In case you don’t already know all in regards to the Samsung Galaxy S II , where have you ever been the past two months? The successor to at least one of the hottest Android handsets to this point carries a burden of expectations almost as sizable as its 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus screen. It promises to be thinner, lighter, and faster than the Galaxy S that preceded it, while garnishing Android 2.3.3 with a fixed of TouchWiz customizations that would actually enhance, in preference to hinder, the user experience. As such, the Galaxy S II earns Samsung full marks for ambition, but does this slinky new smartphone live as much as its interstellar hype? The reply, as always, are available after the break.
Hardware
The Samsung Galaxy S II is 8.49mm (0.33 inches) thick. We whipped out a ruler and checked, it’s true. Admittedly, that measurement expands somewhat on the handset’s bottom, where a curvy bump houses its loudspeaker, and across the camera compartment, which protrudes ever so slightly from the remainder of the body, but even at its thickest point, this phone doesn’t allow itself to move beyond the 1cm mark. Given the veritable spec sheet overload that Samsung has included inside the Galaxy S II, we consider its thin profile feat of engineering. On the subject of the pursuit of absolutely the slimmest device, NEC’s MEDIAS N-04C remains to be the champ at 7.7mm, but global audiences should feel comfortable in replacing the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, which measures 8.7mm at its thinnest point, with the Galaxy S II for his or her benchmark slim device.
More importantly, Samsung’s new 4.3-inch handset feels better within the hand than the Arc, due to its intelligently curved sides that offer a cozy and confident grip. The textured rear cover also feels good to touch, and will withstand nicks and scratches significantly better than the unique Galaxy S’ backplate, though don’t expect its featherlight construction to contribute much to the telephone’s overall rigidity. On the way to be provided by the still-mostly-plastic frame surrounding the telephone’s screen. We found little cause to doubt the Galaxy S II’s durability, though we certainly wouldn’t go recommending it because the phone for the builder for your life. There’s a minuscule crevice between the handset’s frame and screen that appears vulnerable to gathering dust if exposed to dirty environments, and no matter the widely reassuring build quality, the Galaxy S II continues to be constructed from plastic in place of something more robust like HTC or Nokia’s all-aluminum cases.
Returning to the screen, it’s fronted by one continuous sheet of glass, which protects a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display which includes a batch of sensors and a front-facing camera on the top, and two capacitive Android keys on the bottom. The earpiece and residential button are the sole disruptions to the graceful glass surface. Whatever coating Samsung has applied to the Galaxy S II’s screen works rather well, because it resists smudges and fingerprint marks far better than the typical smartphone. A volume rocker and an influence / lock key each absorb one side of the GSII, with a three.5mm headphone jack adorning its top and a micro-USB charging / data port on the bottom. That’s it, no frills, no extras, and — to the dismay of a few — no dedicated camera shutter button. A minimum of the controls you do get all work all right. The side-mounted buttons do their job without fuss and touchscreen responsiveness is impeccable. The Menu and Back keys are purely capacitive, whereas the house button is, well, a real button — it requires you to physically depress it so that it will register input. That distinction may feel a little bit awkward firstly, but we rather enjoyed it. It meant accidental key taps were all but impossible to succeed in and gave a more definitive nature to punching the house key, which somehow felt appropriate given the actual fact it yanks you out of whatever you’re doing and back to the homescreen.
Display
The Galaxy S II’s screen is little short of spectacular. Blacks are impenetrable, colors come out at you, and viewing angles are supreme. This could usually be the part where we’d talk about that qHD (960 x 540) resolution is fast becoming the norm among top-tier smartphones and that the GSII’s 800 x 480 is therefore somewhat behind the curve, but frankly, we don’t care. With a screen as beautiful as this, such things pale into insignificance. And we use that verb advisedly — whereas the vast majority of LCDs quickly lose their luster for those who tilt them far from center, color saturation and vibrancy at the Galaxy S II remain undiminished. It’s only at extreme angles that you simply’ll notice some discoloration, but that’s provided that you’re trying to find it and takes nothing far from the awe-inspiring experience of simply using this device.
