Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 review: Walking tall

Flagship-grade connectivity

The Mega 6.3 may have mostly midrange specs, but Samsung didn't skimp on the connectivity features. The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 has the basic quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G connectivity, plus LTE in some markets.

The phablet has Wi-Fi support which includes a/b/g/n/ac, with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz band compatibility. The 802.11ac standard is the newest and fastest form of Wi-Fi available. There's also the low-power Bluetooth 4.0 on board.

The Galaxy Mega 6.3 allows you to share all sorts of media via NFC by simply touching the Mega and other later-generation Galaxy devices back-to-back. You can share with other NFC devices as well, but functionality is limited to what is provided by the stock Android Beam.

The AllShare DLNA functionality, which used to be a standalone application, is now more tightly integrated into the respective Samsung applications. To share or access content on nearby DLNA-enabled devices, you do this directly from the My Video app and the Music Player.

There's also an IR-port, which allows you to control various TV's and other devices using Samsung's WatchON app, which we'll cover below.

And finally, for wired connectivity we have the MHL port. By all appearances it is a normal microUSB port and works as one (a charger port as well). But the MHL port enables video output by using a MHL-to-HDMI dongle. There isn't one included in the retail box and those can be hard to come by.

Once you plug the dongle into the phone you also need to plug a charger into the additional microUSB port on the dongle and the Galaxy Mega's screen will be mirrored on the TV.

The MHL port has yet another feature - it features USB On-The-Go. You'll need an adapter for that too (there isn't one in the box) but this one is fairly straightforward - you plug it into the Galaxy Mega 6.3 and plug a standard USB cable on the other end.

Web browser on a near tablet-size screen

The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 has a large enough screen to rival 7" tablets in terms of comfortable web browsing. The pixel density of the screen isn't very high, but that only matters if you like reading text at low zoom levels (it gets fuzzy).

Browsing GSMArena.com on the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3

The browser supports both double tap and pinch zooming along with the two-finger tilt zoom. There are niceties such as multiple tabs, incognito tabs, text reflow, find on page and so on. You can also tell the browser to request the desktop version of web pages if you don't want to fiddle with mobile page design for the smaller ~4" screens.

Page options and settings • tabs

The Brightness and Colors option gives you four different presets to adjust the display according to your preferences. Automatic brightness is an option, too, and works only within the browser.

Air View and Smart Stay both work in the browser, the first of which lets you simply hover your finger over a web element and it will act as if a mouse cursor was over it instead, which is great for websites not optimized for mobile devices.

The web browser also works nicely with Multi-window and there's a translate option in case you come across a website in a language you don't speak.

Flash cannot be enabled even in the stock Android browser as support for plug-ins has been dropped.

S Apps and more

The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 features a wide array of advanced features and applications out of the box.

One of the coolest apps is called Group Play. It shares various multimedia across multiple devices in the same room, but unlike DLNA it's interactive.

Group Play

One use case is to play a music track on the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 and use multiple phones as speakers. You can pick the role of each phone (e.g. left channel, right, etc.) all the way up to surround sound. This way you can control the music on one phone but use the loudspeakers of all.

Multiple phones can turn into a multi-channel audio system

Of course, the other phones will need to support Group Play - the phones communicate over Wi-Fi (your Mega 6.3 becomes a hotspot that others connect to) and the pairing is done via NFC.

More useful are the options to share a picture or a document - you can have the same picture appear on everyone's phone and you can draw over it if you need to highlight a certain element of the image.

Sharing a photo and drawing over it

Finally, perhaps the coolest feature of Group Play is that it allows for multiplayer games to be played on several phones simultaneously. Of course, only supported games work.

Group Play enables multiplayer games

Moving on, there's Samsung Link, another way to share content between devices. Unlike Group Play, Samsung Link is intended for personal use. You can link the phone to a computer that is synced with Dropbox, SkyDrive or SugarSync and remotely access content on that device.

Samsung Link lets you access content from your computer remotely

S Translator will help travelers - it can translate between two languages with either typed text or speech recognition. It can read out the resulting translation too, if you don't think your Korean accent can cut it. S Translator supports all the widely-spoken languages - English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and, of course, Korean.

S Translator can be invaluable when traveling

This app can work together with Photo Reader, which employs Optical Character Recognition so you can just snap a photo of the text instead of having to type it in (which can be quite a challenge, imagine typing Chinese if you've never studied it).

Samsung WatchON is the primary app used with the built-in IR emitter on the top of the phone. The app starts out by asking your zip code and pulls up a number of TV service providers in that area.

WatchON has built-in TV guide integration

This is so that the app can offer you a TV guide with shows currently on or upcoming on the channels offered by the service provider. You can read a description of the show, check out its popularity in up/down votes (and vote yourself, of course) and comments. You can also set reminders for shows you don't want to miss.

Anyway, the key element of the app is the IR remote control functionality. The app can control TVs, DVD and Blu-ray players, streaming media players and air conditioners. Devices are organized by rooms.

Adding a new room and a new device

One thing we really liked about the app is that it knows some home setups are messy - some let you change channels with the TV remote, others require you to use the set-top box remote for that. Same for the audio, you might be using the TV to output the sound or an AV receiver. The app will ask about your setup and present a unified remote control interface even if you have multiple hardware remotes to control all the devices.