SamMobile had the opportunity to play with the Galaxy Mega 6.3 (GT-I9205). Samsung announced the Galaxy Mega 6.3 a couple of months ago. The Galaxy Mega line from Samsung are simple and just huge smartphones with big displays. They are a new generation smartphones based on Android OS from Samsung. We played with the GT-I9205 and this is the LTE version of the Galaxy Mega 6.3. The software wasn't final yet but everything worked out well. Time to give our opinion about the Galaxy Mega 6.3!
Design
From small to big in only a couple of years, we all use to use smaller mobile phones in the past and since the smartphone arrived mobile phones are getting bigger and bigger. We see this with every brand, even with Apple is doing it now. Samsung introduced their first huge smartphone at IFA in Berlin. Samsung called it the Galaxy Note. Many people called it ugly, to huge and not easy to use etc. Now a year later Samsung announced the second generation of the Galaxy Note with a display size of 5.5 inches. Samsung did this cause the sales of the Galaxy Note 5.3 inch were great. Samsung created a way to make the Galaxy Note II a little bit bigger and with a bigger display. Now this year Samsung will probably announce the Galaxy Note III the follow-up of the Galaxy Note II. As said in our introduction Samsung announced the Galaxy Mega 6.3 a couple of months ago, and the same thing happened with every huge display device. Samsung received reactions about the design and that it will be too big to use. (Samsung just created the middle step from Mobile phone to Tablet).
Back to the design of the Galaxy Mega 6.3. When we saw the Galaxy Mega 6.3 for the first time we though what a huge smartphone! And yes we did used a Galaxy Note II before and after a couple of minutes we started to like the Galaxy Mega 6.3. A display-size of 6.3 inches is great, and the device did feel great in the hands and we will explain why! First of the device feels thin. the front of the device is all about the 6.3 inch display. Samsung added their traditional home button and touch buttons. And of course at the front the camera, level sensors and the speaker, they are on the same place like we know from the Galaxy S4. The Galaxy Mega 6.3 also has a notification LED at the front right besides the speaker. Something we do know from the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4. At the right side of the Galaxy Mega 6.3 we find the lock-button and on the left side we find the volume rockers. On the upper side you see the 3.5 plugin, IRblaster (Handy for Samsung's own application WatchON) and one of the two microphones, on the downside of the device you have a micro USB connection and the other microphone. The back of the device looks very clean and we only see the Camera sensor with LED flash and a speaker at the bottom. All in all the design is a typical Samsung design.
We give the Galaxy Mega 6.3 for its design a 7.0 cause there is nothing special compared with the Galaxy S4 and the bezels in our opinion could be smaller! Probably this is something for the next generation Gelaxy Mega's!
Design – 7.0/10
Interface – Smartfunctions
Samsung added their own Touch-Wiz UX interface on the Galaxy Mega 6.3. A skin which is easy to use but also is getting a bit boring. A good thing is that Samsung added landscape mode on the Galaxy Mega 6.3. When you rotate the Galaxy Mega 6.3 you still can use the Mega 6.3 in an easy way. If you want to know more about Samsung's touch-wiz Nature UX interface we advice you to read our Galaxy S4 review. As with the Galaxy S4 Samsung added a lot of new smartfunctions in their Touch-Wiz nature UX interface and this device has them too. Features as Smart Pause, Smart Stay, Air Gesture, Air View, and Multi window were all present. Cause the Galaxy Mega 6.3 also has NFC, the smartfunction S Beam is also present! The big question is, will we use all of these smartfunctions? Probably not but they are still fun to show to one of your friends. As mentioned before the landscape mode from Samsung on the Galaxy 6.3 was actually very easy in use. We didn't expect this at all, but it turned out very well!
We give the interface of Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 a higher grade as with the Galaxy S4, this is because of the landscape mode.
Interface – 8.5/10
Smart functions – 9/10
Landscape mode.
As earlier mentioned we were quite happy to see the landscape mode on the Galaxy Mega 6.3. Thanks to the landscape mode everything was very easy to use. We even liked this more than our own Galaxy Tab 7.7. (Yes the tablet with the awesome AMOLED display). We made some pictures for you to show how landscape mode looks like on the Galaxy Mega 6.3. Make sure to view our video too for a fast interface walk-through.
