The Samsung Galaxy has turned into a yearly event. Why? Because
Samsung's flagship Android smartphone is offered by nearly every major
carrier and it sells by the millions. It has great features for the
price and a decent selection of third party accessories. It's 2012 and
the year of the Galaxy S III, a phone with top specs and Samsung's
signature thin design and light weight. The 4.7 ounce phone runs Android
OS 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with Samsung TouchWiz software. In fact,
there's a lot more than TouchWiz here: Samsung adds a host of new "S"
apps like S Voice and S Beam as well as wireless sharing services for
photos and presentations. There's almost too much software here to keep
track of, but even if you use just a fraction, you'll probably find
something new and useful.
Design and Ergonomics
While HTC has taken chances and evolved
their high end One phones with unibody polycarbonate casings and a new
look, Samsung sticks with what works. The phone is made of plastic and
it has the usual paper thin back cover. Both the Pebble Blue and Marble
White models have a high gloss finish that looks attractive even if it
doesn't look chic and expensive. The blue model has light blue sides
that morph into a darker metallic, striated back. It looks cool but
attracts fingerprints like mad. The white model is more organic looking
(Samsung was going for curvy, humanistic design with the GS3) and it
shows fingerprints much less. Despite the 4.8" display, the Galaxy S III
is about the same size as a 4.5" smartphone and it's nearly identical
in size to the HTC One X. It's by no means a behemoth like the Samsung
Galaxy Note.
Like most Samsung smartphones, the power
button is on the upper right side and the volume controls are on the
opposite side (making it easy to hit both power and volume at once by
accident). Despite that complaint, on a tall phone like the S III, it
is easier to reach the power button when it's on the side rather than on
the top like most other brands. The micro USB port is on the bottom and
the headphone jack is up top. The microSD card slot is under the back
cover and there's no need to pull the battery to swap cards. GSM models
with a SIM card slot have a micro SIM card slot near the removable
battery. The GS3 has a notification LED--a rarity on Samsung Android
smartphones. If you turn the LED feature on, the light will blink until
you've taken care of whatever it's notifying you about.
While the Samsung Galaxy S III falls far behind the HTC One X and One S
in terms of materials and aesthetics, it is a solidly built phone
that's decently attractive. And for those of you who love the hardware
home button (the kind that moves and clicks) that Samsung offers on many
overseas models, it's alive and well here. Two capacitive buttons flank
it for Menu and Back, similar to Gingerbread phone models. Rather than a
dedicated ICS multi-tasking button, you'll press and hold the home
button to see a list of recently run applications. Double-tap the home
button to launch S Voice (voice command).
Display
The 4.8" HD Super AMOLED display would've been really exciting a year or
two ago, but these days IPS and advanced LCDs offer sharper text, wider
viewing angles and better outdoor visibility. We'd love to see Samsung
move away from Super AMOLED displays in their most expensive phones;
they once were a competitive advantage but now hobble the phone. The
1280 x 720 display has a Pentile Matrix that uses fewer subpixels than
LCDs, and the result is slightly reduced sharpness. Still, there are a
lot of pixels here thanks to the high resolution, and we suspect many
Super AMOLED fans will enjoy the display. Super AMOLED displays have
better than life colors, though the colors are more in control here and
less cartoony, and black levels are phenomenal. White levels are Super
AMOLED's weak spot and whites aren't quite as bright as LCDs and they
still have a slight blue tint, despite the GS3's improved color balance.
The display's colors pop, but the screen isn't hugely bright. Note that
Samsung has a power saving feature that automatically dims whites to
save power and we suggest turning this off to avoid dingy whites (the
power drain is negligible).
Samsung's auto-brightness as ever tends to be too dark, so we had to go
with manual brightness to suit our eyes. I don't mind manual brightness
but that means having to adjust it when outdoors under sunlight because
the display is hard to see at 50% brightness (my preferred indoor
brightness setting).
