T-Mobile had plenty of good phones when the Samsung Galaxy Exhibit appeared, but few Android handsets under $400. The Exhibit undercut them all at $216, or $9 a month over 24 months. PCMag’s June 2013 review called it the least expensive Android phone on the carrier, and a pretty good value for the money.
A small phone with a familiar face
Under the hood, the Exhibit is a slightly modified unlocked Galaxy S III Mini. That is not a shrunken Galaxy S III, a point worth making, since the S III is bigger in every way. What the Exhibit does share is the software and a family look: the single Home button, the plastic silver ring round the face and the pebble blue finish.
It measures 4.78 by 2.46 by 0.42 inches and weighs 4.27 ounces, so it is squatter and thicker than its namesake, and less elegant. The back is matte plastic, with a blue metallic trim around the camera sensor that PCMag’s reviewer said looked like a forgotten shipping sticker. The compensation is handling. Smaller hands will find it far easier to manage than the S III, though the on-screen keyboard felt cramped, which the reviewer rarely says of phones this size. Swype, built in, lets you drag a finger across the keys and softens the problem.
The screen is a 3.8-inch, 800-by-480 TFT LCD. It looks reasonably sharp, but the colours lack brilliance and it could be brighter. Two backlit capacitive keys sit either side of the physical Home key. The Power button is on the right, the Volume rocker and microSD slot are on the left, and the power port is on the bottom.
Speed and calls
The detail that matters on the network side is the ceiling. The Exhibit tops out at HSPA+ 21 on T-Mobile, not the carrier’s faster HSPA+ 42 or LTE, which the reviewer would have preferred. In New York City it still managed downloads averaging just over 4Mbps and uploads around 2Mbps. It also supports 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and calling over Wi-Fi.
As a voice phone it is solid. Calls sounded well-rounded through the earpiece at good volume, and an on-screen button pushes the level higher once you have maxed it out. At full tilt there is a faint background ringing, though nothing terribly distracting. Calls were clear, though noise cancellation was average at best. The speakerphone was loud enough to use outdoors, and calls over a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset sounded great; the same headset handled voice commands through S-Voice, Samsung’s answer to Siri. Talk time came to a decent 7 hours and 43 minutes.
The phone runs on a 1GHz dual-core STE U8420 processor, a chip PCMag said it had seen little of. It felt responsive in everyday use but turned in very average benchmark scores. Most of the 800,000-plus apps on Google Play will run fine; 3D gaming is where it will struggle.
The plans
T-Mobile’s new contract-free plans started at $50 a month for unlimited talk and text plus 500MB of high-speed data, after which speeds drop to 2G. For $60 you got 2GB of high-speed data, and for $70 unlimited high-speed data. PCMag judged those rates excellent next to AT&T and Verizon, and a good match for the Exhibit’s budget price.
