Samsung Rugby Smart review

6. Camera, connectivity, web browser

A solid 5MP shooter

The Samsung Rugby Smart comes with a 5MP camera and an LED flash. It captures photos at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels.

Its interface looks pretty familiar with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut (which is a thumbnail of the last photo taken).

The camera interface

On the left, you get the front/back camera switch and the flash control. You can replace those two and add two more (for a total of four) shortcuts to any option in the Settings menu.

The quality of the photos, taken with the camera is great. Image detail is clean and naturally looking even at pixel level. Colors and white balance are good too. Check out a few samples below.

Video recording could have been better

The video camera interface is identical to the still camera. You get the same customizable panel on the left with four shortcuts.

The camera shoots 720p video at 30fps. Unlike the still camera, you can't use the video-call camera to shoot videos.

The video camera interface

The videos are shot in .MP4 with the nice sounding bitrate of 12Mbps. The videos themselves are with average quality as we noticed a lot of jaggies on diagonal lines. Detail is also far from impressive.

Here is a 720p video sample for you.

And here goes an untouched 720p@30fps video clip for download.

Connectivity is well covered

The Samsung Rugby Smart has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and dual-band 3G with HSPA+ (14.4 Mbps downlink and 5.76Mbps uplink).

Moving on, there's Bluetooth 3.0 for fast local file transfers. Then there's Wi-Fi b/g/n support and a Wi-Fi hotspot option.

The AllShare app allows you to stream content to and from various devices (TV or computer) over DLNA.

AllShare app

The handset also comes with Kies Air preloaded. The app connects to the local Wi-Fi network (or it can create a Wi-Fi hotspot) and gives you a URL to type into your computer's web browser.

From there you can manage just about anything on the phone - from contacts, messages (including composing messages), to browsing images, videos and other files straight in your desktop browser. You can grant or reject access to computers and see who's connected to the phone at any moment.

The cool thing is you can stream music with handy playback controls. It works for videos too.

A solid web browser

The interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed. Its user experience is, as usual, quite good.

Browsing GSMArena.com

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.

Yet another neat trick is the browser-specific brightness setting. You can, for example, boost the brightness in the browser to comfortably view your web pages but keep the general brightness low to conserve battery.

Page options and settings