By Leo Stiles
We have to admit to being surprised by the recent flood of top quality phones from Samsung. After all, their first forays in to the industry did little to set the world on fire and in some cases were textbook examples of crapgadgets.
The funny thing about Samsung phones was that their user interfaces were just terrible while their hardware, in particular the phone display, was of such high quality that it always came as a shock when you fired them up and discovered that the phone had more in common with a Euro store toy than the shiny piece of technological goodness that the box promised.
Then along comes Google with their all-singing, all-dancing Android operating system and suddenly Samsung start delivering phones that manage to be genuine world beaters. To this end, Samsung have built up the Galaxy brand as their number one product line with each and every device in the range sporting Google’s robust OS.
So what happens when the company decides to shoehorn Android into a €99 phone? The answer is the Galaxy Europa, an incredibly cheap and powerful smartphone that delivers more bang for your buck than just about any phone we have ever used.
Hardware and Design.
The overall design of the Europa is pretty average and falls somewhere between a typical entry level handset from Samsung and the manufacturer’s excellent flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S. It’s a compact phone, measuring just 10 centimetres tall and sporting a 2.8 inch screen which is pretty damn small by smartphone standards. The handset is wrapped in a rather cheap feeling plastic case which didn’t give the greatest first impression.
Unusually for a smartphone, Samsung haven’t gone for a less-is-more approach to buttons and we have to say that this seems like a smart move as having used exclusively touch-screen based phones for a while now, we had almost forgotten just how useful a well placed button on a phone can be.
Much like the casing the Europa’s camera betrays its entry-level status, coming in at just 2 megapixels and there is no flash to speak of.
Memory wise, the phone relies on micro-SD cards. This isn’t great but the included 1GB card in the box goes some way towards making up for this. From a design perspective, there is no denying that the Europa is a fairly uninspiring beast, but as we discovered once we turned it on, beauty is only skin deep.
The phone boots up very fast, something that came as a bit of a surprise given its modest specs. The resolution of the screen might only be 240×320 but it looks reasonably sharp and the colours are vivid enough to make an impression.
A quick tap of our finger later and our pleasant surprise turned into genuine admiration as we realised just how responsive the screen was. Rather than the resistive touchscreens that are common on this category of phone, the Europa’s screen is fully capacitative and it an absolute pleasure to use.
The only bad thing we can say about the screen is that it does not support multi-touch gestures, a feature that if Samsung had managed to include would have made the Europa a genuinely viable alternative to phones that cost twice as much.
The audio capabilities of the phone were another surprise with the speakers pumping out sound loud and clear. There isn’t as much bass as you might like but that is big ask for any mobile device, let alone one that costs under €100.
Using the Phone
Making calls on the Europa is a decent enough experience with the handset delivering nice clean audio that was free from crackle or digital distortion. Samsung have wisely opted to make your contacts and the phone function a permanent feature of the screen rather than a movable app-based configuration.
Texting is a little more problematic and it’s here that the small screen size really makes itself known. There’s a virtual keyboard that doesn’t play well with average size hands and is downright hostile to larger digits. We’re sure part of the problem is acclimatising to the phone, but we would be lying if we said that texting on the Europa wasn’t a chore.
The rest of the interface is spot on and as intuitive as any other Android phone out there and Samsung should be congratulated for not trying to put too much of their own stamp on the operating system. As a result things run very smoothly.
One feature we just have to mention is the functions menu that is accessed by dragging the top edge of the screen down. Here, users can quickly toggle Wi-fi, Bluetooth, silent mode and vibrate functions on and off. This is exceptionally useful and something that not even an iPhone user has at their disposal.
Web browsing and e-mail.
Web pages load pretty quick and getting your mail is a doddle too but the size of the screen has a serious impact here and all but stops you from composing an email without wanting to throw the phone at a wall in frustration after a couple of hundred typos.
Internet browsing isn’t as affected but the lack of multi-touch makes getting around your favourite sites much more difficult than you might expect and the usual pinch to zoom gesture that has become second nature in mobile web browsing is sorely missed.
Apps
The Android marketplace is fully accessible from the phone and now that Ireland has access to paid apps, it’s much more useful. Navigation within the market is not quite what you would expect with apps crammed onto pages and pricing that seems to be all over the place.
On a more positive note, the apps market does seem to be offering more diversity than the App Store and it seems that without the oversight of a overzealous company like Apple there is a nice level of creativity in the apps.This has resulted in things like the excellent Tasker app; the sort of amazing application you will never see in the App Store.
To test the Europa, we downloaded mobile game phenomenon Angry Birds and we are happy to report that it plays just as well on the Europa as it does on other phones. That said, we doubt that the phone could handle some of the more high-end stuff being done on more luxurious handsets but then again, that sort of goes with the low budget territory.
Verdict
Samsung really have delivered a winner with this phone and the Europa demonstrates that good design and forward thinking features can overcome any budget limitations.
As a smartphone is will never quite manage to live up to the title with its undersized screen and poor camera, but everything else it does ensure that it comes really close.
Judged on its own terms and against similarly priced phones from LG and Nokia, the Europa is a champion and puts its competitors to shame. It proves that Android is a truly flexible operating system capable of supercharging the most modest of handsets. In short, the Samsung Europa is a mini marvel.
The Samsung Galaxy Europa is available from €99 on Meteor Pre-Pay
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