Samsung I9010 Galaxy S Giorgio Armani review

User interface gets better

Samsung I9010 Galaxy S Giorgio Armani runs on Android 2.2 Froyo and is one of the first Galaxy S phones to have it out of the box. As usual the TouchWiz overlay (or launcher as it’s technically called) is most prominent. It improves both looks and usability and integrates excellently to Android Froyo.

Despite the Giorgio Armani branding, there is almost no GA styling on the outside or any exclusive content inside. If you have used the previous Emporio Armani feature phone, you will recognize the Armani font, which is slightly different from the original Samsung one. The font, a wallpaper and a shortcut to GA’s website are the only GA things inside and barely pass have any added value by our books.

For starters we've prepared a short video demo of the Galaxy S Giorgio Armani:

Since the user experience isn’t too much different from that on the other Galaxy S phones, we’ll reuse some portions of the text of our previous reviews. You can rest assured that we’ve reflected any differences we’ve seen.

The TouchWiz 3.0 user interface comes preinstalled on top of the Android OS

Let’s start with the homescreen. It accommodates up to seven homescreen panes, which can be managed as easy as never before. A pinch zooming out gesture takes you to the edit screen where you can add, remove and rearrange the panes as you see fit.

Add, delete or re-arrange homescreen panes with pinch zoom out gesture

Moving on, the Android 2.2-running I9010 Galaxy S GA brings a few new live wallpapers and lots of Armani still ones. You can find more wallpapers in the Android Market.

Live wallpapers • still wallpaper gallery

However the improved notification area is one of our favorites. Packing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and sound toggles on top since Eclair it now adds an automatic rotation switch. These handy shortcuts can save you a whole load of digging in the Settings.

The updated notification area

The lock screen has remained relatively unchanged – you now need to swipe to the left or right (rather than upwards) to remove the virtual glass pane covering your phone. There are cool alternative unlocking patterns too when you have a missed event – a message or a call.

The Lockscreen

The Samsung home-backed widgets are still here and even new ones are added. There are no GA exclusives though. Some of widgets are preinstalled, while others are available for free from the Samsung Apps repository. Still there are so many of those available over at the Android market that custom widgets are hardly considered a selling point any more.

The widget list • Buddies now, Feeds and Updates, and Diary social widgets

An interesting change brought by Samsung for the Android 2.2-compatible version of their TouchWiz launcher is the built-in task manager. Coming complete with a homescreen widget that shows the number of currently active apps, it saves you the need to install a task killer on your own.

The task manager • the task widget in the center of the homescreen

Typically the main menu consists of side-scrollable panes, much like the homescreen, instead of a vertical scrollable grid (like in vanilla Android). List view is also available.

The main menu • list view

Also similar to the homescreen is the edit feature – you just use the pinch zoom out gesture and you can add new or re-arrange the current menu panes.

When the launcher is in the other edit mode (the one you select from the menu), you can uninstall applications (only the ones that you installed) just by tapping their corners.

Edit the homescreen panes with pinch zoon out gesture • standard edit mode

The performance of the Samsung I9010 Galaxy S Giorgio Armani is perfect, but that’s hardly a surprise. The Galaxy S GA’s 1 GHz Cortex A8 CPU is doing a great job as usual and the 512 MB of RAM on board feel more than enough.

Quadrant benchmark results