Whether you’re pushing it to its limits with movie watching or simply tamely browsing the net, the Super AMOLED Plus panel in the Galaxy S II never fails to remind you that it’s simply better than almost everything else that’s available. For an instructive example of the contrast on offer here, look at our recent post in regards to the LG Optimus Big’s upcoming launch in Korea. The pattern on that handset’s white back was so subtle on our desktop monitor that we completely missed it, whereas after we checked out an analogous image at the GSII, it looked clear as day. Maybe that doesn’t speak too highly of the monitors we’re working with, however it underlines the supremacy of the display Samsung has squeezed into the Galaxy S II.
We’d even go as far as to mention it’s better than the iPhone 4′s screen, purely because, at 4.3 inches, it gives us a lot more room to work with. It’s almost impossible to separate both up relating to quality of output, they’re both awesome. Notably, however, that was also true of Samsung’s original Super AMOLED display, the one who graced the 4-inch Galaxy S, and by now it’s essential to be wondering if there’s actually anything significant enough within the new S-AMOLED technology to justify appending that “Plus” to its name. The fast answer is yes, and it’s all within the pixels.
The single major downside to the unique Super AMOLED panel was to be present in its PenTile matrix subpixel arrangement. It employed an RGBG pattern, wherein you obtain two green subpixels for each pair of red and blue ones, however the overall resolution was counted at the basis of green subpixels. Ergo, a PenTile 800 x 480 resolution wasn’t as rich on the subpixel level as your standard RGB screen ( 0 768,000 versus 1,152,000 0 ), which ended in slightly grainier images than would otherwise were the case. Well, that “otherwise” scenario is now with us, because Samsung has switched to an actual-Stripe RGB array within the 4.3-inch Galaxy S II, meaning it packs the complete 1.152 megasubpixel count and, as we’ve already noted, the display looks delectable for it. A lesser criticism of the unique Galaxy S was that its colors were a bit blown out and oversaturated, but that’s over again rendered moot at the successor device — a software setting called Background effect permits you to tweak saturation, so in case you’re feeling just a little melancholy, you are able to tone down the intensity of your handset’s colors to compare your ennui. Basically, if we haven’t made it clear already, this can be everything that Super AMOLED was, minus the bad parts and plus a further .3 inches in real estate. A triumph.
Okay, there’s one mildly irritating aspect in regards to the Galaxy S II’s screen and that’s the car-brightness — it tends to seek around for the right setting and sometimes makes jarring jumps between darker and brighter values. Whether that’s right down to the ambient light sensor or the software reading data from it isn’t all that important, what’s relevant is that we found ourselves more well-off with a human helming the brightness controls.
Battery life
The tale of the Galaxy S II’s battery life can’t be told without returning to its luscious screen. Being an OLED panel, the 4.3-inch display here doesn’t use one single backlight as LCD screens do, and instead only illuminates the pixels which are had to actively display content. That is why why it is able to generate truer blacks than any backlit panel, but it surely also permits the user to optimize battery life by doing things like switching to a darker wallpaper or reading ebooks against a black background. We didn’t actually bother with such tweaks, we were too busy exploring every person of the myriad features and options in this phone, however the option’s there as an additional dimension of obsessive control if you happen to take care of it. As to the Galaxy S II’s actual endurance, we found it highly competitive with the most recent batch of Android phones. After 20 hours, 1/2 that have been full of the above tinkering and exploration, we managed to pull the Galaxy S II right down to 15 percent of its original charge. This was with our usual push notification suppliers, Gmail and Twitter, running within the background and while constantly connected to our WiFi network.
Using the Android System Info app (available at no cost at the Android Market), we found confirmation that the Galaxy S II is indeed running a 1.2GHz ARMv7 dual-core processor, but more importantly, we also dug up a breakdown of ways often the SOC was reaching that max speed. Only 9.2 percent of our use harnessed the entire 1.2GHz, with Samsung wisely downclocking its chip to as little as 200MHz when the telephone’s idling (that accounted for 46 percent of the Galaxy S II’s uptime). What’s impressive about that is that we never come across any performance bumps to point that we were running at slower speeds. Clearly, Samsung’s power management system is doing its job well. In summary, we predict you’ll be capable to get an excellent couple of days’ regular use out of the Galaxy S II — our experience with it mirrored what we got out of HTC’s Incredible S and Desire S that recently crossed our review bench — though processor-intensive activities like HD video playback will eat into that, as will the range of 3G coverage. What we will be able to say with absolute certainty is that the Galaxy S II is not any slouch when put against its contemporaries. It also marks a undeniable improvement in longevity over the unique Galaxy S.
