Review: Samsung Galaxy S5 Sport for Sprint
Media
The Sport includes the stock Google-made Play apps. The Google music, video, TV, book, and magazine stores are all fine places from which to rent or purchase content. The individual apps to consume them are decent and haven't changed in quite some time. The Sport also includes the standard YouTube app, a generic MP3 player for sideloaded music, and a generic video player for sideloaded video.
The Sport carries over Samsung's Smart Remote app. Smart Remote can both control your home theater equipment and also peruse various content sources for something good to watch. Setting up the remote is a cinch. It walks you through the process of pairing with various devices and doesn't take more than a few moments to lasso control over your TV, cable box/DVR, Blu-Ray player, and receiver. The app's "smarts" come from the Peel engine. Answer a few questions and the app will be able to interact with all the content from your cable provider, as well as view schedules in advance, interact with the DVR, and so on.
Sprint was sure to bundle in a ton of its preferred apps, as well. You'll find NASCAR Mobile, NBA Game Time, NextRadio, Spotify, Sprint Music Plus, and Sprint TV & Movies. The NextRadio and Spotify apps are for streaming music, and Sprint TV & Movies is for streaming video content. These apps suffered under 3G, but worked passably when the Sport was able to connect to LTE or Wi-Fi. Sprint Music Plus is a for-pay ringback tone service.
Camera
The Sport may not have a dedicated camera button, but the excellent camera application opens in a jiffy from the lock screen.
The viewfinder fills the entire screen; the controls float within. There are some quick settings available on the left side of the screen, including a toggle for the user-facing camera, selective focus, HDR, and the full settings. The action buttons on the right include a dedicated video camera button, a separate shutter button, and access to the various shooting modes and gallery.
The full settings are organized in a grid of icons. It is easy to interact with them and understand exactly how changes you make will affect the outcome. Further, it is customizable; You can drag the icons for the settings around in the grid and arrange them however you like. The Sport offers control over picture size/resolution, metering modes, stabilization, timer, white balance, exposure, guidelines, shutter sound, and on. Basically, everything you need is there.
The Sport has six different shooting modes preinstalled. They are auto, beauty face, shot & more, panorama, virtual tour, and dual camera. There is also a link in the mode listing to the Samsung app store where you can download more modes if you want, such as sports mode, which isn't preinstalled.
Samsung was smart to make the HDR feature accessible all the time. You can turn it on or off quickly when needed, and I find that really helpful. The same goes for the selective focus control. Like Nokia's ReFocus tool or a Lytro camera, selective focus lets you blur the background while the foreground is in focus and vice versa. You need to have a clearly defined subject and background in order for the feature to really work. Images turn out best if you are really close to the main subject. In fact, Samsung recommends you be about 1.5 feet away, with the background object at least 5 feet from the foreground subject. You can set the foreground to be in focus, the background to be in focus, or both to be in focus after the fact. This shooting mode also takes a little bit of practice to use properly, but the results are cool.
Just like the GS5, the Sport has the picture stabilization tool on by default. I suggest you deactivate it because it really bogs down the speed of the camera. Every shot takes several seconds to focus and capture. When turned off, the Sport's camera will focus almost instantly and can take pictures as fast as you can press the shutter button.
Photos
The Sport captures images as large as 16 megapixels in the 16:9 aspect ratio or 12 megapixels in the 4:3 ratio. I was pleased with the shots I got. I didn't see any appreciable difference when compared to the results I obtained with the regular GS5 or GS5 Active. The Sport delivered razor-sharp focus, good exposures, and accurate white balance. In general, the pictures are better than those I got with the HTC One. Most people will be pleased with the shots they take, even if all they ever do is use the automatic mode. Sport owners who take time to explore the different shooting modes will be rewarded with images that go beyond the ordinary.
The front camera does a good job, too.
Video
The Sport can shoot 4K (Ultra HD) video, but it's wasted without a 4K TV on which to view it. Skip recording in 4K entirely unless you have a monitor that can show it. The 1080p HD video that I captured looked great. I was really impressed with the quality of focus, exposure, and white balance. The results accurately represent the real-world scene I recorded. Your YouTube fans will be impressed, no doubt.
Gallery
Samsung's gallery app offers some fun extra features. The Sport will automatically sync thumbnails from your Google+ and Dropbox accounts, but you can thankfully turn these off. There's a drop-down menu accessible from a button at the top of the screen for sorting between albums.
When you dive down into the individual galleries, the Sport goes into a split-screen mode: a vertical list of other galleries forms a strip along the left edge of the screen, and the rest is reserved to show larger thumbnails of the images in the gallery you chose to view. You have to press one of the thumbnail images to go into a full-screen view of that image. The entire screen of thumbnails can be pinched to make them smaller or enlarged. Once you open a single image, you can swipe through photos and share quite easily thanks to the numerous options in the gallery app.
The editing features are extensive. Not only does the Sport offer crop, resize, and rotate, but it includes a number of handy tools for making OK photos exceptional. It allows users to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and red/green levels. It includes a number of Instagram-like effects. There's a suite of tools for touching up portraits, such as red-eye reduction, airbrushing, and blurring. Now you have no excuse to look like an unkempt mess in your selfies.
The Sport also includes the Google+ Photos app, which can be used to sync and backup images to your Google account. Google+ Photos also includes the nifty Auto-Awesome feature for making GIFs and other improvements.
Activity Zone
One app on the Sport that's not available to the standard GS5 is the Activity Zone. This app lets you tap into the Sport's outdoorsy sensors, and more. The basic info screen shows you the elevation, barometric pressure, and compass. There are two large buttons that toggle on/off the flashlight or stopwatch. Them there's a dropdown menu accessible from the top-left corner that lets you drill down into each of these individual tools to get more detailed readings and measurements.
