Samsung Galaxy S Review: The Android Market

The Samsung Galaxy S, running on Android 2.1 and all, has access to the Android Market for all your application and mobile content needs.

And here’s a little bit about it.

Right on the first menu screen of applications, is the icon for the Android Market place. Launching it, brings up the following screen (provided ofcourse you signed in with your Google credentials when you first switched on your Android device).

A nice ol’ list of the featured content on the Android Market. By default it’s sorted by “Top Free” apps, but you can change it to list the most recently listed apps. Each application is listed with it’s app icon, name, creator name and rating and price.

Content is sorted into three sections: Apps, Games and Downloads. While the first two categories are self-explanatory, ‘Downloads‘ is a list of all the apps and content you’ve downloaded from the Android Market, on your device. There’s even a featured content banner that fades between category types, at the top of the store. Worth mentioning that both the Apps and Games category are further broken down into mini-sections, like productivity, entertainment, etc apps and Action, Arcade, Casual games.

You can also search the Marketplace at any time, by tapping on the Search icon at the top. The search function also remembers a history of your previously searched words.

And wait, what’s that?

Oh yes. The Android Market informs you of any applications you have already installed. So freakkin convenient. Especially if you’ve already bought an application before. Also very convenient while browsing for new apps “just to try them out”.

And if that wasnt enough, the piece de resistance must be…

… that the Android market also tells you if any of the apps installed on your device have an update available. No need to manually update any of them, just click on the app icon, or go to the ‘downloads‘ section to see which apps have an update available.

You can also set the Market to notify you when updates are available (on by default). Just hit the ‘edit‘ hardware key and select ‘notifications‘ from the menu that pops up.

And that brings us to, how to actually download and install any of these listed apps on your Android device. It couldnt be any easier really. Just tap on the app listing.

That will bring up a full description of the app, along with the app version number, size, total downloads so far, total ratings so far, overall rating, and a couple screenshots and user reviews at the bottom. You can also view more applications by the same developer, or related apps on the store. Everything you’d want to know about the app to be honest.

And to download it, all you have to do is tap the ‘install‘ button. You’ll get a quick prompt about what features that application will have access to.

And that’s about it. You’ll get a quick prompt telling you that your app is being downloaded and installed in the background, and you can continue checking out other apps in the meanwhile. All very effortless. And you can download multiple apps too, they all get queued up very nicely and are downloaded.

If you ever need to check how your downloads are going, all you have to do is pull down the Android notification bar at the top and that will give you a percentile bar on how the installation or download is coming along.

Like I mentioned before, this is all so effortless, and there are so many apps out there(both free and paid) that you should soon find yourself with quite a load of apps installed on your Android device.

Worth mentioning, is that the Samsung Galaxy S also has access to the Samsung App Store, but that only had about 7 apps for the Galaxy S listed, so it isnt much worth talking about.

To give you a better idea of the whole process, here’s a quick video on the Android Market on the Samsung Galaxy S.

So, as you can see, download apps from the Android Market is a pretty enjoyable experience. It couldnt get any simpler, at this point.

Have a question about the Android Market? Something we missed? Do let us know in the comments below y’all.