Loudspeaker / earpiece
The loudspeaker is surprisingly passable, hell, it’s greater than passable. We’re probably being swayed by the pretty screen in this phone, but playing back video without counting on headphones feels just fine, unlike the same old grinding chore that it’s on most present phones. That being said, Tinie Tempah’s Pass Out — a song that starts out dominated by deep bass — feels like a hilarious remix of the unique at the GSII thanks to the speaker’s inability to dip down low enough to sound out the track’s bassline. Bass deprivation is a standard shortcoming of smartphones, which isn’t looking more likely to discover a fix any time soon. You continue to won’t be forced to desert your dubstep addiction while at the move, however, as Samsung bundles an excellent pair of in-ear headphones that do an exceptionally respectable job of both isolating external noise and delivering audio in your cranium. Including an in-line mic that doubles as a music play / pause button isn’t any bad thing either. We’d be remiss to not indicate that the Galaxy S II’s loudspeaker is positioned rather poorly — it and the 2 slits cut into the telephone’s rump for its output face the rear. Laying the handset down on a flat surface immediately alters the sound and a stray finger – a single fleshy finger — can mute almost everything.
The earpiece performed as on the brink of the center of the line as you may get. Calls sounded good on our end and equally so at the other side. We had a number of garbled moments during one conversation, but that’s much more likely as a result of network performance than some fault at the Galaxy S II. As to the network itself, the GSII exhibited no reception issues or aberrant behavior, though we weren’t ready to inspect its rated 21.1Mbps HSPA+ speeds on our UK carrier.
Camera
Samsung eschews the default Gingerbread camera app for its own effort, which comes with a neat slice of customization. The left menu column provides three shortcut slots for the functions you think about most relevant on your photographic exploits. By default, two of them are populated with a button to flip between the rear-facing 8 megapixel and front-facing 2 megapixel camera and another one for controlling the flash, but you are able to do whatever you fancy. Resolution, ISO, scene and shooting modes, or adjustments like white balance, contrast, metering, and after-effects can all be included in there. And for those who consider various things important when in video mode, that’s no problem, because that retains its own set of shortcuts become independent from the stills mode. It’s an absolutely realized suite of options, however most users will neglect the left side and just keep bashing the capture key at the right.
After they achieve this, they’ll be treated to a couple excellent results. The camera compartment at the back of the Galaxy S II justifies its size (it’s still tiny, it just happens to protrude a bit from the ultrathin GSII body) with the gathering of significant detail in nearly every shot. What most impressed us about this sensor is that images remained relatively sharp at full resolution — including the only you notice above, it’s a 100 pc crop from an 8 megapixel capture — with Samsung feeling confident enough within the quality of its hardware to use almost no noise-reducing blur under default settings. That does permit for graininess to sneak into some images, but usually, we’re one of several finest smartphone camera sensors around. Closeup shots are handled alright too, regardless of the inability of a dedicated macro mode. The flash is a typically overpowered LED unit, though we were impressed to work out the Galaxy S II use it while specializing in a close-by object but not while shooting — had it been utilized in the shot, the flash would’ve whitewashed the whole composition, so it’s good to peer the software showing a timely little bit of restraint.
The sole issue we encountered was that that the GSII’s sensor has a predictably narrow dynamic range, meaning that photographs with high contrast between dark and well-lit areas become with either deep shadows or blown out highlights, dependent on that you choose to cope with. Nonetheless, which may cause some highly artistic / moody shots, so we’re not too sure it is a major downer. A limitation, sure, but not something which will seriously impact your delight in snapping pics with this phone.
