Samsung Captivate Glide review: Thumbs ready

Gallery and file browser are a familiar sight

The Samsung Captivate Glide uses the standard Android gallery. The gallery automatically locates the images and videos no matter where they are stored. It even imports the online photos from your Google Picasa web albums.

The standard Android gallery

Little about the Gallery should surprise you – aside from displaying full-res images and the addition of the two-finger tilt zoom, there’s nothing new really. And don’t you worry, the double tap and pinch zoom are still there.

Two-finger tilt zoom works much like the name suggests. You touch the screen with two fingers and s soon as you start tilting it, it will zoom in or out according to the tilting motion.

The My Files app is a simple to use but functional file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files via Bluetooth. My files will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can’t access the system drive).

The My Files app

TouchWiz-ed music player

The Samsung Captivate Glide uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung has enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.

The music player is great

The nice feature that allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search is also here. The handset also prompts you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album.

The video player is simple yet powerful

The video player offers a simple list-based interface. It displays all video files stored on the phone and you can sort them by name, date, type or size. The video player also remembers the last viewed position of the video, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. There’s 5.1 channel virtualization and subtitle support. You can change font size and adjust subtitles sync (adjust them back or forth a few seconds) but there’s no option to manually load subtitles, they have to have the same filename as the video file to load.

The video player has a simple interface but don’t let it fool you

The video player had absolutely no trouble with any of the files we threw at it – starting with WMV through AVI (DivX and XviD) and MP4 to MKV (H.264). Resolution wasn’t a problem either – the Samsung Captivate Glide played Full HD files just fine. Large files of over 2GB worked as well.

The 8MP camera does a good job

The Samsung Captivate Glide for AT&T comes with an 8MP auto-focus camera for photos of up to 3264 x 2448 pixel resolution. It comes with an LED flash but nothing in the way of lens protection or physical shutter key.

The interface looks pretty familiar with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut (which is a thumbnail of the last photo taken).

On the left you get several controls by default but the good news is that you can pick four shortcuts to put there – commonly used features need to be one tap away.

The camera interface can be tweaked to fit your needs

In terms of features, the Samsung Captivate Glide offers pretty much everything – touch focus, scene modes, face/blink/smile detection, effects, geotagging, digital image stabilization and manual controls for ISO, metering mode and so on. There are other features too; we’re only listing the most interesting ones.

The pictures from the device's camera cam out really good. There is plenty of detail to them; noise can be found only in the darker areas. See them below.

Samsung Captivate Glide Camera samples

The video camera tops out at 720p

Sadly, the camcorder of the Samsung Captivate Glide cannot capture full HD videos – you will have to make do with 720p ones. We cannot think of a logical reason for this occurrence – the device has plenty of horsepower to handle video recording in full HD.

The video camera interface is identical to the still camera one. You get the same customizable panel on the left for four shortcuts. The video camera can record video using the front facing camera too.

The video camera interface

The videos, captured by the Captivate Glide were of good quality. The camcorder however, tends to change focus while recording - a well known issue for all Samsung camera units.

Below is a 720p video, captured with Samsung Captivate Glide’s camcorder.

Also, here goes an untouched 720p video clip.