Physical Features
The Epic 4G is a surprisingly thin slider phone at 4.9 by 3.5 by .56 inches (HWD) and 5.46 ounces. Yes, it's a lot thicker than the HTC EVO 4G, but the screen slides to the side to reveal a rather large QWERTY keyboard, so give the Epic a break. Otherwise, the phone is about the same size as the EVO, although its 4-inch screen is smaller than the EVO's 4.3-inch panel (but the same 800-by-480 resolution.) The Epic's screen uses Samsung's new Super AMOLED technology, which offers the same gorgeous, hypersaturated colors and low power consumption as earlier AMOLED screens but with much better visibility in sunlight.
The Epic 4G is a surprisingly thin slider phone at 4.9 by 3.5 by .56 inches (HWD) and 5.46 ounces. Yes, it's a lot thicker than the HTC EVO 4G, but the screen slides to the side to reveal a rather large QWERTY keyboard, so give the Epic a break. Otherwise, the phone is about the same size as the EVO, although its 4-inch screen is smaller than the EVO's 4.3-inch panel (but the same 800-by-480 resolution.) The Epic's screen uses Samsung's new Super AMOLED technology, which offers the same gorgeous, hypersaturated colors and low power consumption as earlier AMOLED screens but with much better visibility in sunlight.
The Epic 4G will live or die on the strength of its keyboard; I'm happy to say it will live. This is an excellent keyboard. It has five rows, including a dedicated number row, and physical keys for Android's home, back, menu, and search functions. The keys are slightly raised, slightly domed, and nicely separated. You can't use it one-handed like you can a BlackBerry or Palm Pre ($299.99-549.99, ), but that's true with all phones in this form factor.
Almost passive-aggressively, Samsung seems to have sabotaged the four important touch buttons below the screen. When they're not lit up, they disappear and become impossible to press; you have to tap on the screen to light them up while you're in the middle of doing something else. Adding insult to injury, sometimes the buttons don't respond even when they're lit up, which is very frustrating. I tapped a lot.
If you don't want to use the excellent physical keyboard, the Epic comes with six possible virtual keyboards. There's the Swype text-entry method, which lets you drag your finger across the screen without lifting it, as well as Samsung's and Google's portrait and landscape mode keyboards.
Phone, 3G, and 4G Performance
The Epic 4G is a perfectly good phone, and probably slightly better than the EVO. It connected one more call than the EVO out of ten in our weak-signal test. The phone's earpiece and speakerphone are both loud enough for any use, and while sound in the earpiece is a touch muffled, that's only comparing it to super-duper-sharp phones like the Motorola Droid X ($199.99-569.99, ). Transmissions have a problem with wind noise, and transmissions from the speakerphone sound a bit tinny, but really, this one is fine. The Epic 4G has Bluetooth 3.0 (which offers no real consumer advantages over version 2.1) and connected to our Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, ) Bluetooth headset without trouble. But while the Epic 4G has voice commands, they don't work over Bluetooth. I have to re-test battery life, but the phone got enough talk time that battery shouldn't sway your purchase either way.
The Epic 4G is famously Sprint's second "4G" phone, which means it can connect to the Internet using Clearwire's WiMAX network in a few dozen cities. It doesn't work anywhere within 100 miles of New York City, for instance, so I had to shack up in Philadelphia to test it. That's better than last year, though, when I had to go all the way to Baltimore.
WiMAX seems to have trouble penetrating buildings; when I went indoors, the signal dropped much more quickly than Sprint's quite robust 3G signal. That said, when WiMAX worked, it worked: I got speeds up to 6.6 megabits down on the Epic 4G, which is about six times the average speed of Sprint's 3G network. (Uploads are capped at 1 megabit/second.) This drains the battery, so it's best to use 4G as a "turbo boost" when you need the extra speed. If you don't have 4G around, the Epic will connect to 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi networks as well. The phone both tethers to PCs via USB as a modem and works as a Wi-FI hotspot for up to five devices. 4G is also unlimited. There's no data cap on WiMAX use, at least for now.
