Samsung Captivate Glide review: Thumbs ready

User interface: Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and TouchWiz 4.0

There are absolutely no surprises in the software section of the Samsung Captivate Glide. The smartphone comes with the extremely familiar Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, dressed in Samsung’s latest TouchWiz launcher.

We have prepared a video of the Captivate Glide in action for you. Check it out below:

The lock screen can be removed by swiping in any direction. The cool feature where missed events (messages, calls etc) get their own unlock patterns is here too.

The lockscreen can be removed by swiping in any direction

The homescreen got plenty of tweaks too. You get rectangular design for the widgets and a lot of functionality. The process of adding widgets is visually enhanced too with attractive transition effects.

Being a QWERTY device, the Samsung Captivate Glide will see a lot of action in landscape mode as well. Here, the homescreen layout changes a bit – the four docked icons move from its bottom to the left side.

The homescreen

Editing the homescreen panes is business as usual – you pinch zoom-out to display an aggregate view of all panes, which you can then easily rearrange, delete or add.

Editing the homescreen

Some of the proprietary Samsung widgets allow you to edit them directly on the homescreen. We find this feature to be particularly neat.

Editing a widget directly on the homescreen

The numbered dots that identify the homescreen panels serve as a scroll bar too. A press and hold on the dots lets you scroll sideways through the resized images of the available homescreen panes in one short go rather than with several swipes.

Scrolling between homescreens looks great

The app launcher is improved as well. You can now create folders inside it (though given that folders are enabled on the homescreen we don’t see much use for that here).

The app launcher

Creating folders is pretty easy stuff – in edit mode you drag the icons you want over to a blank folder icon at the bottom of the screen. Then you drag the folder to the screen on which you want it to be placed and pick a name for it.

Creating a new folder

The notification area has been slightly redesigned in TouchWiz 4, but there aren’t any major changes to functionality there.

The notification area

The task manager, which Samsung has preinstalled, offers a lot of functionality. With 1GB or RAM and with the Gingerbread policy of keeping resource-hungry background processes in check, we are not sure you will need to enter the task manager all that often, but it doesn’t hurt having it. It also comes with a handy widget which shows you the number of active applications straight on your homescreen.

The task manager and its widget

Being a proper dual-core device, the Samsung Captivate Glide offered silky smooth OS experience. We are now about to take a closer look into the NVIDIA Tegra 2 performance credentials.

CPU performance: NVIDIA Tegra 2 is up to snuff

The NVIDIA made CPU in the Samsung Captivate Glide is a sharp departure from the usual silicon suspects in the dual-core Samsung devices. Still, we found its performance to be more than acceptable, when it benchmarked it. The results are below.

Antutu • Quadrant • Pi • Linpack

Things are could have been better in the browser benchmark performance though. The Vellamo score of the Captivate Glide came out quite average.

Vellamo benchmark

By now, we all know that the synthetic benchmark scores often have little reference to the actual user experience. The same goes for the Samsung Captivate Glide. The device was practically lag-free – it handled everything we threw its way with ease.