As to video, it too looks crisp and sharp, though the ever-present rolling shutter effect is extremely much in evidence when there’s rapid motion on screen (see the bus passing by within the sample below). Provided you don’t insist on panning around too quickly or recording hound races from the sidelines, that shouldn’t pose much of an issue. There’s little within the way of image stabilization too, but again, as long as your ambitions stretch no further than casual HD video, the Galaxy S II should prove greater than sufficient.
Even if pushed to record at 1080p, the Galaxy S II showed no sign of slowdown or maybe any processing lag. Speed of operation, both in stills and video, is as fast as we’ve seen yet. The time taken to go into the camera app, process one image and be ready for the subsequent, and to exchange between camera and camcorder modes was in all cases supreme. We consider that an important section of a successful camera’s mechanics — having the ability and able to reply to the user immediately rather than making him — so the Galaxy S II scores another big tick from us. Samsung also provides a photograph editor app that allows you to tweak, crop and stylize your imagery. It covers all of the basics and throws in a number of fun extras when you prefer to experiment.
Software
General responsiveness is actually exemplary. In case you’ve read what we needed to say concerning the 7 G2x 7 and how it simply flies through homescreens, menus and applications, you’ll know that we have got a high bar for Android performance already set, however the Galaxy S II beats it anyway. There’s simply never been an Android handset this smooth and this fluid in its operation. Nothing phases the GSII, and the sole time we got it to teach any performance dropoff was in enacting a pinching gesture at the home screen to increase an Exposé-like overview of all seven homescreens. That’s seven fully loaded-out homescreens with information updating live (multiple clocks plus news and weather feeds) and the sole thing that recipe for memory overload produced was a slight stutter in animating the zooming effect. There’s just no getting across the extravagant amounts of power this device has and we will’t wait to work out Samsung jam such a Exynos chips inside a future tablet or two.
5 We all know you want your benchmarks, so we would besides hit you with those all-important numbers. Do take heed, however, that graphical tests resembling those in Quadrant and Neocore perform on the phone’s native resolution, so as to bias ends up in favor of lower-res screens — so don’t take what you notice as a conclusive performance comparison, use it just as a hallmark. With that out of ways, listed here are the scores: Quadrant gave us leads to the three,000 to three,400 range, Linpack produced a standard of 47 MFLOPS, and Nenamark and Neocore both brought in a 59.8fps average that was limited by a 60fps software cap at the phone (a suspicion that was further confirmed by running Fps2D and seeing the identical behavior). It’s a shame that we weren’t capable of properly quantify the real maximum capability of the Exynos dual-core chip and Mali-400 graphics within, but that Quadrant score may be taken as highly representative of the chasm that exists between the Galaxy S II and smartphones which have come before it. It truly is that a lot better. Put simply, here is essentially the mostsome of the most powerful mobile handset we’ve yet tested.
Browser
6 Browser performance is excellent in relation to speed but a bit of troubled in terms of rendering. In our use of the Galaxy S II, we were consistently met with pronounced aliasing when viewing webpages from a more distant, zoomed-out view. There have been no issues relating to the structure of the page, all sites organized themselves exactly as their makers designed them, but pulling out for an summary brought out the jaggy lines and usually looked unattractive. That’s not, however, a functional flaw, it’s only a superficial scratch on a muscly brawler. With regards to actually navigating webpages, the Galaxy S II is exceptional. Page scrolling is so smooth it borders on slippery, pinch-to-zoom is flawless, and re-orienting the screen from portrait to landscape and back is finished in a flash.
Oh, did we are saying Flash? One entirely aberrant aspect of our review handset was that we couldn’t get it to play back any in-browser Flash content. Instead, it encouraged us to upgrade our Flash Player. We did so, downloading and installing Flash Player 10.2, but still had no joy. This looks like an unhappy fluke and we’ll see how Samsung responds to our queries at the matter. For now, given this phone’s exquisite general performance and terrific browser agility, we’re happy to miss this oddity. Retail units must be ready to play Flash right out of the box. Virtually every Android handset we’ve reviewed this year has been ready to accomplish that with little issue and we predict the Galaxy S II to be no different.