Phone and Data
The Samsung Galaxy S III has superb
voice quality on both Sprint and T-Mobile. Samsung really knows how to
make an excellent voice phone. Incoming and outgoing voice are loud and
very clear with no background noise or digital distortion. Just in case
call quality isn't already stellar enough for you, there's a volume
boost setting for noisy environments and EQ settings-- yes EQ isn't just
for music players anymore.
On both the T-Mobile and Sprint versions
our data connection sometimes dropped for a second every so often. That
makes me think there's a firmware issue since it occurs on two
different carriers, and I'd assume Samsung could fix this with an update
if it proves to be a problem for others.
The T-Mobile version has 42Mbps HSPA+, and that
provides excellent data speeds that didn't make me pine for LTE. Our
phone averaged 11Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up. The Sprint version has 3G
EV-DO Rev A and 4G LTE, but Sprint's LTE network isn't yet live, so we
had to use their sluggish 3G network that averaged 400k down and 350k up
in our area of the Dallas metroplex. Sprint's version has a feature
that will automatically turn WiFi on if the phone is in range of a known
WiFi network and that certainly helps. AT&T and Verizon versions
have both 3G and LTE, and both carriers have robust LTE networks with
fast data speeds. All carrier versions have the mobile hotspot feature
that turns your phone into a high speed wireless modem for laptops,
tablets and other devices (this may require an additional monthly
charge).
Performance and Battery Life
All US carriers are going with the
1.5GHZ dual core Snapdragon S4 CPU (because it's compatible with LTE)
rather than Samsung's latest Exynos CPU. That's not a bad thing since
the Snapdragon S4 is a top performer that holds its own against the
Exynos and quad core Tegra 3. It manages strong battery life as well,
and the Galaxy S III on T-Mobile and Sprint (neither running on LTE) had
no trouble making it through a full day on a charge with moderate use.
When we get our hands on the LTE Verizon and AT&T models, we'll
update this review with info on their battery life.
The Galaxy S III benchmarks similarly to other 1.5GHz Qualcomm S4
smartphones like the HTC One X. It falls just a few points behind the
One X, and it feels responsive despite the demands of TouchWiz 4. Is it
one of the fastest Android phones currently on the market? Yes it is.
Does it feel faster than the iPhone 4S? Not so much, but that's an
Android vs. iOS issue. The phone has Adreno 225 graphics, and that's a
capable graphics processor that can handle the latest 3D titles well. We
tested a variety of games that worked perfectly, though Max Payne
didn't draw on screen controls on the GS III, making it impossible to
play. That seems to be a compatibility issue with some Samsung models
and the developer is working on that issue.
Software
The smartphone runs Android OS 4.0, the
latest and greatest version of that OS. It has Samsung TouchWiz 4, and
if you're a Samsung owner, the UI will look very familiar to you. In
fact, it really doesn't resemble vanilla Android at all, and Samsung
goes farther than HTC's Sense to skin Android (watch our video review to
see TouchWiz in detail). You get Samsung's usual custom app icons,
their widgets for various Samsung apps and services like Media Hub, S
Memo, S Calendar (it now skins Calendar instead of being a separate app)
and Samsung's music and video players as well as a host of new widgets.
There are many, many screens of widgets to choose from out of the box.
Samsung's own app store is on board, as is their Buddy Photo Share
feature, AllShare Play DLNA streaming, a wireless group PowerPoint
presentation feature, and a proprietary Galaxy S III to Galaxy S III
hybridization of Android Beam NFC and WiFi Direct called S Beam.
Honestly, there's more software here than most of us can wrap our heads
around. Samsung's software push is perhaps excessive: some of the apps
and features feel more like buried gee-whiz gimmicks than stuff that's
easy to use and necessary. That said, you can explore what you wish and
ignore the rest.
The most talked about feature is Samsung's S Voice.
