The S3 is a phone for people with serious power hunger and a healthy bank balance. If you want a device for 3D gaming, HD video streaming and surfing the web like a pro -- I don't mean faffing around with mobile versions of websites or lightweight apps -- the S3 has the superpowered engine and massive display you're looking for. Indeed, this phone sits at the very top of the smart phone spectrum -- rival high-end Androids at this lofty price are hard to find.
The main alternative is HTC's quad-core brute -- the One X -- which is actually more affordable than the S3 but not such a powerhouse, judging by my benchmark tests. Samsung also makes an even larger device -- the Galaxy Note -- which is a smart phone that's pushing into mini tablet territory. The main non-Android rival device to the S3 is Apple's top-of-the-range blower, the iPhone 4S -- at least until the iPhone 5 lands.
The 4S can be bagged for around the same monthly toll as the S3. Apple's iOS software is generally slicker and easier to use than Android, with a simplified interface that's really straightforward to use.
However, iOS won't appeal to people who really like to drill down, tweak, tinker and customise their kit. You guys will fall hook, line and sinker for the S3's customisable charms -- relishing the fine-grained opportunities Android opens up for customising and controlling your digital environs. The Galaxy S3 is running on Android, Google's mobile operating system. Specifically, it's powered by Android 4.
Until very recently ICS was the latest version of Android but that honour now goes to 4. Samsung has not yet confirmed whether the S3 will get an update to Jelly Bean. If you're desperate to get your hands on the latest Google OS, you might be better off opting for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus , which is due to get Jelly Bean later this month.
Despite Samsung's reticence to confirm a Jelly Bean update for the S3, it seems pretty likely it will get one. Do be prepared for a bit of a wait though -- the S2 ICS update was a long time coming. Android is a powerful, flexible operating system that affords users loads of scope to customise and tinker with their phone.
But the wealth of options and tools available can be overwhelming to newcomers, which makes having a really slick interface especially important. It's the same colourful interface you'll see on kit like the Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Note. TouchWiz on the S3 looks polished, with lots of carefully drawn icons and easy-to-read fonts. But when it comes to ease of use, it's not always as well thought through as rival mobile maker HTC's Sense 4. At times, as you poke and prode TouchWiz, the intuitive action does not yield the hoped-for result.
For example, adding widgets to the home screens is not done by long-pressing the place where you want to add the widget. Rather, you have to dive into the apps view, switch to the widgets tab and long press on a widget -- then move it onto the home screen position of your choice. It's an inelegant way of doing things and, while it's only a minor quibble, it is indicative of TouchWiz's tendency to be a tad gnomic.
Another example is TouchWiz's notifications interface. Even if you turn on SMS notifications in the settings, if the notifications icon is toggled off in the notifications tray, you won't hear any sounds until it's toggled on.
That's fine once you know about the existence of this icon. But if you haven't found it yet, you'll be really confused about why you can't hear any SMSes coming in.
S2 owners won't have any trouble navigating the S3's interface since they're retreading familiar ground. But newbies will certainly need to get accustomed to Samsung's way of doing things.
One new addition to TouchWiz on the S3 is Samsung's much-trumpeted eye-tracking technology. This makes use of the phone's front facing camera so it can keep the screen on if it detects a face looking at it.
It's a nice idea, which works well if you're holding the phone directly in front of your face. But if you're looking at the phone at an angle -- say you've propped it up a little way off so you can watch a film -- it won't register your face and will turn off anyway.
The flashing eye symbol can also be distracting, if not downright disconcerting, as it warns you that your phone is watching you. Those with files to hoard will be happy to know the S3 comes with two years of online storage app DropBox, giving you an impressive 50GB worth of virtual disk space on which to plonk your files. The S3 comes pre-loaded with lots of Samsung apps -- and several of these, including S Suggest and the Games Hub -- give you additional ways to get content onto the phone, as well as being able to download apps from Google's Play Store.
The previously Apple-exclusive Flipboard app also makes an appearance on the S3's home screen as an attractive widget. The Flipboard app turns links and updates from your social networks into an attractive magazine-style layout.
The app and widget really come into their own on the S3's gloriously large display. There are other new goodies on board, including a neat 'Pop up Play' feature that lets you watch videos while performing boring functions like sending a text, and a transfer tool called S Beam, which lets you send large files over a Wi-Fi connection.
