Retrospective review of Samsung Galaxy S Fascinate: my first Android phone

They all go through many “firsts” in their lives. You have your first day of school, the first time you ride a bicycle, your first kiss, your first job, etc. These important occasions often accompany us as the years go by and, in some cases, can help us become the person we finally turn out to be.

For some of us, there is another first one that we fondly remember: our first Android phone. Call it corny or nerdy if you like, but as someone who has had a love and passion for the platform for over a decade, remembering the initial device that started it all fills me with a warm sense of nostalgia. We’ve been reviewing many old Android devices and software versions lately in AC, and as such I thought now would be a good time to dig up my first Android phone and see how it is maintained through the eyes of 2020.

My first Android phone was the Samsung Galaxy S Fascinate, and I clearly remember the day my dad and I went to the Verizon store to buy new phones. We decided between him and the Motorola Droid 2, and finally we chose the Galaxy S for how good its Super AMOLED screen looked compared to the Droid. I used the phone for several years, and luckily I made the wise decision to keep it all this time later as a little technological keepsake.

It’s been a long time since I last turned on the phone, and the instant I did, the old-school Samsung startup sound brought me back to my childhood. So I started listening to all the bloops by touching literally anything on the screen, and I quickly remembered how far we’ve come in such a short period of time 😛.

Hardware

Let’s start with the Galaxy S Fascinate hardware first. The phone is made entirely of plastic and is absolutely insignificant by today’s standards. A 4-inch screen was seen as the norm in 2009, but in 2020, it makes the Fascinate look and feel like a toy. As previously mentioned, the 4-inch screen is a Super AMOLED panel and comes with a crisp 800 x 480 resolution.

You can easily make our individual pixels and the screen doesn’t get super bright, but outside of that point it’s pretty impressive how good it looks. Samsung’s early Galaxy S phones stood out for their AMOLED displays when much of the market still used LCDs, and that ability to make unmatched displays remains one of the company’s greatest strengths.

Beneath the screen are four capacitive navigation buttons, giving you shortcuts for Home, Back, Menu, and Search. In my opinion, this is probably one of the biggest changes Android has made in recent years.

The Home and Back buttons are very familiar to me and, as I mentioned in my Moto X article, they still work incredibly well even when my brain has become accustomed to gesture navigation. The Search and Menu buttons disappeared with the release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in 2011, and I have mixed feelings about them. Having a persistent shortcut to open the search app is pretty handy, but where most Android phones would use this to open Google, Verizon messed around with Microsoft to get the Fascinate button to open Bing. Leaving the most neglected search engine aside, there was value in being able to search for something on the Internet no matter what you were doing on your phone.

As for the Menu button, I am perfectly happy that it was killed when it was. In today’s Android apps, you can access all the features and settings by tapping different icons / buttons within the app. In the days of Android 2.1 to 2.3, many of these things were hidden behind the Menu button. Tap the button while on your home screen, you’ll get access to your wallpaper, system settings, and more. Tap it in the Messaging app, and you’ll get shortcuts to start a new message, search for your messages, or open the app’s settings. Some apps used the button, others didn’t, and it ended up being a confusing mess of knowing when you could press it and what it would give you access to.

Other parts of the Galaxy S Fascinate’s design also elude the time it was launched. There’s a micro-USB charging port that can be hidden with a flimsy plastic cover, a 3.5mm headphone jack, no selfie camera, a single rear camera, and a removable back plate that gives you access to the replaceable battery. by the user of 1,500 mAh. In a world where phones are now shipped with batteries as large as 5,000 mAh, it’s fun to look at such a small battery and think of how we praise it for its good endurance.

Outside of the screen and battery, almost every spec found on the Galaxy S Fascinate looks a bit silly given all the progress we’ve made. There’s a 1.0Ghz Cortex A8 single-core processor, 384MB of RAM, and 2GB of storage. As difficult as it is to believe, these were seen as front-line components.

As with its display, the Galaxy S Fascinate surprised me with how well it still works. The animations are edgy and don’t handle modern websites very well, but it does an excellent job of opening applications, navigating through the home pages, and navigating through the various setup menus. It is difficult to do much more since I cannot log in to my Google account, but the things that are present on the phone work well considering its age.

software

Samsung shipped the Galaxy S Fascinate with Android 2.1 Eclair and updated it to Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread. That’s the version I have on my unit, and it’s quite retrograde compared to Android 11 running on my Pixel 4 XL.

To put things nicely, Android 2.3 was rough. Multitasking didn’t exist, you couldn’t control app permissions at all, there was no brightness slider in Quick Settings and you couldn’t interact with notifications from notification tone the way you can today. You can find some charm, like the Samsung custom lock screen that saw you putting a puzzle piece to unlock the phone, but it’s mainly a bunch of rough edges and missing features that Google would be fixing over the years.

Seeing as this is a Samsung phone, that also means that we are dealing with TouchWiz. Samsung continues to heavily customize Android with One UI on phones like the Galaxy S20 and A51, but it feels mature and well thought out. TouchWiz, on the other hand, was like a cartoon Android version and radically changed many of the user interface elements. TouchWiz wasn’t really bad until the days of the Galaxy S4 and S5, but its influence on the Galaxy S Fascinate is still something to behold.

In any case, revisiting Android 2.3 gives me a much greater appreciation for Android in its current form. There are so many limitations on the S Fascinate that I have to actively think about how to do certain things, while everything works the way I expected with the beta version of Android 11 on my Pixel 4. Android was still very much in its infancy during the era of Gingerbread, which doesn’t offer a real visual identity and lacks many features that we expect in 2020.

As Jerry said in his editorial, Google no longer needs to reinvent the wheel every year. Android is at the point where you don’t need an annual revolution, just minor tweaks and changes here and there. It may seem boring compared to the jumps we made from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich and KitKat to Lollipop, but that’s because all the hard work has already been done. There was a lot of work to be done when the Galaxy S Fascinate was present, and that is instantly apparent in almost every aspect of its software.

We have come to long road

I had a lot of fun revisiting the Galaxy S Fascinate. It is no longer a viable option as a phone that you can use as a daily driver, but as a little piece of history, it is excellent. Using the phone is like stepping back in time when the mobile technology industry was in its infancy and with many milestones to achieve, and it gave me a great appreciation of how far we’ve come in a very short time.

The Android phones we have today are downright amazing compared to 2009, and the fact that we now call devices like the S20 and OnePlus 8 “boring” is further proof that we’ve received years and years of great devices. .

Now, I want to hear from you! What was your first Android phone? Do you have good memories with him? Do you still have it? Turn off in the comments below, and let’s fill all the nostalgia.

Moto X was one of the best Android phones – time to bring it back