Samsung I9070 Galaxy S Advance review: While-u-wait

Slick gallery and file browser

The Samsung Galaxy S Advance 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. It displays full resolution images and supports double tap and pinch zoom. It supports sharing images over Bluetooth, email, messaging along with uploading to Picasa or using DLNA to push the image to a compatible TV.

The Gallery also offers some editing options - cropping, 90-degree rotation and some more advanced features such as image adjustments, effects and selections.

The Gallery offers several image editing options

The My Files app is a simple to use but efficient 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 well-established music player

The Samsung Galaxy S Advance uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung have enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.

By default, tracks are sorted into four categories - All, Playlists, Albums and Artists. From the settings, you can add or remove categories to set up the music player just the way you like it.

The music player is great • The DNSe settings • Choosing which categories to use

The album art has a central place in the Now Playing interface, but you can replace it with an equalizer. You can skip songs or FF/rewind by sideways swipes.

Another nice feature allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search. The handset also prompts you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album.

The Now playing interface • Looking up a track

Simple yet powerful video player

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, and it also remembers the last viewed position of the video, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

You can choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. There's 5.1 channel virtualization and subtitle support, as well.

You can also change font size and adjust subtitle sync (move them back or forth in time) but there's no option to manually load subtitles; they have to have the same filename as the video file to load properly.

The video player handled most videos we threw at it with ease. DivX and XviD videos at 720p resolution weren't a problem, but 720p h.264 lagged. The player had no trouble with sound codecs (most other phones choke on AC3 or DTS sound).

Don't let the video player's simplistic interface deceive you

Pretty decent audio output

The Samsung I9070 Galaxy S Advance did pretty well in our audio quality test. The audio output from the phone was averagely loud and pretty clean, which is about what you'd expect from a mid-range droid.

When used with an active external amplifier the Galaxy S Advance is really great. As you can see from the table below every aspect of its performance is flawless. The only thing you might not particularly like is the subpar loudness, but that's hardly a huge issue here.

There's some degradation when you plug in a pair of headphones, mostly in terms of intermodulation distortion. Both of those rises to just below average levels, while the other readings remains virtually unaffected. A solid performance overall.

Check out the table and see for yourself.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung I9070 Galaxy S Advance	+0.03, -0.03	-88.6	87.6	0.0086	0.018	-88.0
Samsung I9070 Galaxy S Advance (headphones attached)	+0.39, -0.09	-88.6	87.7	0.025	0.240	-42.3
Samsung I9103 Galaxy R	+0.03, -0.04	-89.9	89.9	0.014	0.018	-90.0
Samsung I9103 Galaxy R (headphones attached)	+0.38, -0.10	-84.8	90.0	0.0093	0.255	-54.8
Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II	+0.04, -0.09	-91.4	91.9	0.0042	0.066	-89.7
Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II (headphones attached)	+1.05, -0.22	-90.0	90.2	0.013	0.647	-49.4
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	+0.11, -0.69	-90.6	90.6	0.0085	0.014	-91.8
Samsung Galaxy Nexus (headphones attached)	+0.41, -0.61	-89.5	89.5	0.097	0.267	-63.5
HTC Sensation (headphones attached)	+0.71, -0.15	-89.1	90.1	0.019	0.522	-70.6
HTC Sensation	+0.05, -0.34	-90.2	90.2	0.012	0.021	-91.1

Samsung I9070 Galaxy S Advance frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.