Samsung Exhibit II 4G review: Second time around

Connectivity is abundant with options

The Samsung Exhibit II for T-Mobile starts off with the basics – quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and quad-band 3G. There’s HSPA+ with 14.4 Mbps downlink and 5.76Mbps uplink too, which T-Mobile brands as “4G” even though it’s technically not.

Moving on, there’s Bluetooth 3.0 and Wi-Fi support, which includes a/b/g/n protocols.

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 sweet

The interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed. Its user experience is, as always, flawless.

Browsing GSMArena.com on the Samsung Exhibit II

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, and 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

There are a couple of Samsung Hubs preinstalled

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

You are fully covered in the office department

The Samsung Exhibit II for T-Mobile comes with the Polaris Office preinstalled, which seems to be getting rather popular with hardware manufacturers lately. And for good reason, we guess – 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 as well. The app allows you to search for your office files just like with a file explorer.

Polaris Office

The organizer is flawless

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 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 Exhibit II 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