We all know that Samsung isn't exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to smartphones. It has a wide range of handsets, spanning all price points and covering Android, Windows Phone and even its own Bada operating system.
Samsung has been in the rugged mobile phone arena before, although only with 'dumb' phones such as the Solid Extreme B2100. Now, though, Samsung seems to have finally noticed the success Motorola has had with its Defy andDefy+, and has decided to jump onto the bandwagon with a rugged handset of its own.
The result is the rather heavily named Samsung Galaxy S5690 Xcover Extreme, which you'll probably see referred to as either the Samsung Galaxy Xcover or the Samsung Galaxy Extreme. We're opting for the Samsung Galaxy Xcover for this review.
The Samsung Galaxy Xcover is IP67 certified, meaning it's able to survive under a meter of water for up to 30 minutes, and can withstand dust too. Clearly it needs to be well sealed to perform these feats. The sealing looks relatively subtle, but we'll test it later.
Both the headset slot on the top and the USB slot along the bottom are protected by hinged covers. The USB slot is also quite recessed, and we had trouble getting our usual 'one size fits all' connector to fit into the hole.
The power button on the right and the volume rocker on the left are fairly flush with the chassis, and presumably well protected underneath.
The backplate is held firm with a screw-type lock, and even when you release this you need to prise it away. There's a secondary seal around the battery for double protection. The Samsung Galaxy Xcover's screen, of course, is made from Gorilla Glass.
The handset is a somewhat chunky beast, measuring 121.5 x 65.9 x 11.95mm and weighing 135g. There is a lot of unused space above and below the screen that makes it seem a bit over-engineered, and the 3.65-inch screen looks a little lost.
Beneath the screen are three fairly large buttons for Home, Back and Menu. Yes, they're well sealed against water and dust, but this doesn't in any way affect their comfy feel under the fingers.
Look closely at the volume rocker, incidentally, and you'll see a torch icon. Hold this end of the rocker down and you can toggle the camera LED for use as a, well, as a torch.
Specs-wise, Samsung hasn't really pushed the boat out with the Galaxy Xcover. Android is version 2.3 Gingerbread. The 800MHz processor isn't what we'd call state of the art, and with just 150MB of free storage you'll need a microSD card almost immediately.
The camera is another letdown, offering just 3.1MP of shooting power.
Considering that Clove, who supplied our review sample, is selling the Samsung Galaxy Xcover for £226.80 SIM-free in the UK, then maybe these specs are to be expected. In the US, we found it priced at $385 SIM-free on Amazon.
There's also the usual GPS, Wi-Fi and HSDPA on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover.
Interface
There's nothing very unusual about the way the Samsung Galaxy Xcover works. The user interface is very familiar indeed, with TouchWiz sitting on top of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
That means that all the home screens have four shortcut icons at the bottom, taking you to Dialler, Contacts, Messaging and Apps. When you switch into the apps menu, for example, the four shortcuts remain, but the Apps shortcut is now replaced by one for the main Home screen.
You start out with three home screens, but if you hit the Home button then choose Edit you can add more, up to a total of seven. This Android 2.3 feature means you can customise the number of home screens to your own taste.
Meanwhile Samsung provides a reasonable range of apps, including Active Applications, which shows you when system resources are getting low and gives a quick link into the Task Manager to close any you don't need.
It also includes a neat weather app that links into AccuWeather for five-day forecasting.
Meanwhile, if you pull down the notification bar on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover, you can access connection settings and even switch the sound to vibration mode and disable automatic screen rotation. It's nothing we haven't seen before, but it is all good stuff.
One user interface aspect we really like is the message notification on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's lock screen. Just slide it to the left and the handset opens right up into the messaging area.
Contacts and Calling
The Samsung Galaxy Xcover supports Samsung's SNS services, which means it can bring in your social network contacts to one place.
Setting up accounts is easy, and you can tell the Android smartphone how often to check for updates.
And you can instruct the handset precisely what updates to check for.
