Software
As mentioned above, the Continuum is very similar on the software front to the Samsung Fascinate. I won’t bore you with a repeat of old information so let’s keep it short and sweet.
The Continuum uses Samsung’s TouchWiz Android interface which provides and app drawer which mimics iOS (even down to the icon shape). Along for the ride is also a bunch of awful widgets that are specific to TouchWiz (I’d be surprised if anyone found them particularly useful). For more detail on all of this, see the Software section of our Fascinate review.
Performance
Samsung has promised Android 2.2 to Galaxy S devices for some time now, but they’ve yet to deliver to the Continuum. It needs it quite badly. Despite the fact that the Continuum doesn’t score much lower in Quadrant than the Fascinate, it feels very sluggish by comparison. The Continuum just feels like it hangs all over the place. You’ll notice this when the keyboard takes a while to be called up as you click in an input field, and especially when using the four Android buttons (hidden-menu, Home, Back, and Search) and unlocking the phone. This is likely a combination of the Ticker display running and the fact that the Continuum only (oddly) has 366MB of RAM while the Fascinate, and most other modern smartphones have 512MB or more.
Here’s how the Continuum stacks up against other devices that we’ve benchmarked (but it’s important to note that this isn’t always an indicator of real world performance:
Conclusion
I must inform anyone reading this review that Continuum is a rather poorly executed concept from Samsung. From the weakly implemented and inherently flawed ticker display, to the sluggish performance; the Samsung Continuum is not a phone that I’d recommend if you have other choices at the same price. The Samsung Fascinate [tracking page][review] is a better alternative that provides a more snappy experience (with a bigger screen and a thinner body) and can usually be had at the same price. Here’s to hoping that Samsung’s next experiment will be more thoroughly thought through.
