Samsung Galaxy i7500 review

Will a new player help make Android even better?

TechRadar's Samsung i7500 Galaxy review
TechRadar's Samsung i7500 Galaxy review

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Here we come to the main failure point of the Samsung i7500 Galaxy – its battery life. There's a good chance this phone has the worst battery life of any handset we've ever had on test, which is utterly inexplicable when you consider it has one of the largest battery on the market at 1500mAh.

Couple that with the optimised (well, you'd assume it was) Android OS and the OLED screen drawing less power than its LCD counterpart, and we're jiggered if we can work out what's going on here.

The samsung i7500 galaxy

We managed to run the battery down in around three hours of moderately hard use. By that we mean Twidroid running in the background, Gmail, the music player and a fairly hard session on the internet. Not easy, granted, but most phones handle it with a third of the battery going at most.

But the Galaxy just looked at us snootily and switched itself off. And with even a medium to low use, we only got a day's charge out of it, which is ridiculous.

The only good thing is that it's likely to be a software fault, as there are many reasons to believe that it should have a class leading battery, not the opposite. If that's the case Samsung should divert all attention to this problem. It's that bad.

Organiser

At least the organisational functions on the i7500 Galaxy are decent, with Google Calendar a great experience. Fast synchronisation with the web calendar means you're always up to date, and it's easy to simply drag and create new events on the phone.

The samsung i7500 galaxy

You can choose a range of alerts for upcoming events on your G-calendar, which appear in the notification bar by default.

The samsung i7500 galaxy

The screen displays the information well, and you can choose a variety of views, such as day, week and month to manage your life. If you're someone who needs a calendar to use day to day for work or the like, this is an excellent option.

The samsung i7500 galaxy

Other software isn't so plentiful, with the calculator the only real other option in terms of organising your life.

The samsung i7500 galaxy

However, there is an alarm clock as well, which is functional enough and allows you to set multiple alarms for different days of the week. Although we suggest you instantly take it off the annoying beep-beep-beep sound that makes you want to curl up and die when it rouses you from your slumber.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.