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The Samsung Epic 4G Touch is a powerful media device. The Android smartphone supports common music file types such as MP3 and AAC and lesser-known formats such as MID and OGG.
The internal 16GB of memory is plenty for most needs, and twice that of other Android smartphones. The Samsung Epic 4G Touch also supports memory cards up to 32GB each.
Samsung includes its own Music app, which enables you to create playlists, view music by album or artist, search for a favourite song and even adjust a handy EQ setting for your style of music. We couldn't find a Music widget for the app.
Samsung also provides a Music Hub app that you can use for purchasing and renting movies and TV shows, but not music. Since this is a Sprint phone, you can also use the Sprint Music Plus app to play songs and snippets of music or buy ringtones.
Songs played loud enough on the Samsung Epic 4G Touch, but this isn't the phone you want if you tend to play music through the included speaker on the phone. Through headphones, music sounded clear enough but had a slightly distorted sound compared to the iPhone 4S.
The Media Hub app works well for finding movies and TV shows and playing them on the phone. It's a bit restrictive - this is a highly protected system that authorises playback only on your phone. The bright and colourful screen is amazingly rich for video. The TV show Fringe looked outstanding, with smooth frame rates that looked similar to the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 tablets.
Since the phone is so light, movie-watching is easier on this phone than even the Motorola Atrix 2, which is another phone with a bright and colourful screen. The Epic 4G Touch played both of the major video formats we tested, including MP4 and H.264, but didn't play an XVID video of the show The Killing.
The Gallery app is fairly routine for an Android phone - you can view albums of photos, scan through Facebook photos and share your images over email, text, Bluetooth and the AllShare wireless service. Samsung includes an obvious 'Send To' button for transmitting photos from the phone.
There's a simplistic photo editor for painting on an image, adding colour swatches and copying sections of one photo over to another. In addition to the photo sharing options such as email and AllShare, you can also post videos to YouTube.
Sprint offers an FM Radio app that's easy to use, but with basic features.
The AllShare service is another highlight of the device. You can easily install a desktop app, then stream content to and from the device over a Wi-Fi network. The app found an AllShare server quickly and made the connection, and we were sending files after only a few minutes.