You'll pay $10 extra a month for the 4G service whether or not you can use it —you can't buy the Epic without the 4G supplement. But none of these gripes change the fact that 4G is the future, and if you're going to be stuck with a phone for the next 18 months, you might as well future-proof it. Clearwire positively insists that they'll cover 120 million Americans by the end of the year.
Android Software
We've been down this road before: The Epic 4G is a Galaxy S phone like the Samsung Captivate ($199.99-499.99, ) for AT&T and the Samsung Vibrant ($199.99-499.99, ) for T-Mobile. To wit, it's an Android 2.1 device with a set of mostly-useful Samsung extensions, such as built-in Twitter and Facebook integration through Social Hub; Buddies Now, a sort of visual Rolodex of your favorite people and their status updates; Daily Briefing, a combined news/weather app; and a much-improved contact book which lets you swipe right and left to check your friends' status updates or contact them by various means. It will handle any e-mail account you have coming, including Exchange, and it integrates Exchange, Google, and Facebook events onto one calendar. Samsung's widgets and social networking integration are similar to, and slightly inferior to, HTC's—but don't let that sway your decision if you're drawn to the Epic for its keyboard.
The software is running on a 1-GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor, which generally scored faster on our benchmarks than the Qualcomm Snapdragon in HTC's phones and roughly on par with the TI OMAP in Motorola's latest Verizon devices. Hummingbird really sets itself apart on graphics performance, though—on the industry-standard Neocore graphics benchmark, Samsung's Galaxy S phones scored far and away better than all other Android devices. That means this is a better gaming machine than the EVO.
Sprint adds their Nascar and NFL apps, as well as Sprint Navigation and Sprint TV. Sprint TV is an unsung gem; it has clips and full episodes from a wide range of TV networks, and many of them come free with your service plan. If you're connected to 4G, videos become sharp and clear, although they occasionally lose (and then re-gain) lip sync.
One painful omission is YouTube HQ, which Sprint made such a big deal about when they introduced the EVO. On the Epic, the YouTube app is unwatchable; it's a hideous mush of blocky compression. I don't understand why Sprint didn't give the Epic the same sharp YouTube video quality that the EVO has.
I hope it isn't because of the upcoming Samsung Media Hub, a movies-and-TV store which I got to see a brief demo of, and which will be coming to the Epic in a few weeks. Media Hub is a typical expensive, movie-studio-approved video store, with $3/day rentals and $12 to 20 movie purchases. It doesn't fulfill that "I want to watch free video" desire that YouTube so neatly satiates.
Sprint says the Epic will get an Android 2.2 upgrade "soon." That will bring voice dialing over Bluetooth and supposedly better browser performance, though I didn't find noticeably different page load times when I upgraded the Evo from 2.1 to 2.2.
I'm also happy to say the Epic 4G has no problems with GPS or AGPS fixes. My location appeared quickly in Google Maps Navigation and Sprint Navigation.
Multimedia
The Epic 4G is an excellent media phone—better than the EVO. Why, you say, when the EVO has a bigger screen? It's all about codecs. The Epic 4G plays an unusually wide array of video files, including XVID, DIVX, and H.264 with AAC audio, including many files in 720p HD format. That means fewer videos will require re-encoding compared to other phones. Video looks sharp and plays clearly on the screen, including over Bluetooth stereo headphones. While there's no HDMI out to play video on a TV, Samsung said they'll sell an analog TV-out cable (but didn't give me any further details.)
Music also performs well here, with the Epic supporting a wide range of formats including MP3, WMA, OGG, and AAC. The phone has about 450MB of free internal memory and comes with a 16GB microSD card that fits in a slot under the back cover. Fortunately, you don't have to remove the battery to get at the memory slot.
To get your media onto the phone, you'll probably drag and drop. The Epic 4G, unlike the Vibrant and Captivate, doesn't work with Windows Media Player or with Samsung's Kies syncing software. Fortunately, the third-party program doubleTwist (Free, ) will work to sync media to the Epic 4G—and with the phone's excellent codec support, you're much less likely to encounter unwatchable files than on other phones.