Once you've set up Facebook and Twitter, the contacts area is populated and you can see everyone's little photo by their name, and whether they're a Facebook or Twitter contact.
You can easily search this list using the search box, and if you click through you can see people's contact details and history.
The other way of reaching out to your contacts, of course, is via the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's smart dialler. Call this up and start tapping out a name or number and matches are displayed. There isn't much space for the display, but a little number to the right of the only match that shows tells you how many there are, and tapping it gives you the full list.
In-call services are well thought out, with easy links to hold, the speaker and mute button and to go back to the dial pad.
Call volume on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover was good, although we'd have liked a bit more volume from the speaker, which seems under-powered.
As with TouchWiz, there's nothing here that we haven't seen before, but Samsung lays all the elements out well, and the feature that any phone must get right - calling - is well handled.
Messaging
The Samsung Galaxy Xcover handles your Facebook and Twitter contacts via its Social Hub, which is where it also handles SMS messages.
Initially this looks inviting, but in fact it doesn't mean there are integrated Twitter and Facebook apps on board. Tap either option and you're taken to the mobile web versions of each social network.
Worse than that, while we were automatically logged into our Facebook, the Samsung Galaxy Xcover had the cheek to ask us to log into our Twitter again. It's hardly a fully-integrated solution.
Moreover, there are no dedicated apps for Facebook or Twitter pre-installed. You can get both from the Android Market, of course, but their absence makes the Samsung Galaxy Xcover a fairly socially unaware handset out of the box.
To add a little insult to injury, we had a bit of a problem with sessions expiring and found we had to log in again quite frequently. If this were an ongoing problem with the Samsung Galaxy Xcover we'd be pretty annoyed, since the whole point of seamless social network integration is that it is seamless.
Moving on to SMS text messaging - the other thing the Social Hub handles - this is a rather more pleasant experience. Missed calls are listed here, as well as text messages. Click through to create a new SMS, and the screen offers smart dialling in its search box.
When it comes to typing messages, the keyboard lets things down a bit. You have to pop onto a second screen for punctuation and numbers.
It slows down the rush of fingers across the screen a little.
On the other hand, the threaded message view works well and gives you a reasonably lengthy view of an SMS chat.
The Samsung Galaxy Xcover offers Swype, but you can't turn it on and off from within the keyboard settings. It's in the general settings area under Locale and Text.
This is also where you can turn on and off predictive text and different keyboard types, including old fashioned numerical style keypads and handwriting recognition in portrait mode.
Of course there's email support too, and you can set up accounts very easily by adding in the standard information. It's nice that the keyboard offers '@' and '.com' shortcuts here for quick information entry.
Internet
The Samsung Galaxy Xcover has both Wi-Fi and 7.2Mbps HSDPA, so it ought to be able to cope well with web browsing in simple terms of downloading pages.
And it did, too. It took about 12 seconds to pull down and resolve the TechRadar home page over the network, which is nice going.
The 3.65-inch screen is just about big enough for comfortable web browsing, although its resolution, at 320 x 480 pixels, is some way behind what we'd expect from a higher-end smartphone these days. Still, when we did a double-tap to zoom in, web text was readable and not blocky at all.
Text reflowing isn't what it should be, though. A double-tap to zoom into a TechRadar story we wanted to read didn't result in good news.
We only really got to read without a lot of scrolling when we flipped into landscape mode. What you experience in everyday life may vary depending on the websites you read and how they're originally formatted, but we weren't too happy with what we found.
Moving on to take a look at how the Samsung Galaxy Xcover handled Flash, there was more disappointment. Its 800Mhz processor isn't up to the job, so embedded video was a bit of a no-go area.
On the other hand, there's a nice bookmarks area, which also offers your most visited sites and browsing history, enabling you to get around fairly quickly. To add a bookmark, you just tap a little icon to the right of the search box.
Camera
The camera on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover is something of a disappointment on paper. It shoots stills at just 3.1 megapixels, making it pretty much entry-level as far as today's smartphones are concerned.
