Samsung Captivate Glide review: Thumbs ready

Connectivity will overwhelm you with options

The Samsung Captivate Glide for AT&T starts off with the basics – quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and tri-band 3G. There’s HSPA+ with 21Mbps downlink and 5.76Mbps uplink too, which some carriers brand as “4G” even though it’s technically not.

Moving on, there’s Bluetooth 3.0 with High Speed, which promises transfer speeds up to 21Mbps. Wi-Fi Direct is a similar technology, which offers simple pairing of two devices but blazing speed.

The Wi-Fi support includes a/b/g/n versions.

The AllShare app allows you to stream content to and from different kind of devices (TV or computer). We didn’t give it a proper run for its money, but we guess it works over DLNA.

AllShare app

The web browser is excellent

While the interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed, the hardware specs of the Samsung Captivate Glide for AT&T allow great user experience. The sharp display with great colors makes reading a joy.

Browsing GSMArena.com on the AT&T Samsung Captivate Glide

The browser supports both double tap and pinch zooming along with the new two-finger tilt zoom. There are niceties such as multiple tabs, text reflow, find on page and so on. A neat trick is to pinch zoom out beyond the minimum – that opens up the tabs view.

Page options and settings

Samsung offers you a couple of Hubs

Hubs are not just for Windows Phone 7 – Samsung, at least, seems to think so. They’ve added two Hubs to their QWERTY offering.

The Social hub we’ve seen before – it combines you email accounts with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn) and IM accounts (Gtalk, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger) and shows all incoming messages as one list with handy shortcuts to reply, mark as favorite and so on. There’s filtering by message source too, to help manage the inflow of incoming updates.

The Social Hub

The Media Hub lets you buy or rent movies or TV shows. Its interface is neat and intuitive, while its setup will take you no time.

The Media Hub

There is an office editor for the overly productive

The Samsung Captivate Glide comes with Quickoffice preinstalled. It’s one of the most feature rich mobile editors we’ve seen. You can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and there’s a PDF viewer to boot.

Quickoffice

With a full-blown hardware QWERTY on board, one can get seriously productive with the office editor of the device.

Organizer has everything covered

The calendar has four different types of view: list, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The organizer centerpiece - the calendar

The list view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. It’s a very handy tool when you need to check your appointments for the next few days.

There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big enough and easy to hit.

The Samsung Captivate Glide features a decent alarm clock application which allows a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.

The Clock app and the alarm options

The Memo and Mini Diary are self-explanatory. The first app works with text only, while the Diary lets you also attach pictures.

The Memo and Mini Diary

There’s a YouTube app although it’s really irrelevant here. It cannot match the resolution the in-browser flash player can give you.