Pop up Play makes intelligent use of the S3's quad-core engine by letting you overlay and playback a mini version of a video over whatever else you're looking at -- be it a web page, your email or an app. Sadly, you can't pop out embedded videos in apps like YouTube -- it's only for videos stored on the phone itself.
While Pop Up Play is cool, I feel it could be even cooler. One big limitation is there's no option to custom-size the video window. I could see it being really useful to have a video playing on half the S3's screen, leaving the other half for typing out a text or email, but the popped-out video window can't be made any bigger or smaller.
And it really is small -- about the size of two stamps side by side. You certainly wouldn't want to watch a feature length film on it. That said, it's a clever addition -- it's the most coherent case for multi-core phones with very big screens I've yet seen. A voice control assistant app is on board too, dubbed S Voice. It has a very Siri-esque interface with a tap-to-talk-to-the-phone microphone icon.
Like Apple's Siri, you can ask S Voice to tell you the weather or perform tasks like making a call, setting an alarm, controlling music playback or taking a photo. You can ask, but don't expect S Voice to give you the right answer -- I found it very frustrating to use as it repeatedly failed to understand what I was asking it.
In an extensive comparison of S Voice and Siri, neither acquitted themselves terribly well. But Samsung's virtual assistant was by far the worst of the two -- it had real trouble recognising my voice, was slow to process sounds and ultimately seemed gimmicky rather than genuinely useful.
Most of the time it's much quicker to tap to get to the function you're after, rather than faff around hoping S Voice hears your words correctly and understands what you're after.
S Voice has been bundled into Ice Cream Sandwich's Face Unlock capability on the S3 -- so now you can choose to have the phone demand to see your visage and hear your voice before it unlocks.
Setting up Face plus Voice Unlock took multiple attempts to run through the vocal stage as my efforts to use my own voice repeatedly failed to win the approval of a very disappointed-sounding female-toned S Voice.
Eventually I managed to set it up -- but I can't imagine too many people will want to have to speak to their phone every time they need to unlock it Sergey Brin excepted. The S3 includes Samsung's Music Hub app, which links through to a 7 Digital -powered music store where you can listen to clips and buy songs and albums to live on the device.
Buying songs is fairly straightforward although you do have to drill down to find out exactly how many benjamins you need to spend to buy each track or album. The categorisation of albums isn't perfect either -- I found lots of individual songs listed under the albums tab. Once you've loaded the S3 with your favourite tunes, you can pipe them into your ears by using Samsung's Music Player. This includes a feature called Music Square -- which creates custom playlists based on the tunes you listen to.
Samsung has also added a handsome-looking FM Radio app to the phone, which includes a pleasing analogue-style knob-twiddling interface and the ability to save station presets so you can tune in with a single tap.
S Planner is Samsung's name for the S3's calendar app. It's a pretty cumbersome name -- say it quickly and it sounds like spanner. But despite this unpromising start, it has some neat features. For example, you can pinch to quickly zoom in and out from day view, to week, to month and to year. Most importantly, S Planner syncs with Google Calendar so -- if you use Google Calendar and as an Android lover you surely do -- you can keep abreast of all your appointments on the fly.
The overall S Planner interface isn't super-straightforward, but that's to be expected as it's a fully featured calendar app -- letting you set reminders, add event participants and so on. It also links with S Memo, Samsung's note-taking app, so you can add memos to calendar appointments. The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted an app-naming theme emerging, whereby Samsung sticks the letter 'S' in front of a word describing the app's function.
And so it follows that S Memo is a note-taking app. This app lets you create both text or scribble handwritten or hand-drawn notes. It's more fully featured than Apple's Notes app on the iPhone, with a range of pens and colours to choose from -- as well as the ability to draw pictures or scribble words, not just create typed text notes.
So, for example, you could draw a map of how to get to your house and attach the S Memo to the corresponding S Planner birthday invite.
You can also add pictures to memos, lock private memos to keep out prying eyes and add audio recordings -- handy if you want to record a meeting as you take notes. The S3's contacts app includes some neat features. If you swipe left over a contact's name, it will take you straight to the messaging menu so you can rattle off an SMS double-quick. Swipe right over their name and the phone will call your buddy without you having to tap twice.
