Samsung Galaxy Camera review: Half-press to play

TouchWiz music player

The Samsung Galaxy Camera packs a capable music player with equalizer presets (including a custom one) and SoundAlive technology, which features 7.1 channel virtualization. Samsung uses SoundAlive in some of their MP3 and Android-powered media players.

SoundAlive presets • Manual preset

Music is sorted into various categories, and there is the Music square feature, similar to SensMe on Sony phones. Music square will automatically rate a song as exciting or calm, passionate or joyful and place the tracks accordingly on a square (hence the name).

The music player

From here, you can highlight an area of the square and the phone will automatically build a playlist of songs that matches your selection.

You can swipe the album art left and right to skip tracks songs. You can also place your palm over the screen to pause playback.

The Galaxy Camera player is DLNA-enabled, so you're not limited to locally saved tracks only - songs on devices connected to your Wi-Fi network are as easy to get to as locally stored songs.

Impressive video player

The Samsung Galaxy Camera features the same video player as the S III, which is one of the most capable video players we've seen on a mobile device.

The video player has a simple interface but is quite capable

It offers several view modes - grid, list, folders and nearby devices (which accesses DLNA devices). The grid view is our favorite as it is a true quad-core tour de force - the visible video thumbnails (all eight of them) are actually playing the videos instead of being static images. They play at a reduced framerate, but it's an awesome preview and it shows what can be done when you have processing power to spare.

Two of the view modes available for browsing your videos

Another cool feature that showcases the power of the Exynos chipset is the chapter preview - it detects chapters in the video and shows a rectangular grid.

Plenty of settings available • the chapter preview

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 Galaxy Camera played FullHD files. Large files worked glitch-free.

You can adjust video brightness, color tone, enable outdoor visibility and choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. The same SoundAlive audio-enhancing technology is available here too.

SoundAlive enhancements are available

The video player allows you to manually select which subtitles you want, a feature dearly missed from most other players on Android devices. You can even adjust the timing of the subtitles if needed.

Picking the right subtitle file, the easy way

The video player on the Camera has a feature called Pop up play - it moves the video in a small floating window and you can use other apps on the phone while still watching the video. You can move the video around and resize it with pinch gestures.

Pop up play in action