV is nice, but I'm having a hard prison term recommending the Lightray when you backside get the unfastened Samsung Galaxy Link for considerably less. If you'rhenium set happening buying a smartphone on MetroPCS, check into the LG Connect 4G: Although it does come with a little of bloatware, at least information technology has LTE and more-modern specs.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460805/samsung_galaxy_s_lightray_4g_review_live_tv_and_a_high_price.html

Posted by: ortiztaide1983.blogspot.com

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