Samsung Galaxy Stellar (Verizon Wireless)

Samsung may have cornered the high-end smartphone market with the Galaxy S III , but not everyone is looking for a big, expensive new device. Many people are still picking up a smartphone to use for the first time. And even plenty of experienced users aren't willing to shell out $200 or more for a new phone every two years. That brings us to the Samsung Galaxy Stellar. It's a perfectly capable smartphone that's free with a two-year contract, and it has a simplified starter mode for first-time smartphone users. Overall it's a stellar deal, but the phone's camera isn't quite out of this world.

Design and Call Quality
The Galaxy Stellar measures 4.8 by 2.51 by 0.47 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.73 ounces. It's made out of slippery black plastic that feels similar to the material used for the GSIII. It has a slightly angular chin, like the Samsung Droid Charge, but overall the look is pretty tame. Still, it's nice enough that you'd never guess this is a free phone.

The 4-inch, 800-by-480-pixel display looks bright and sharp. There's really nothing to complain about here, and it's a huge step up from any feature phone on the market, though it isn't as impressive as the 960-by-540 display on the Motorola Droid Razr M. The onscreen keyboard is a little cramped for typing, but you get used to it.

The Stellar is a dual-band EV-DO Rev A (850/1900 MHz) and 750 MHz 4G LTE device with 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. Verizon's 4G LTE speeds are fast as always, around 8Mbps down and 6Mbps up with the Stellar on average. You can also use the phone as a mobile hotspot with the appropriate plan to provide a Wi-Fi connection to up to 10 devices.

Voice quality on the Stellar is good. Incoming calls sound loud and rich. Calls made with the phone are very clear, natural, and easy to hear, with good background noise cancellation. The speakerphone sounds fine and is loud enough to hear outside. Calls sounded good through a Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset. Samsung's S-Voice virtual assistant is on board, and I had no trouble using it over Bluetooth. Talk time was excellent, at 11 hours and 8 minutes.

Hardware, OS, and Apps
The Stellar is powered by a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor. Benchmark scores were rather good, especially for a budget device. It's not quite as fast as the Samsung Galaxy S III, but the lower screen resolution on the Stellar means it still gets high frame rates for gaming. That means you shouldn't have trouble running any of the 500,000+ apps or games available in the Google Play store.

The Stellar runs Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich). There's no word yet on an update to Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), but it's nice to see a budget device running a relatively recent version of the OS. Samsung has made some modifications to the OS but nothing too drastic. There's also a simplified starter mode for new smartphone users.

Unlike the pretty major changes Pantech made on the Marauder, Samsung's starter mode populates each of the Stellar's five home screens with a variety of helpful widgets. One page gives you quick access to a bunch of settings, from ringtones and wallpapers to font size and battery usage. Another home page is a full-on phone dialer. The main page shows the time and date with quick access to your three favorite contacts, and another page lets you choose your nine favorite apps. The final page has access to a few different online stores?it isn't all that helpful, but you can remove this widget and replace it with something else, just like you can in standard mode. Still, I find most of these widgets to be more helpful to a new user than Pantech's configuration, which actually made some things seem even more confusing.

Standard mode gets you the same five home screens, just filled with different apps and widgets. Unfortunately, there's a good deal of bloatware on the phone and none of it is deletable. You can disable it so that it doesn't show up on your app menu or anywhere else, but you're still stuck carrying it around.

Multimedia and Conclusions
There's an empty, side-mounted microSD card slot on the left edge of the phone. My 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine in it. You also get 1.72GB of free internal storage.

All of our music test files played back except for FLAC, and sound quality was fine over both wired 3.5mm headphones as well as Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones. All test videos played back too, at resolutions up to 1080p, except audio clipped in and out on DivX files.

The 3.2-megapixel camera is the Stellar's low point. Shutter speeds are slow, at 1.1 seconds, and autofocus doesn't lock in until after you press the button to take a picture. The camera actually captures some decent detail, but colors are a bit washed out. More than that, however, there's only so much you can do with a 3-megapixel sensor, and these photos just can't compete against those taken by most other smartphones. Unfortunately, video capture is worse. The Stellar records video at a steady 30 frames per second both indoors and out, but maxes out at a small, lackluster 640-by-480 resolution. There's also a standard 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat.

If you can deal with the disappointing camera, the Samsung Galaxy Stellar is actually a great choice for Verizon users on a budget. It's a lot more powerful than either the keyboarded LG Enlighten ?or the Pantech Breakout , two of Verizon's other low-cost options. The Pantech Marauder is actually a good match spec-wise, and it's a better choice if you want a phone with a physical keyboard. But the Stellar has a sleeker form factor and better battery life, making it the better choice overall. If you're willing to spend some more money, the Motorola Droid Razr M gets you a larger, sharper display and a faster processor for just $100.

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