The Charge, which goes , costs $300 with a 2-year contract--$50 more than the ThunderBolt--but does come with free mobile hotspot capability "for a limited time" (provided you buy a nationwide calling plan and an unlimited data plan (starting at $30). The Charge's mobile hotspot can connect up to 10 devices via Wi-fi or five devices via a 3G CDMA connection.
Key Specs
Like the ThunderBolt, the Charge has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen, runs (Samsung had not comment about why the phone doesn't' run the newer Android 2.3 OS), and includes an HTML5 browser. It sports a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera (with flash) and a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video chatting. A 1 GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor (same as Samsung's ) sits under the hood--not dual-core, but not slow either.
Design
The Charge is a largish phone with an oval shape that comes to a soft point at the bottom. It is 5.1 inches long, 2.6 inches wide and .46 inch thick. The Charge is about the same width and depth as the ThunderBolt, but noticeably longer.
The Charge, at just over 5 ounces, is also noticeably lighter than the ThunderBolt's almost 5.8 ounces, which some will like. Personally I like the weight of the ThunderBolt more; it feels like I'm holding a real piece of gear in my hand.
The Charge, like Samsung's Galaxy S 4G, has a band of smokey chrome-colored plastic (Samsung calls this "mirror gray") running around the outside front of the phone, which, to me, creates a cheap-looking effect. Question: Would Apple or HTC ever use such materials on a phone? Answer: Nope.
The functional set-up of the phone is pretty much like other phones in its class. Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons on the front bottom, front-facing camera and ear speaker at the top, earphone jack on the top, volume rocker and mini USB port on the left side edge, power button and HDMI port on the right side edge, camera and flash on the top of the back side, speaker on the bottom back.
Display is a Difference Maker
The literature says that the Charge's Super AMOLED screen "sets a new standard for brightness, clarity and outdoor visibility." I selected a movie trailer from the "Media Hub" (Sofia Coppolla's 'Somewhere') to see if that was true. I was impressed--the Charge's display looks as good or better than that on any other smartphone I've seen. The picture I saw did have impressive clarity, and the wide range between the most sunlight-bright whites and the deepest blacks of which the display is capable was immediately apparent. The colors were vibrant and true-to-life without being overbearing. This was a tough part of my testing, because I kept watching the pretty moving pictures, and didn't want to turn it off.
The fat LTE pipe carrying the video data packets is important here too. The high bandwidth will reduce lost packets to the extent that artifacting, skips, and jitter in the video become very rare. The Charge has to bring in high-definition video streams intact and the AMOLED screen to display the video well. That's a pretty compelling combination.
As for the "outdoor visibility" claim, I'm a believer here too. I held the Charge and the ThunderBolt side-by-side in direct sunlight, pulled up the phone dialer on each, and saw that the Charge's screen was indeed easier to see. I could see the ThunderBolt's dialer, but had to squint a little.
The Overlay
Samsung puts its own TouchWiz interface design over the Android operating system in the Charge and other Samsung phones. This overlay presents to the user all the content (and more) that the normal Android interface does, but the presentation is a little more crowded and noisy. I personally prefer HTC's Sense UI overlay, which looks more elegant and well-organized to me, but that may be purely a matter of taste.
Camera
I was also moderately impressed with the quality of the 8-megapixel camera on the phone. Viewed on the Charge's screen the still pictures I shot contained some of the contrast and clarity I saw in the videos I watched. When I viewed the photos on the large screen the high resolution of the shots was apparent. On certain shots (when I held the camera steady) I could detect the kind of fine detail you see in images shot with single-purpose cameras, but rarely in smartphone camera shots (click the zoom image at left). On the downside, the photos seemed to have a bit of a dark cast to them. The photos were not quite as good as ones I've shot with my iPhone, but noticeably better than those I've shot on my HTC EVO 4G.
The video I shot was less impressive. Viewed on my PC screen, the smallest amount of motion caused the video to blur and wash out. I also saw a lot of correction for light balance going on in the footage. The footage I shot in normal light indoors turned out better, but still not as sharp as I'd hoped. All of the videos looked better viewed on the screen of the Charge than on a full-sized display.
The camera software interface itself was easy to use, for the most part. One function allows you to tap the spot on the screen where you want to the camera to focus, which seemed to help some of my shots. I liked that the camera uses the phone's volume rocker as its zoom controller, but was disappointed that there was no physical button on the phone to start shooting images or video.
Data Speeds
Testing from my office in the South of Market district of San Francisco I recorded an average download speed of 8.5 mbps and an average upload speed of 3.9 mbps. Running the same test at the same time, I recorded a very similar average download speed--8.25 mbps. (Unfortunately, the FCC cannot accurately record LTE network upload speeds on the ThunderBolt, so that comparison is omitted here.)