It's Vlingo on steroids and it tries to fight Siri on the iPhone but
loses. Where Siri does a pretty good job of hearing and understanding
us, S Voice seems like my partially deaf grandma from the old country
whose English is a little quirky. It helps if you talk quite loudly at
the phone when issuing commands, and forget using it in noisy
environments. Like Siri, it sends your commands to a server using the
data connection and the server interprets those commands and tells the
phone what to do. If your data / WiFi connection is slow or down, you'll
get "sorry, network connection error" messages. Check out our video
review to see S Voice in action. It is useful for most common tasks like
checking the weather or your next appointment, but it doesn't do well
with those fanciful natural language queries that Siri handles so well
like "what's the meaning of life?"
You can set the phone to always listen for your
command (prefaced with something like "hi Galaxy"), and that can impact
battery life. Alternatively, you can set it to run whenever you
double-press on the home button, which doesn't affect battery life.
One of our favorite features is how the
phone will automatically call the person you're currently texting if you
put the phone to your head when viewing that conversation. And we
really like the Smart Stay feature that
uses the front camera to see if you're looking at the phone's screen and
prevents it from turning off while you're looking at it (but why isn't
this feature turned on by default?). Less useful but cool if you want to
impress your friends is the PIP (picture in a picture) feature where
you can play a video in the Samsung video player and tap a button to
keep that video running in a small window while you're in other apps.
Camera
Like the Galaxy S II, the S III has an 8 megapixel
camera that can shoot 1080p video, but quality has improved over the S
II. We still noted some exposure issues in bright outdoor shots where
the camera rendered hazy images, but the new HDR feature helps greatly
with that. Dedicated image processing chips are the next big thing in
high end phones (the HTC One X has one too), and that allows for
extremely quick shot times. Again, like the HTC One X and One S, you can
shoot photos while simultaneously recording video but there's no slow
motion option like that of the One X. There are plenty of effects to
play with: exposure, macro mode, face detection, smile detection and
panorama. This is a very capable camera, though we give the edge to the
HTC One X for image quality.
Video quality is excellent at 1080p and 30fps: video is sharp and colorful with smooth motion and little in the way of blockiness. The continuous autofocus sometimes hunts when several subjects are in motion at once, but overall it's great stuff.
Video quality is excellent at 1080p and 30fps: video is sharp and colorful with smooth motion and little in the way of blockiness. The continuous autofocus sometimes hunts when several subjects are in motion at once, but overall it's great stuff.
For those of you who can't be social enough, there's Share Shot:
a feature where you and your GS III-toting buddies can share photos in
real time over a WiFi Direct connection. Speaking of social, Buddy Photo Share
will implore you to tag faces and assign photos to your social
networking friends. This was a hit or miss feature and it sometimes
didn't recognize nearly identical shots of the same person, and it
thought a houseplant was my best friend.
Conclusion
Is the Samsung Galaxy S III an excellent
smartphone? Yes it is. Given the millions of preorders, I suspect many
of you would buy this no matter what I said about the phone. That speaks
of Samsung's momentum in the smartphone market and their excellent
track record. Is this Samsung's best Android phone ever? Yes it is, but
there is room for improvement. I'd love to see Samsung use high quality
materials and cutting edge designs in their top tier phone. I wish
they'd cut down on the absurd number of features and apps introduced
with the GS III, and instead focused on making a few core apps really
solid. S Voice is a fantastic feature that needs more development (it's
hard of hearing, prone to network connection errors and needs more
natural language AI to compete with Siri). With more work, it could
really sell folks on the Galaxy S III. If Samsung axed the Group Cast
PowerPoint presentation sharing over WiFi feature to spend more time on S
Voice and facial recognition in photos, the smartphone world would be a
better place. Software and cosmetic gripes aside, the Samsung Galaxy S
III has phenomenal voice quality, a fast CPU and good battery life for a
powerful phone. If you buy one, you probably won't be disappointed.
Price: Starting at $199 for 16 gig model with contract
Website: www.samsung.com
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