Samsung Droid Charge (Verizon Wireless)

The Samsung Droid Charge skips the HTC Thunderbolt's Sense UI layer in favor of lighter weight and a better camera; both are killer handsets, as long as you don't need great battery life.

Front

The Samsung Droid Charge measures 5.1 by 2.6 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 5 ounces. That makes it almost an ounce and a half lighter than the HTC Thunderbolt, but even slightly taller. 

Angle

The Droid Charge's 4.3-inch, 480-by-800-pixel, Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touch screen is just as vibrant as other recent Samsung phones.

Back

The Droid Charge features two cameras that, on paper, look just like the Thunderbolt’s: an 8-megapixel auto-focus camera on back, and a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera. Test photos were natural, vibrant, and detailed, with virtually no grain even in dimmer indoor rooms.

Right

Under the hood, the Droid Charge has the same 1GHz Cortex A8-based Hummingbird CPU found in half a dozen Galaxy S handsets over the past year. By now, it would have been nice to see an upgrade. 

Left

The Droid Charge runs Android 2.2 (Froyo); there’s no word yet on an Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) update. On our benchmark test suite, this phone tested slightly slower overall than the Thunderbolt, which packs a second-generation 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. 

Angle

There are four plastic buttons beneath the Droid Charge's screen. I like these better than the Samsung Galaxy S’s finicky touch buttons, but HTC’s haptic feedback-enabled design beats them both. 

Spec Data

Service Provider Verizon Wireless

Operating System Android OS

Screen Size 4.3 inches

Screen Details 480-by-800-pixel, 16M-color Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touch display

Camera Yes

Megapixels 8 MP

Camera Flash Yes

802.11x Yes

Bluetooth Yes

Web Browser Yes

Form Factor Candy Bar

Network CDMA

Bands 850, 1900, 700

High-Speed Data 1xRTT, EVDO Rev A, LTE

Storage Capacity (as Tested) 1.08 GB

Processor Speed 1 GHz

Keyboard No

Continuous Talk Time 4 hours 28 minutes

Posted in: Phone News