TouchWiz 4.0
Android should already be a well-known friend (sometimes foe) to most of you, so we’ll just go ahead and dive right into what Samsung has done on top of the Android 2.3.3 base at the Galaxy S II with its latest set of OS customizations, dubbed TouchWiz 4.0. For a deeper exploration of what’s new and improved inside the Gingerbread iteration of Google’s operating system, have a look at our 8 Nexus S review 8 .
We commence on the inevitable beginning, namely the lock screen. The Galaxy S II’s lock screen won’t offer the identical hotbed of activity which you might find in HTC’s new Sense 3.0, nevertheless it does include some pretty awesome functionality of its own. Missed calls and unread messages become little tabs at the side of your locked GSII, which you’ll swipe into view and thereby unlock the telephone straight into the message or call that needs your attention. It’s slick, as fast as everything else in this speedster of a phone, and it adds real utility for your day-to-day use. Speaking of calls, your options when receiving one are to to select up, hang up, or reject with a text message — with a slide-up menu offering you the most typical apologetic missives to send out. When the shoe’s at the other foot and also you’re looking to reach out in your nearest and dearest, swiping right on their name within the Contacts list will initiate a decision, while swiping left will start the composition of a text. Each contact card also comes with a history of communications between you and any other party, providing gentle reminders of in the event you last checked in together with your neglected friends. The Galaxy S could perform a little of this fancy stuff too, but that shouldn’t get rid of from the truth that we’re gazing genuinely useful additions that enhance the Android user experience.
Long-pressing the house button brings you to an app switcher exhibiting six of your most recently active apps, with a job Manager loitering with malicious intent beneath them. Entering that Manager helps you to view active tasks in addition to their RAM and CPU cycle consumption, with an strategy to kill them in the event you feel it necessary, and to then flush from the telephone’s memory any remnants in their operation. Not that you simply’ll actually need to be micromanaging either of these things with 1GB of RAM and oodles of processing power, but still, it’s an invaluable feature to have. Also available is a Program Monitor widget in your homescreen that shows the choice of active applications at any given time and links you into a similar Task Manager menu. Observing its fluctuating count, lets see the telephone was selectively deactivating some apps as we increased the selection of open programs. That never brought about us losing data or having to restart apps, so whatever resource management is kicking in looks to be doing its job judiciously and with precision.
Samsung also throws a trifecta of motion sensor-assisted functions into the Galaxy S II. The 1st is something you are familiar from HTC’s Sense: flipping the telephone to stand the ground mutes all sounds, whether or not they be incoming calls or media playing at the device. Unlike HTC’s implementation, however — which had an unfortunate tendency to be hit or miss in its recognition — Samsung’s “Turn over” feature works without hitch every time. We’re big fans of this seemingly benign option since it combines the physical gesture of turning the sound source far from you with the software response of switching all audio off. It feels natural and will be seen as a representation of where phones may and must be headed, to a spot where they predict and decide your intent using a stronger level of intelligence than the standard impassive expectation of conventional input.
The opposite two motion controls are truly novel and, we suspect, may be quite neat party tricks for Galaxy S II users to indicate off. Tilt-zoom offers you a brand new technique to zoom throughout the browser and film gallery app, whereby you tilt the telephone as much as enlarge a picture or right down to shrink it. It truly is activated by placing two fingers at the screen simultaneously and is derived with a sensitivity adjustment for users to tailor it to their whims. We don’t know if we’d ever come to take advantage of tilt-zoom over the tried and tested pinch-to-zoom functionality — that is naturally also present here — however the Galaxy S II makes zooming of any kind a pleasure to behold. As already outlined above, this phone just executes zooms and animations exactly as they were meant to be done. Having treated tilting, Samsung also gives us a panning motion function, which is useful when reorganizing your homescreens. There are seven of them in total and any grizzled Android user will know the chore of getting to transition through multiple screens to get an icon positioned superb. Samsung’s bright idea here has been to apply the accelerometer to acknowledge the telephone’s lateral motion and react to it by moving you thru the homescreens. This motion-aided panning is purely accessible whenever you’re rearranging your widgets or shortcuts, but when you do not forget that a 90-degree turn will jump you three homescreens in a given direction, navigation could be made delightfully quick.
