Samsung Galaxy Apollo i5800 review

Galaxy S style on an entry-level budget

Samsung Galaxy Apollo
The definitive Samsung Galaxy Apollo Review

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The Galaxy Apollo's browser is the regular Android 2.1 device, which features many, many usability tweaks and updates over past WebKit browsers. And past WebKit browsers have been great, the perfect model of simplicity ideally suited to mobile use.

Samsung galaxy apollo

The screen layout is uncluttered, giving you maximum browsing real estate, with only an address bar and icon to bring up your bookmarks and history beside it visible on the browser window. Everything else is shuffled out to the Menu screens.

The copying and pasting tools, which were so complex as to be virtually non-existent in previous Android versions, are updated and very welcome here, with the option to copy text to the clipboard, share URLs via email or social tools.

Long-pressing on a URL in a web page enables you to bookmark it, open it in a new tab, share it or copy the URL to the clipboard for later use.

Samsung galaxy apollo

The browser also integrates RSS support, with any sites that offer a feed pinging up an icon and "Add RSS feeds" menu option, which will automatically copy across RSS data to your Google Reader account for easy aggregation.

Oh, and there's multi-touch for page zooming, just as there was in the Samsung Galaxy S. Scrolling and resizing isn't lighting fast and can grind to a halt occasionally, but slowdown is a rare enough event not to put you of the idea.

Switching screen orientation for portrait to landscape is quick, with pages redrawing themselves virtually instantly.

Samsung galaxy apollo

To add a bit more usability to the browser, you're able to select the default text size and page zoom, turn off image loading if you're worried about sailing through this month's data allowance, disable JavaScript, and, of course, delete all your internet history and cookies to cover any tracks you may have left.

Despite all the popular and well-reported alternate browsers out there, the standard Android WebKit one remains the best. And that's what you get on the Apollo.