The Epic 4G's 5-megapixel camera, with a weak LED flash, is a middling example of the breed. It has extremely little shutter delay, which is good. But anything below full daylight tends to make photos become a bit soft. In video mode, the Epic 4G records smooth but overexposed 720p HD videos. That said, the Epic's 5-megapixel camera provides a better experience than the EVO's 8-megapixel model did, as the EVO had even worse problems with low-light blur and jerky HD videos.
The phone also has a front-facing, VGA resolution camera that's in theory for video calling, but like all non-iPhone front-facing cameras we consider it useless. Qik and Fring, the two video calling programs for Android, are both unreservedly awful. On the other hand, now you have that video-calling camera in case the software companies get their acts together.
Conclusions
At $349 minus a $100 mail-in rebate (or $249 at Radio Shack and Best Buy), the Epic 4G costs $50 more than the HTC EVO 4G for Sprint. But since the two-year service contract for either phone costs at least $1,920, a $50 difference in price actually doesn't matter much. Avid mobile gamers and people with a lot of their own video files will want to go with the Epic for its powerful Hummingbird GPU and great codec support; YouTube aficionados will go with the EVO. The real difference is the keyboard. If you want to type your messages, surf the Web, and play your games with little buttons that go "click," the Epic is your phone.
Phone, 3G, and 4G Performance
The Epic 4G is a perfectly good phone, and probably slightly better than the EVO. It connected one more call than the EVO out of ten in our weak-signal test. The phone's earpiece and speakerphone are both loud enough for any use, and while sound in the earpiece is a touch muffled, that's only comparing it to super-duper-sharp phones like the Motorola Droid X ($199.99-569.99, ). Transmissions have a problem with wind noise, and transmissions from the speakerphone sound a bit tinny, but really, this one is fine. The Epic 4G has Bluetooth 3.0 (which offers no real consumer advantages over version 2.1) and connected to our Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, ) Bluetooth headset without trouble. But while the Epic 4G has voice commands, they don't work over Bluetooth. I have to re-test battery life, but the phone got enough talk time that battery shouldn't sway your purchase either way.
The Epic 4G is famously Sprint's second "4G" phone, which means it can connect to the Internet using Clearwire's WiMAX network in a few dozen cities. It doesn't work anywhere within 100 miles of New York City, for instance, so I had to shack up in Philadelphia to test it. That's better than last year, though, when I had to go all the way to Baltimore.
WiMAX seems to have trouble penetrating buildings; when I went indoors, the signal dropped much more quickly than Sprint's quite robust 3G signal. That said, when WiMAX worked, it worked: I got speeds up to 6.6 megabits down on the Epic 4G, which is about six times the average speed of Sprint's 3G network. (Uploads are capped at 1 megabit/second.) This drains the battery, so it's best to use 4G as a "turbo boost" when you need the extra speed. If you don't have 4G around, the Epic will connect to 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi networks as well. The phone both tethers to PCs via USB as a modem and works as a Wi-FI hotspot for up to five devices. 4G is also unlimited. There's no data cap on WiMAX use, at least for now.
You'll pay $10 extra a month for the 4G service whether or not you can use it —you can't buy the Epic without the 4G supplement. But none of these gripes change the fact that 4G is the future, and if you're going to be stuck with a phone for the next 18 months, you might as well future-proof it. Clearwire positively insists that they'll cover 120 million Americans by the end of the year.
Android Software
We've been down this road before: The Epic 4G is a Galaxy S phone like the Samsung Captivate ($199.99-499.99, ) for AT&T and the Samsung Vibrant ($199.99-499.99, ) for T-Mobile. To wit, it's an Android 2.1 device with a set of mostly-useful Samsung extensions, such as built-in Twitter and Facebook integration through Social Hub; Buddies Now, a sort of visual Rolodex of your favorite people and their status updates; Daily Briefing, a combined news/weather app; and a much-improved contact book which lets you swipe right and left to check your friends' status updates or contact them by various means. It will handle any e-mail account you have coming, including Exchange, and it integrates Exchange, Google, and Facebook events onto one calendar. Samsung's widgets and social networking integration are similar to, and slightly inferior to, HTC's—but don't let that sway your decision if you're drawn to the Epic for its keyboard.
