Samsung Galaxy S i9001 Plus preview: First look

Image gallery

The Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus has the stock Android gallery, rather than a custom TouchWiz version. It has good functionality, cool 3D looks and nice transition effects, but only shows a downsized version of your images. .

Images and videos placed in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder, which is very convenient - just like a file manager.

The different albums appear as piles of photos, which fall in neat grids once selected. If you have online albums over at Picasa those show up as separate stacks as well.

Nice-looking gallery

Alternatively, you can organize photos by date with the help of a button in the top right corner, which switches between grid and timeline view.

In grid view, there’s a date slider, which can also be used to find photos taken on a certain date.

If you are checking out a photo, you can use the tabs at the top of the screen to jump back to the main gallery screen, without having to go several folders back.

The gallery supports finger scrolling or panning so you can skip images without having to return to the default view. Just swipe to the left or right when viewing a photo in fullscreen mode and the previous/next image will appear. Multi-touch is, of course, enabled.

Video player

The video player of the Galaxy S Plus is inherited from the original Galaxy S. It’s easy to use and offers unsurpassed codec support for basically anything you’d want. DivX and XviD are covered and you can also watch them up to 720p HD.

The video player app has a nice and simple interface that automatically disappears when not used to allow you to enjoy your videos in their full shine. The on-screen controls boil down to play/pause and skip buttons, as well as a draggable progress bar.

The video player app

The Outdoor visibility setting boosts the brightness and contrast of your screen to give you better viewing quality.

Music player

The Samsung Galaxy S Plus uses the TouchWiz music player. The interface consists of several tabs for the sorting options: current playlist, all tracks, playlists and albums, artists and composers. You are free to remove those you don’t need to make the interface easier to navigate.

In addition, equalizer presets are enabled on the Galaxy S Plus along with Samsung’s DNSe technology.

Great TouchWiz music player

And with the added eye-candy, album view and song scrolling, things are almost as good as they can get now.

Music Hub

The Music Hub app is here too. It lets you browse music online with search, charts, new releases and featured content. You can preview songs (30 seconds each) and buy tracks or whole albums.

Music Hub