Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G User Reviews

I have being looking for a good Qwerty Slider Smartphone with a 5 row key keyboard for a while. I currently use a Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro and I really was waiting to see if a smartphone with a good 5 row keyboard would come out with a 2GB ram and quad-core processor. This does not seem like its going to happen either in the US or in Europe where I'm based. I would probably have got a Motorola Photon 4G for its excellent keyboard but its a major risk to try and remove to build in sim card and solder on a sim card reader to access a sim for a european network.
I bought Samsung T699 unlocked from Open Group Wireless for 150Euros + 65 Euro Tax, Customs duty and Transport using freight forwarder Borderlinx who streamlined any problems exporting to Rep. of Ireland. The package arrived 2 days early and straight out of the box, I put in my O2 sim card and its worked seamlessly since, the only limiting factor is the patchy coverage outside of the cities by O2 network, but in the cities it is very fast web browsing and even picked up on the new trailing of 4G by O2 in cork.
The keyboard is very good for fast typing and the dedicated number row and multiple secondary functions on each key using the function key is a great feature. Outside of being slightly heavier that the Sansung S3, this phone can match the S3 in almost all departments - the screen resolution is slightly less than the S3 but really is not obvious. The 5mp Camera is very good and the focus is much better than the 8mp camera on the Sony Xperia Pro. Call quality is fine receiving and speaking and playing Music through the speakers has excellent clarity. Even with 3.75Gb of the phone's memory taken up with preloaded software does not seem to be an issue and it runs Android 4.1.2 Jellybean out of the box. I have checked the Blogs on upgrading Android but it seems to be a safer bet to stick with Jellybean to keep the full functionality of the slide out keyboard.
overall this is Excellent value Qwerty Slider Smartphone for any GSM network worldwide

Having owned both the G1 & G2 I was used to vanilla Android with a physical keyboard and great camera.

CPU speed, storage, screen size, weight and even battery were all items sacrificed for the strengths of the G2 & G1 phones.

PRO: Now, I have a dual core 1.5GHz CPU, a power GPU a huge bright 4" screen, 5 rows of keys, all the bells and whistles and yet I'm still longing for the old simplicity of my G2.

CON: Sure, I can play the best games now but I can't take a decent picture in anything but full sunlight. The camera lens cover get smudged so easily, even the good pictures look like they soft-focus.

PRO: Reception over 4G & Wifi is awesome, bluetooth works flawlessly, NFC, S-Beam, front camera, battery 10-12 hours with heavy use - all great things that make the hundreds of MB of bloatware even less tolerable.

CON: This bloatware is baked into the OS, remove it and you'll be factory resetting your phone - the reliability of the phone goes south when you remove the 20-30 apps built into the phone. Each of the apps is more useless than the next and they all take up CPU/Memory.

PRO: This phone will play anything, game, app, video. Speaker quality is way above average and almost has bass(!) the case is grippy, great to hold and the 5 row keyboard is made for writing a novel or two.

CON: Samsung's version of Swype is utterly useless, the huge home button isn't an optical trackball, there is no dedicated camera button and all the plastic construction is already showing signs of wear.

Everything I love about this phone has a feature that makes me doubt why I bought it. All of the downsides can be fixed with software changes which makes them that much harder to understand why they need to be there.

Overall, if I could remove the bloatware, fine tune the camera with presets to overcome the natural weaknesses, get back to Vanilla Android and locate a good case - I could see calling this phone a worthy successor to my G2 called the "GS3" :)