It may have been a late entrant into the crowded premium smartphone market, but boy, did Samsung arrive with a bang! The I9000 Galaxy S smartphone takes the out-and-out brawn route to designing a smartphone, packing it to the gills with pure grunt — a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird CPU processor, 512MB of RAM, a decent 5 megapixel camera with HD video recording, and 16GB of onboard space, with expandability upto 48GB!

Design wise, the Galaxy S is rather iPhone inspired, with its metallic rim and single front button. At 122.4mm x 64.2mm x 9.9mm, the Galaxy S’ dimensions are larger than its contemporaries, but the all-plastic casing helps keep the weight down to an almost lightweight 118g.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of such excessive use of plastic, it really detracts from the premium image of this phone. Of course, the size, weight and the plastic fade into the horizon the moment you switch the phone on. No two ways about it, the magnificent and massive 4-in Super AMOLED display running a WVGA (480x800 pixel) resolution is unquestionably the best screen I’ve seen on a mobile phone that sells in India. It is unbelievably bright and crisp, and its use of the Super AMOLED screen technology lets Samsung keep it thinner and brighter while using less power. And with the Galaxy S supporting MKV, MP4 and DivX videos out of the box, the screen makes even more sense if you plan to use the Galaxy S as a portable media player.

Using the phone then is a delight, with the capacitive screen responding to the gentlest of finger touches, and the beefy processor ensuring that the pinch and zoom experience is as good, if not better than the iPhone. That said, there was the occasional sluggishness while launching or closing apps.

Samsung’s added a custom user interface called TouchWIZ 3.0 over the base Android 2.1, and while I personally prefer the more polished HTC Sense interface, Samsung has added some neat features and apps to personalise your phone experience. In particular, I liked the built-in Swype text entry method, which allows you to slide your fingers over the letters you want to type in a single motion, and the software figures out the word you were trying to type. It appears awkward at first, but if you get used to it, you will wonder what life was like before Swype.

Honestly, the Galaxy S has what it takes to take on the best, and at Rs 30,990 is priced in a premium manner as well. Something’s got to give, right?

• Rating: 9/10
• Price: Rs 30,990/-
• URL: http://bit.ly/9qAwFJ

More mini magic

The diminutive Mac mini needs no introduction. For long, it’s been the cheapest way to buy into the Mac family, and the 2010 ground-up refresh brings it closer to its more expensive siblings. For starters, the Mac mini has started looking a lot more like the rest of the family, with a striking aluminium unibody makeover. It is thinner but slightly bigger than the previous gen, but manages to fit in the power adaptor inside the casing, which makes the net effect rather pleasing especially if you plan to use this in the living room.

Which is pretty much the point with a Mac mini, really. Previous generations of Mac loyalists have managed to use the Mac mini as a home theatre PC for years now, and the new model’s HDMI port is a nod in that direction. All you have to do is supply the HDMI cable to connect this baby to your LCD TV, and boom! You have a full-fledged computer connected to your TV. Now, since this is a computer after all, you will need a keyboard and a mouse to do anything remotely useful if you plan to connect it to a TV. It’s really an extra bit of flexibility, this HDMI port.

Apart from the standard array of ports and a new SDXC card slot, the mini is rather like the entry-level MacBook, with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, an NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. If you’re looking to upgrade the RAM, the mini’s bottom panel opens up with Apple-esque simplicity. Pity you can’t get at the hard drive as easily. And then there’s the obvious — a Blu-ray drive is missing, and that’s being attributed to a lack of demand for the medium. Having it as an optional built-to-order add-on wouldn’t be so bad now, would it?

At the end of the day, the Mac mini is pricey purely as a computer, but almost ticks all the right boxes as a sexy living room companion.

• Rating: 8/10
• Price: Rs 44,900 for the 2.4 GHz/2GB/320GB model

Speed drive

If you’re looking for storage for a Mac, or just something that packs the style punches, the Iomega UltraMax Plus Desktop Hard Drive is worth considering. The look is clean, and there’s the dotted-grille design and aluminium shell that would look comfy coming out of Apple’s design labs. It also covers all manners of connectivity options — you get USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSATA ports, which allow the UltraMax Plus to achieve impressive transfer speeds, if you have the relevant hardware on your Mac/PC like a FireWire 800 port or eSATA connection, that is. It’s pricey, but the inclusion of speedier ports, a winning design and data protection features like RAID may make it worth your while.

• Rating: 7/10
• Price: Rs 19,500 (2 terabytes capacity)
• URL: http://bit.ly/bhRCJF