2 The Galaxy S II’s onscreen keyboard is terrific, allowing us to rise up to a quick typing speed within almost no time in any respect. Samsung needn’t feel too smug about it, though, as that is a virtually identical recreation of the default Gingerbread button pad. The Korean company has opted to incorporate a dedicated button for voice input within the place of the comma, that is now relegated to hanging out with the remainder of the punctuation crew within the secondary keyboard mode for symbol / numerical input. We’re not thrilled by this variation, as we use commas a hell of much more than voice input, but we recognize reasons why Samsung did it — two of its pre-launch ads for the Galaxy S II were concentrated on using its Voice Talk feature to accomplish effortless handsfree communication. Only problem is that the actuality of using the Vlingo-powered Voice Talk is more an exercise in frustration than the rest. It’s also been given priority by dedicating a double-tap of the house button to it (from wherever you’re at the phone), but when you actually get into the app itself, you clash with slow (purely due to the software) operation, a consistent failure to correctly recognize common words, and a generally unrewarding user experience. It’s a gimmick, pure and easy. Whatever value you extract from using it is going to be be the results of sheer stubbornness in your part instead of good software design.
Alas, we are able to’t say anything a lot more positive about Samsung’s set of Hubs at the phone. There are Game, Music, Readers, and Social Hubs, however we found everything apart from the ebook reader a waste of time. The sport Hub doesn’t yet offer anything that differentiates it from simply seeking out games at the Android Market, the Music Hub tries to sell you stuff without providing a compelling reason to leap into an extra online music store, and the Social Hub tries to convince you which you need it to prepare your entire social feeds, messages, and email. Such centralized control could have been handy earlier on in Android’s development, however the native Gmail and Gtalk apps have evolved to supply trouble-free use, while the Twitter client for the platform is now greater than mature enough to address itself. What we’re taking a look at, then, is redundant functionality. The Readers Hub, as we are saying, is the one who we are able to see ourselves actually using, mostly as a result of the inclusion of the Kobo e-reader software, though it too seems geared more toward selling you stuff than actually serving users’ needs.
We’ll finish off with a snappy run in the course of the remainder of Samsung’s additions to the Android experience. Sharing over DLNA is made stupidly simple with the AllShare app, and in case you’re on a Windows PC, you’ll be able to just flick thru the device’s stored music, video and images and access content at the fly. The entire process is as seamless because it is wireless. The persistent “dock” on the bottom of the homescreen isn’t customizable (because it is on Sony Ericsson’s latest batch of Android phones, for instance). It can provide access for your Phone, Contacts, Messaging, and Apps list, and hopes you’ll like them, because in case you don’t… tough! The Applications menu isn’t the precise we’ve ever seen either. Don’t get us wrong, its navigation exhibits the identical stupendous speed and responsiveness because the remainder of the telephone, but automated reorganization into alphabetical or date order isn’t available. One could only switch to a listing view or manually rejig the style the apps are listed on each page. Screenshots of regardless of the Galaxy S II is displaying may be taken by pressing the house and gear buttons simultaneously. It’s not yet a standard feature among Android devices, but we’d love it to become one. We’re also happy to peer Samsung maintain its long-held tradition of providing a few of the weirdest ringtones around, the majority of which seem wholly unsuitable for anyone however the most obnoxious of users. Nevertheless, we did have the capacity to unearth an extraordinary gem within the Cassiopeia tone, which appears like a slowed-down version of the Metal Gear Solid codec chime.
Wrap-up
3 For a handset with any such broad range of standout features and specs, the Galaxy S II is remarkably easy to summarize. It’s the most effective Android smartphone yet, but more importantly, it may possibly well be the right smartphone, period. For sure, a 4.3-inch screen size won’t suit everyone, regardless of how stupendously thin the device that carries it could be, and we may’t say obviously that the Galaxy S II would justify an extended-term iOS user foresaking his investment into one ecosystem and making the leap to a different. Nonetheless, in case you’re asking us what smartphone to purchase today, unconstrained by such externalities, the Galaxy S II may be the clear choice. Sometimes it’s just so simple as that.
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