The software is running on a 1-GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor, which generally scored faster on our benchmarks than the Qualcomm Snapdragon in HTC's phones and roughly on par with the TI OMAP in Motorola's latest Verizon devices. Hummingbird really sets itself apart on graphics performance, though—on the industry-standard Neocore graphics benchmark, Samsung's Galaxy S phones scored far and away better than all other Android devices. That means this is a better gaming machine than the EVO.
Sprint adds their Nascar and NFL apps, as well as Sprint Navigation and Sprint TV. Sprint TV is an unsung gem; it has clips and full episodes from a wide range of TV networks, and many of them come free with your service plan. If you're connected to 4G, videos become sharp and clear, although they occasionally lose (and then re-gain) lip sync.
One painful omission is YouTube HQ, which Sprint made such a big deal about when they introduced the EVO. On the Epic, the YouTube app is unwatchable; it's a hideous mush of blocky compression. I don't understand why Sprint didn't give the Epic the same sharp YouTube video quality that the EVO has.
I hope it isn't because of the upcoming Samsung Media Hub, a movies-and-TV store which I got to see a brief demo of, and which will be coming to the Epic in a few weeks. Media Hub is a typical expensive, movie-studio-approved video store, with $3/day rentals and $12 to 20 movie purchases. It doesn't fulfill that "I want to watch free video" desire that YouTube so neatly satiates.
Sprint says the Epic will get an Android 2.2 upgrade "soon." That will bring voice dialing over Bluetooth and supposedly better browser performance, though I didn't find noticeably different page load times when I upgraded the Evo from 2.1 to 2.2.
I'm also happy to say the Epic 4G has no problems with GPS or AGPS fixes. My location appeared quickly in Google Maps Navigation and Sprint Navigation.
Multimedia
The Epic 4G is an excellent media phone—better than the EVO. Why, you say, when the EVO has a bigger screen? It's all about codecs. The Epic 4G plays an unusually wide array of video files, including XVID, DIVX, and H.264 with AAC audio, including many files in 720p HD format. That means fewer videos will require re-encoding compared to other phones. Video looks sharp and plays clearly on the screen, including over Bluetooth stereo headphones. While there's no HDMI out to play video on a TV, Samsung said they'll sell an analog TV-out cable (but didn't give me any further details.)
Music also performs well here, with the Epic supporting a wide range of formats including MP3, WMA, OGG, and AAC. The phone has about 450MB of free internal memory and comes with a 16GB microSD card that fits in a slot under the back cover. Fortunately, you don't have to remove the battery to get at the memory slot.
To get your media onto the phone, you'll probably drag and drop. The Epic 4G, unlike the Vibrant and Captivate, doesn't work with Windows Media Player or with Samsung's Kies syncing software. Fortunately, the third-party program doubleTwist (Free, ) will work to sync media to the Epic 4G—and with the phone's excellent codec support, you're much less likely to encounter unwatchable files than on other phones.
The Epic 4G's 5-megapixel camera, with a weak LED flash, is a middling example of the breed. It has extremely little shutter delay, which is good. But anything below full daylight tends to make photos become a bit soft. In video mode, the Epic 4G records smooth but overexposed 720p HD videos. That said, the Epic's 5-megapixel camera provides a better experience than the EVO's 8-megapixel model did, as the EVO had even worse problems with low-light blur and jerky HD videos.
The phone also has a front-facing, VGA resolution camera that's in theory for video calling, but like all non-iPhone front-facing cameras we consider it useless. Qik and Fring, the two video calling programs for Android, are both unreservedly awful. On the other hand, now you have that video-calling camera in case the software companies get their acts together.
Conclusions
At $349 minus a $100 mail-in rebate (or $249 at Radio Shack and Best Buy), the Epic 4G costs $50 more than the HTC EVO 4G for Sprint. But since the two-year service contract for either phone costs at least $1,920, a $50 difference in price actually doesn't matter much. Avid mobile gamers and people with a lot of their own video files will want to go with the Epic for its powerful Hummingbird GPU and great codec support; YouTube aficionados will go with the EVO. The real difference is the keyboard. If you want to type your messages, surf the Web, and play your games with little buttons that go "click," the Epic is your phone.
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