The lens is slightly recessed, so it should be able to avoid getting scratched and buffeted by all the rough and tumble the phone is designed to take, and there's a flash.
The flash doesn't work well more than a few feet from your subject, however, and even then it's not great.
Shooting modes are fairly limited, but there is a panorama mode and alongside the usual sports, indoor and night modes there's a mode for photographing text.
Camera controls sit on the edges of the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's screen, where they are easy to find by touch. Because there's no shutter button, you can assign the menu key as a camera shutter, or use the on-screen button, which is just as easy.
WHITE SKY: You can see at a glance that the camera delivers only average quality photos. It can't cope with the sky in this photo, though the water and the bridge are OK, as is the greenery. Zoom in even a little bit and you notice the pixelation.
PANORAMA: Panorama mode stitches together eight photos, which are taken in sequence automatically as you pan. The result is a photo 2640 pixels wide x 400 pixels high. The stitch quality isn't too bad, and the process is fairly fast.
MODES: Moving through the standard Normal, Black and White, Sepia and Negative filters, you see again how badly the camera handles variance in light. The sky wasn't especially bright on our shooting days, either.
INDOORS: Indoors, the camera copes fairly well with average household lighting conditions. But don't try to take pictures as it gets darker.
| GENERAL | 2G Network | GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 |
|---|---|---|
| 3G Network | HSDPA 900 / 2100 | |
| Announced | 2011, August | |
| Status | Available. Released 2011, October |
| BODY | Dimensions | 121.5 x 65.9 x 12 mm |
|---|---|---|
| Weight | 100 g | |
| - Touch-sensitive controls |
| DISPLAY | Type | Capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors |
|---|---|---|
| Size | 320 x 480 pixels, 3.65 inches (~158 ppi pixel density) | |
| Multitouch | Yes | |
| Protection | Corning Gorilla Glass | |
| - TouchWiz UI |
| SOUND | Alert types | Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones |
|---|---|---|
| Loudspeaker | Yes | |
| 3.5mm jack | Yes | |
| - DNSe sound enhancement |
| MEMORY | Card slot | microSD, up to 32GB, buy memory |
|---|---|---|
| Internal | 150 MB storage, 512 MB RAM |
| DATA | GPRS | Class 12 (4+1/3+2/2+3/1+4 slots), 32 - 48 kbps |
|---|---|---|
| EDGE | Yes | |
| Speed | HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps | |
| WLAN | Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot | |
| Bluetooth | Yes, v3.0 with A2DP, EDR | |
| USB | Yes, v2.0 microUSB |
| CAMERA | Primary | 3.15 MP, 2048x1536 pixels, autofocus, LED flash |
|---|---|---|
| Features | Geo-tagging | |
| Video | Yes, VGA | |
| Secondary | No |
| FEATURES | OS | Android OS, v2.3 (Gingerbread) |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 800 MHz Marvell MG2 | |
| Sensors | Accelerometer, proximity, compass | |
| Messaging | SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, RSS | |
| Browser | WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML | |
| Radio | Stereo FM radio with RDS | |
| GPS | Yes, with A-GPS support | |
| Java | Yes, via Java MIDP emulator | |
| Colors | Gray | |
| - IP67 certified - dust and water proof (up to 1m for 30 mins) - Social networking integration - MP4/H.264/H.263 player - MP3/WAV/eAAC+ player - Organizer - Image/video editor - Document editor (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) - Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa integration - Voice memo/dial/commands - Predictive text input (Swype) |
| BATTERY | Standard battery, Li-Ion 1500 mAh | |
|---|---|---|
| Stand-by | (2G) / Up to 640 h (3G) | |
| Talk time | Up to 13 h 20 min (2G) / Up to 11 h (3G) |
| MISC | SAR US | 0.53 W/kg (head) 0.73 W/kg (body) |
|---|---|---|
| SAR EU | 0.58 W/kg (head) | |
| Price group |  |
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