Review: Samsung Fascinate
The Fascinate integrates your social networks into the phone in a few ways. First, in the contact list, you get a History tab that gives you all the private Facebook emails and Twitter DMs that you've sent and received. Second, you also get an Activities tab that provides an exhaustive feed of updates from all of your contacts on Facebook and Twitter. It's nice for a quick glance, and you can also reply or retweet Twitter updates, or add your comments to Facebook posts. The same tabs are supposed to work on individual contact listings, but when I pulled up my friends' contact cards, these tabs were always left blank.
I had trouble with the social networking features on my Samsung Fascinate review unit. A Samsung app called SNS manages all of your accounts for social networking widgets and contact sync. Unfortunately, this widget on my phone seemed buggy and always at the root of Force Close error messages. A hard factory reset fixed the issue.
The Samsung Fascinate does not come with any official social networking apps preloaded, but you can download Twitter, MySpace and Facebook from the App Market. These apps all worked well on the Fascinate. The phone does come with Skype mobile, and Verizon has Skype locked up exclusively on Android. Skype worked fine, for a voice-only app. I had a nice chat with my sister in Amsterdam, but we couldn't connect for a video chat over Skype, which is a bummer.
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