Samsung Exhibit II 4G review: Second time around

Gallery and file browsers are at your service

The Samsung Exhibit II 4G 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 as 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

The usual TouchWiz music player

The Samsung Exhibit II 4G 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 capable as always

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 deceive you

The camera is nice for a snapper

The Samsung Exhibit II comes with a 3.2MP camera with an LED flash. Its 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).

The camera interface

It is needless to say that 3.2MP resolution is far from impressive these days. But truth be told, we've seen 5 megapixel cameras deliver poorer results than those of the Exhibit II 4G. The images produced by the phone are actually really nice for a 3MP snapper.

We have prepared several samples for you. See them below.

Video recording can, again, turn out a nice VGA clip

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

The video camera interface

The VGA resolution of the camera sounds inadequate for a 2011/2012 smartphone, but the Exhibit II 4G is a budget device. And the VGA videos turn out really nice contrary to what we've seen on other budget droids back in Europe.

Here goes an untouched VGA video clip.