The Activity Zone also automatically finds other apps that tie into activities, such as Samsung's own S Health. The two can share information to enhance your view of your activities, exercise, and health. For example, it might be helpful to know that perhaps you're more winded than normal because you're at a higher elevation and the humidity is nearing 100%.
(Activity Zone is also found on the GS5 Active.)
Apps
Sprint stacked the Sport with plenty of annoying apps. Some include Eureka Offers, Flipboard, Lookout Security, Scout, and Sprint Zone. Sprint Zone is a collection of separate apps that Sprint believes its customers might find useful.The Sport includes a Samsung app store where you can download all the Samsung apps you want.
The Sport carries over features such as Air View, Smart Stay, S Finder, S Voice, and multi-window for running two apps at a time. Samsung included a data usage tool so you can monitor how much data you consume in a given day, week, or month. Sharing content from the Sport to other screens is easy thanks to a screen-mirroring tool. Music and video content can be pushed to TVs and stereo systems via Samsung Link. It is brain-dead easy to use and can connect to most any nearby device.
The phone comes with what Samsung calls Blocking Mode. It's basically a Do Not Disturb function. It lets you set times when notifications are turned off. The app allows you to select certain contacts who will be able to reach you even if all others are blocked. Blocking Mode can be controlled manually, or set to turn on and off at certain times each day.
Bluetooth
The Sport supports Bluetooth 4.0 LE. I was able to pair it successfully with a number of different devices, including headsets and speakers, as well as other smartphones and PCs. Phone calls routed to a headset offered excellent quality. Since the Sport supports the aptX profile, music sounded amazing coming from aptX Bluetooth speakers.
Browser
The Sport comes with both the generic Android browser and Chrome. The generic browser is "enhanced" with the Lumen Toolbar. Basically, the Lumen Toolbar adds browser extensions that improve the performance of the browser when it comes to content, such as games and videos. It also adds easy sharing tools, newsfeed shortcuts, and recommendations. I didn't find it to be all that helpful, and thankfully you can turn it off. You can also choose to apply Lumen to Chrome if you want.
Both the stock browser and Chrome do a fine job of rendering web sites whether you use the Lumen toolbar or not. Speeds on Sprint's LTE network are decent when it comes time to browse. Browsing on 3G — which happened more than I'd like — feels like a death sentence.
Clock
You can choose to put a clock on the lock screen or not. It's your call. If you do, it'll be a large, white, digital one. The weather can be paired with it, which shows the current conditions wherever the Sport happens to be. I wish you had more control over the lock screen clock.
GPS
Scout and Google Maps are both preloaded. The Sport performed excellently as a navigation tool. It pinpointed me in about 5 seconds consistently, and had no trouble plotting routes and finding nearby points of interest. Scout is really useful when it comes to searching for nearby points of interest, such as restaurants, gas stations, ATMs, and so on. Google Maps and Scout are free.
Private Mode
The Sport includes Private Mode, a special, sealed-away part of the OS that is password protected. Private Mode is mainly meant to protect sensitive files. It can interact with the photo gallery, the Google+ Photo app, the MP3 and video player apps, as well as the file browser. You can, in effect, hide pictures, songs, and videos you don't want others to see or hear. Though privatized pictures will technically exist in the gallery app, they can only be viewed when in private mode. Private Mode can come in handy for those who may want to keep some adult content on their device and take comfort that others won't be able to view it.
S Health
S Health taps into a bevy of sensors and can be used as a fitness pal and diet planner all in one. S Health forces you to create a profile, including your age, sex, height, and weight. It automatically calculates your body mass index and asks how active you are in general. You can use the app to track walks, runs, hikes, and bike rides. The Sport has a built-in pedometer and heart rate monitor. Pair these with the calorie tracker and you really have a good idea of your fitness level. I found the pedometer to be fairly accurate at counting steps and measuring approximate distances. The heart rate monitor was also accurate, as it delivered the same result that my treadmill did. The one bummer is that you have to be still to track your heart rate. This means you can't track while you're actually working out. You have to stand still for 30 seconds with your finger on the sensor to get an accurate reading.
The food tracker is highly detailed and lets you be explicit in monitoring your diet. For example, I was able to pick out the exact brand of yogurt I ate for breakfast, including the flavor! The food tracker can find nearly anything you search for, which is very helpful if you're monitoring calories strictly. You can track breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. The software automatically knows how many calories you need to consume to maintain your current weight. It can help you set limits if you actually want to lose weight.
Sprint Fit
If S Health and Activity tracker aren't enough for you, you'll be happy to know the Sport also includes Sprint Fit. Sprint Fit merges features of MapMyFitness, S Health, Smart Health, and Spotify to create workouts complete with playlists and recommendations on diet and exercise. You have to create a MapMayFitness account in order to use it, which I find rather annoying. Further, the Spotify portion of the service doesn't work unless you sign up for at least the basic version of Spotify. Quite honestly, it's one fitness app too many.
The service is available directly from the home screen panels thanks to two ever-present widgets. One sits in the upper left corner and works akin to turning a page in a magazine. You grab the corner with your finger and swipe diagonally downward to open the full Sprint Fit Suite of apps. The second appears as a little bookmark along the left edge of the screen. Tap it, and a small widget opens with a dashboard containing info about your latest walk, health articles, and so on. Perhaps the best aspect of these tools are that MapMyX MVP is being offered for free to Sport owners for one year. The MVP version of MapMyX includes a broader range of features, such as heart rate analysis, aaudio coaching, and interval training.
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