Samsung Epic 4G Touch review

4G comes to a phone that could beat the Samsung Galaxy S2

Samsung Epic 4G Touch review
The definitive Samsung Epic 4G Touch review

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The Epic 4G Touch has a 1800mAh battery, with talk time matching what you will find on other Android smartphones - about nine hours of constant use for phone calls, and all day (about 14 hours) of casual use for web browsing, checking email and playing games. Samsung rates the handset's battery life for 10.5 days of standby time.



Samsung epic 4g touch review

Our experience with the phone is that it lasts all day if you use it only for occasional calling, running apps and checking the web. However, if you use the phone for watching videos and playing music, the battery life goes down faster than you will find on an Apple iPhone 4, but slower than the iPhone 4S.

In our tests, playing videos and music, with the 4G service enabled, the Epic 4G only lasted for about six hours.

The Samsung Epic 4G Touch supports all of the common wireless standards: 802.11n, Bluetooth and GPS.

There's an app called Sprint Hotspot that enables you to share the 4G connection with five users. We prefer this hotspot app to the way this feature works on some Android smartphones, where you have to wade through a series of options in the Settings area of the phone to enable the hotspot.



Samsung epic 4g touch review

There's no DLNA app on the phone, but you can share media using the AllShare service, which runs as an app on the phone and as a desktop app.

To add media, you can either load files onto microSD cards, connect over USB or share using AllShare. Samsung also offers the Kies desktop app for adding files. This tool will automatically format content for the best playback on the handset.



John Brandon
Contributor

John Brandon has covered gadgets and cars for the past 12 years having published over 12,000 articles and tested nearly 8,000 products. He's nothing if not prolific. Before starting his writing career, he led an Information Design practice at a large consumer electronics retailer in the US. His hobbies include deep sea exploration, complaining about the weather, and engineering a vast multiverse conspiracy.