Screen – Multimedia
Yes we are finally at the part what the most people will care about. The Screen! The Display of the Galaxy Mega 6.3 is 6.3 inches with a resolution of 720 x 1280 and with a pixel density of 223 ppi. We would love to see a Full HD LCD display or some huge AMOLED display. But this would mean the price would be to expensive and Samsung couldn't bring a good follow-up on the first generation Mega devices. The display of the Galaxy 6.3 is pretty nice real and beautiful and vivid colors, something we really liked! Some minus about the screen is of course the colour black. We as team normally use smartphones with AMOLED panels and that means that the black OLEDs are turned off. And will give you the ultimate black feeling. The black colour reproduction wasn' that good but for us AMOLED is still the best. We only can hope Samsung will bring more OLED panels to their mobile phones. OLED is in our opinion still the best mobile display tech around.
The display of the Galaxy 6.3 is of course brilliant for playing games, surfing the internet, to watch photo's or to view videos. We tried to show of the spiral view in the gallery sadly our firmware wasn't final yet. But we could show off a video! We did the last thing to show you how and there for it wasn't there. We did show its display in different viewing angles. Is the Galaxy Mega 6.3 a multimedia device? YES! Watching video's surfing the internet, view photo's with a screen as this it is very nice to have a 6.3 inch screen. Everything looks sharp (can be sharper) but based on multimedia functions as video, gallery, internet we have to say: This is the ultimate multimedia device! OK, we did said the same with the Note II and the Galaxy S4.
Yes the display could be better but based on multimedia we couldn't give the Galaxy Mega 6.3 a lower score than below.
Multimedia – 9.9/10
Screen – 7.5/10
Camera
As with the Galaxy S4 the Galaxy Mega 6.3 uses the same camera functions. Functions as Beauty Face, Best Photo,Continuous shot, Best face, Sound& Shot, Rich tone(HDR),
Panorama, Sports, Night shot are all present on the Galaxy 6.3. We made ourself a couple of photo's with device. Remember our device has still a pre-release firmware.
Camera – 7.5/10
Performance
The Galaxy Mega 6.3 uses a dual-core processor clocked at 1.7 GHz. Something for a device with a caliber like this we would love to see a quad-core processor instead of the dual-core processor. Now we need to say our device was on a pre-release firmware. The device had a couple of bugs and wasn't fast at all. We hope that the final version is OK, but still in our opinion a device like this and based on a ”old” dual-core processor is a big lose for us. Samsung probably thinks everything is next for the next generation.
Performance – 6.0/10
Battery
As mentioned before we tried the Galaxy mega 6.3 for some time. The firmware wasn't final yet but the battery was surprisingly not that terrible as we would expect. We thought a huge display like this would drink the battery like water, surprisingly it did not. We think that the Galaxy Mega 6.3 could play full video's and we do expect that you need to charge the Mega 6.3 every day. We can't tell much about the battery yet. But we will update our review when we can! At the moment we think that the battery will be around the same level as the Galaxy S4.
Battery – 7.0/10
Conclusion
From little to big, from mobile phone to almost a tablet. Yes the Galaxy Mega 6.3 is a little bit of both, a little tablet but a huge smartphone. We liked to play with the Galaxy Mega 6.3 specially to watch video's or to surf the internet. As advice we could say: ” if you want to buy the Galaxy Mega 6.3 because you travel a lot… Go for it! This is perfect for people who travel much with the train or plane. For calling with device like this is our opinion that this device is actually a bit to huge. You almost call with a small tablet. Something that looks strange for outsiders (uh we said this by note too owners first too). We believe this need a couple of years before people accept huge smartphones. Like we now accept Galaxy Note sized smartphones! All on all, a 6.3” LCD HD display a 8 megapixel camera with LED flash Samsung's own easy to use interface called Touch-Wiz and based on the latest version on Android called Jelly Bean. We simple can't say this device isn't useful. No it is! But only for the right group of people.
If you want to know everything about the specification of the Galaxy Mega 6.3 or you want to compare the Galaxy Mega 6.3 with other devices hit over our compare page!
The Galaxy Mega 6.3 scored a 7.8 out of 10