Shortly after I tested the Charge's speed, I tested the speed of its mobile hotspot in the same manner. The connected at an average 14 mpbs for downloads and 8 mbps for uploads. Verizon is apparently allocating more bandwidth to the hotspot because it must allocate one pool of bandwidth to multiple devices. The bandwidth allocated to the phone, meanwhile, need only be enough to connect one device.
For comparison, I also ran the speed test on a laptop connected with Verizon's new Mifi 4G hotspot. The Mifi showed a download speed of 15 mbps and an upload speed of 13.7 mbps. It's possible that the Charge's hotspot isn't quite as fast as Verizon's single-purpose hotspots, but it's still plenty fast. Word of warning: battery life disappears extra fast while the mobile hotspot is on; better to use it when the phone is plugged in, if possible. Which brings us to our next issue.
The Battery Problem
Samsung may have named its phone the "Charge" because that may be the mode the phone spends most of its time in.
The ThunderBolt has already gained a reputation as having a weak battery. The first 4G phone, Sprint's HTC EVO 4G, suffered from the same problem. The 4G radios in these devices demand far more power than those in 3G phones simply because they pull and push so much more data from and to the network.
Of course I was very curious about the longevity of the Charge's 1600 maH battery. To test it I streamed a movie in standard definition from a server on the web for four-plus hours, a function that would keep the phone pulling down data from the web continuously, as well as keep the display and speaker operating continuously. I then noted the level of battery depletion, worked out the rate of depletion and finally extrapolated how long the battery would have lasted had the test continued. Since the phone is said to use more juice when the LTE signal is weaker, I tested in place where reception could be called "fair" but not "good."
Samsung says the Charge's battery will last "up to 660 minutes," or 11 hours. (Technically, if the battery lasted only two minutes no one could say that it didn't last "up to 660 minutes"!) At any rate, our battery test found that the Samsung battery life comes up way short of the 660 minute number--after four hours and 8 minute of continuous video streaming the battery had been depleted to 37 percent of capacity. At that rate, the battery would have expired completely in 393 minutes or 6 hours and 33 minutes.
That's assuming the battery expires at the same rate when it begins to run out of charge. In my (anecdotal) experience, however, that rate of depletion accelerates. So the 6 hours 33 minutes of battery life may be a little on the generous side.
Still, six and a half hours of continuous use isn't really too bad. After all, who is going to keep their phone in continuous use for that long during the day? It seems pretty likely that a user could make it through a day without the Charge needed a charge--more than I can say for some 4G phones I've used.
And six and a half hours certainly beats the ThunderBolt's rumored battery life of just 4 hours, if you believe the reports. I ran the same video streaming test on the ThunderBolt. After 4 hours and 3 minutes of streaming, the Thunderbolt still had 40 percent of its battery left. At that rate the battery would have completely expired in 405 minutes or 6 hours and 45 minutes. HTC promises only 6 hours and 18 minutes of usage time for the ThunderBolt.
Call Quality
To test the voice quality I placed some calls to land lines from a quiet spot, then from beside a busy street in San Francisco. The person I called said they could hear me very clearly but that my voice sounded like "radio voice"--that is, very present but without much body. I heard the same thing coming through the ear speaker on the Charge; the voice was clear but didn't sound exactly human, as it does on the iPhone 4.
When I called my friend from beside the busy street, I learned two things: the ear speaker was loud enough for me to hear my friend's voice clearly, without even turning the volume all the way up. Most importantly, my friend said that the traffic noise I could hear so clearly on my end sounded no louder than a dull background noise on his end. The noise cancellation in the Charge must be of fairly high quality.
Bottom Line
Samsung's Droid Charge is a strong second for Verizon, especially for people who like to stream high-quality video, video chat or play web-based games. The combination of the impressive AMOLED stream and the fat LTE pipe to carry loads of high-quality media down to the phone is a powerful combination. If you can deal with the not-so-impressive battery life, Samsung's somewhat cluttered user interface and the general biggishness of the phone, the Charge might be a good phone for you
Since the Charge is the second LTE phone to hit the market in the US, it must be measured against the first LTE phone, the ThunderBolt. And here the Charge comes up short. While the ThunderBolt's display may not look quite as beautiful as the Charge's, its connection speeds are the same or a little better, its battery is a little better, its physical design is smaller and more elegant, and its user interface is a more ordered, pleasing environment to work in. In short, if I were choosing between the two Verizon LTE phones, I could choose the one that's $50 less, and still walk out with the better of the two phones.