Samsung phones will reliably give you an impressive screen, a quality camera and the clunky old TouchWiz interface. Luckily the Samsung omits the last of these in favour of the Android operating system. Phone users everywhere will whoop with joy.

Style and handling on the Samsung Galaxy i7500

The Samsung Galaxy i7500 is Samsung’s first Android phone and one of the slimmest Android handsets on the market. It’s a nice flat tablet shape that feels comfortable to hold, and the glossy black finish is classic Samsung.

This is definitely a high-end product, with a 3.2-inch capacitive touch-screen, fast HSDPA internet, 8GB of internal memory and a five-megapixel camera with an LED flash and autofocus.

The screen is tremendous: it reacts smoothly and instantly to swipes and pressure and the AMOLED display makes content crisp, clear and vivid. There are three home screens, as is usual on Android phones, each of which can be customised with shortcuts and widgets such as an updating calendar or analogue clock.

Sadly the touch-screen keyboard is quite slow, and not suitable if you’re a quick typist. Sure, there’s an auto-suggest function that inserts correctly-spelt words if you mistype, but it’s not as good as the one found on, for example, the HTC Hero. Adding to the slow experience, numbers and symbols are on a separate screen, and inserting a punctuation mark doesn’t take you back to the letters screen automatically. Easing the pain, you can double-tap the spacebar to insert a full-stop.

Email and contacts on the Samsung Galaxy i7500

The Android OS means you can synchronise and back up your contacts on Gmail, but not on Facebook, say, or Flickr. The Gmail is desktop-like – you can open and forward attachments, mark important emails and view your custom folders as you would on a PC.

The Samsung Galaxy i7500 is the basic Android OS, with no input from Samsung at all – probably no bad thing when you consider how clumsy TouchWiz could be. This is most evident when using email. You can get push-email if you have a Gmail account, but there is no application included for push-email on Microsoft Exchange or other webmail accounts. Adding other accounts is pretty straightforward, but setting up push alerts means using the manual setup and inputting the IMAP settings. If you choose not to do this, the auto-setup uses POP settings check for new mail at regular intervals.

Camera on the Samsung Galaxy i7500

Android phones are not known for having good cameras, but thanks to Samsung’s skill in this department, this one is a vast improvement. Shutter release is instantaneous, and daylight shots are a little foggy but with warm colours. Autofocus takes a little while to focus, but gives you a nice, clear result. Because the camera reloads so quickly, you can take another photo immediately after one you’ve just taken. The last one sits in a small square in the corner of the screen and you can tap it for more options or scroll through to other photos in your gallery. There are no photo modes other than the basic flash on/off/auto, and as far as editing goes, all you can do is crop. Once you have your snap, you can email or text them, or upload them Picasa, Google’s photo-sharing site.

Music and media on the Samsung Galaxy i7500

The music player on the Samsung Galaxy i7500 is pretty good: the preloaded music application is enhanced by a 3.5mm audio jack and bundled in-ear headphones. The sound quality from these isn’t outstanding, with slightly thin bass, but they have a properly long lead and a basic remote control that allows you play and pause.

The massive 8GB of internal memory allows you to store a good amount of music and video on the phone, and you can also download Spotify, the music streaming application, from Android Market. For all its camera and fancy display, the Galaxy’s main selling point is that there are over 2,000 apps to download, most of which are free or cost just a few pounds. So even though Samsung hasn’t added much to the bare-bones Android interface, a couple of hours’ downloading can get you a whole new phone – we chose Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, Layar, which helps you find nearby eateries, and two video platforms to add to the preloaded YouTube application. The quality of streamed video footage is high, although we did experience some freezing, even over Wi-Fi.

The superb HTML browser loads full webpages and resizes them to fit the Galaxy i7500’s screen. Instead of zoom, you just drag a magnifying navigation box over the area you want to view close-up. All the toolbars melt away when they are not in use, maximising the generous screen space, and the address bar also functions as a search box. It’s all very neat and organised, and all very satisfactory.

The verdict on the Samsung Galaxy i7500

Samsung could have made more of the Android OS with a custom-made interface – it may well have made for a better email experience, for example. But the hardware – especially that AMOLED screen and the five-megapixel camera – is outstanding, and Android Market gives you a cheap way of pimping up your phone. A fast, stylish handset.

View the latest Samsung Galaxy i7500 Deals Here