Review: Samsung Galaxy Light for T-Mobile
Menus
The Light runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with Samsung's TouchWiz user interface dominating the look and feel of the phone.
The lock screen supports up to four shortcuts that will work with or without a security lock. You can also choose to have a personal message, clock, and live weather on the lock screen.
There are five home screen panels activated by default, but those can be deleted or added to at whim.
The main app menu is fairly flexible. The default view is of a four by five grid of apps all arranged alphabetically. Apps can be rearranged in any order you wish, as well as viewed in list form, or dropped into folders.
The pull-down notification shade includes toggles for the different radios on the device, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. You can arrange the toggles however you like. The notification shade also provides access to the brightness setting, full settings menu, and of course all your alerts.
The settings menu is spread out across four screens, which I find annoying. This is something Samsung has done with many of its devices this year. It means more work to find the exact setting you want to adjust.
Novice users might want to consider using the "Easy Mode" home screen setting, which makes icons and text bigger, simplifies the menu screens, and cleans up all the clutter. The downside is that you lose access to cool and helpful features such as home screen widgets.
In terms of performance, the Light didn't have any problems. It has a quad-core 1.4GHz processor that provided more than enough power to run apps smoothly.
Calls and Contact
Samsung has gifted the Light with the same powerful phone application from its high-end devices. It's got a software dialpad, with tabs that run across the top for accessing the call history and contacts, but advanced settings are hiding under the menu button. For example, you can turn on/off noise cancellation (which improves outbound sound), as well as dial in your own preferences for volume, clarity, and warmth. Of course, the Light lets you customize call-rejection messages, as well as control how the phone answers/ends calls.
The contacts app, which is really just a tab within the phone application, is as feature-rich as any other modern smartphone. For example, you can set a direct access shortcut on the home screen that includes the contact's most recent social network status update. There are also two different home screen widgets that collect your favorite contacts in one place on the home screen. Adding and editing contacts is easy, and the Light will sync with most any online contact service.
Messages
The Light offers the stock Gmail, email, SMS/MMS, Hangouts, and Google+ apps. Together with their associated widgets, they make an impressive arsenal for reaching out to and connecting with your friends, family, and colleagues. The Light includes the old Android SMS app, but you can choose to set Hangouts as your combined SMS/IM app if you want to. It takes a bit of getting used to, in my opinion, and isn't as intuitive as it could be. Feel free to stick with the old SMS app if you want.
On the social networking front, neither Twitter nor Facebook is pre-loaded. You'll have to install them yourself. Samsung's ChatOn cross-platform messaging app is also MIA.
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Samsung Galaxy Light
