Samsung Galaxy 3 / Apollo – a throwback

Released all the way back in July of 2010, the Samsung Galaxy 3 was a mid-range Samsung phone.

It is also often called Apollo 3. So, of course, you can’t expect much when it comes to the specs. Inside, you’ll find a 667 MHz single-core CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and 512 MB of ROM, but you can slot in a microSD card up to 32 GB. Up front is a 3.2” 240×400 TFT screen. For the juice, you have a removable 1500mAh battery, good enough for 2 days for medium usage.
But for it’s age, the specs are pretty good.
On the top you have all of your connections. Micro USB, a headphone jack and your power button. On the left is your volume rocker. On the back is your 3 MP camera capable of 240p video recording. There’s a small hump on the back, and it actually makes the phone feel really comfortable. And behind that hump is a speaker that sounds…well, awful. But it does get pretty loud.
The phone is running Android 2.1. Now, the phone IS upgradable to Android 2.2, but it’s a bit of a pain to upgrade. So, in short, the OS isn’t really usable.

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Now, even though the phone really is old, the screen is really good. Despite the resolution of only 240×400 pixels using TFT technology, it has good colors and really good viewing angles.  The colors do fade to white when you look at it from an angle, but it is still very much viewable under angles. Really shows that Samsung even 7 years ago did screens right! And it can get okay bright.

Since the phone by today’s standards is seriously under-powered, it is not really that usable. Loading a simple mobile page takes ages. Stuff like playing back videos off of YouTube is a real pain and takes a while to load. And no, the YouTube app doesn’t work. At all. The small screen size definitely doesn’t help. But general usage throughout the OS isn’t actually that bad and you can even play some light games, like pou or pinball.

However, the place where the phone really does show its age is the camera. Sure, under decent light,the pictures actually are not that bad, but it’s the video recording, which is limited to 240p, that kills it.
So despite the phone being 7 years old, it is still decent when you consider the age!