You can create groups of contacts so you can easily send emails or SMSes to multiple people. If you're trying to find someone in your address book, you can press on the corresponding letter of the alphabet in the index at the right-hand side to jump down to the right section, or just start typing their name into the search box.
The software favours surnames over first names so it will display anyone with the surname 'Johnson' before your mate 'John'. A slightly controversial inclusion? We think so. Yes, the iPhone sports one with pride — but it's often the first thing to eventually give up the ghost, which is no doubt why many of the newest Android phones have done away with the physical button.
The click of the button feels a touch rigid, too, though we might give our brand-new device the benefit of the doubt on that. They stand slightly proud of the sides, making it easy to press the volume control unintentionally — but we put this down to the need to learn the layout of a new handset.
As already mentioned, you'll find the latest Android 4. Most of the controls will be familiar to any Android users — and indeed as the rival operating systems converge, not exactly alien to iOS users. Less familiar for those coming to this phone from an Apple device will be the touch-sensitive controls either side of the home button, which glow in to life when touched: 'back' and 'menu' buttons. These controls are responsive and allow you to navigate the S III easily enough, but we'll point out now that the Home Button proved occasionally prone to a slight lag — OK, it was just a split-second, but still gave a noticeable pause before the home screen reappeared and repopulated itself with apps.
Other handsets give you access to this useful screen more effectively. Elsewhere, seven customisable screens are familiar and more importantly the phone is impressively rapid — previous points aside — when it comes to moving around them.
Samsung has got the level of sensitivity spot on, screens swishing past at the right speed, while the notification bar still pulls down from the top and reveals a number of shortcuts to turn key features such as wi-fi and Bluetooth on and off with one touch.
On the subject of notifications it's also worth noting the LED indicator on the front at the top left of the handset. This glows different colours for different reasons — low battery, charging or for missed notifications — and certainly when it comes to checking for messages or missed calls without having to pick up and unlock the screen, it's a nice feature. The Galaxy S3 has a number of unique features up its sleeve and for once there are some genuinely useful advances here.
Arguably our favourite is Smart Stay. Turn the feature on and the proximity sensor above the screen will make sure the screen stays on as long as you're looking at it, overriding the normal screen lock and only turning the screen off when you look away. It's handy if you're reading emails or browsing the web and don't want to worry about the screen locking, and we found it pretty consistent at clocking when we were reading the screen, even though it's less effective in low lighting.
Also new is S Voice, Samsung's answer to Siri. Despite both companies protestations to the contrary, we're not sure voice commands are that useful or appealing to most people most of the time, and the fact that it didn't always recognise our voice, plus the need to keep to fairly simple commands, means its existing state is unlikely to win over most people. That said, watching as the phone sets an alarm or sends a preferably basic text message at your command is still impressive.
Samsung has ramped up the wireless connectivity options and capabilities, too. What's more, existing apps such as Bump already deliver this functionality. Talking of apps, the Galaxy S III comes with plenty of them pre-loaded apps: some are more useful than others, with highlights being the first look at Flipboard on Android — now rolled out to the Google Play store —, which is a smart news and social media aggregating app.
You also get a slick version of Google Maps complete with turn-by-turn satnav-style navigation, decent enough memo and calendar apps and a tie-in with Dropbox to give you 50GB of free storage. However, we could probably do without the Samsung Apps and S Suggests icons: these seem to do no more than proffer apps you might like, when it's easy enough to dive straight in to the main Google Play store. The Galaxy S3 internet browser is fast to load and easy to read. The screen keeps Samsung's favoured bright, vivid colour balance, so text stands out easily and colours leap out of the page.
Are whites quite as clean as rivals'? Perhaps not — more on that when we come to video — but in isolation this makes little difference to web browsing. It's worth noting that the internet browser has its own setting for brightness so click on settings within the browser to adjust this or turn off the auto brightness.
Text doesn't always auto-fit to the screen but due to the smooth operation of the touch and zoom touch functionality it's easy to make small adjustments, and there's also a handy icon to turn a web page into plain text, which sometimes works better for long articles.
Tabbed browsing is easy thanks to a shortcut at the top right of the screen to open more windows, while touch icons to refresh the page you're on, or access your bookmarks, history or saved pages, make a lot of sense. Naturally Flash is supported and all told the internet browsing experience is everything you'd want: fast and reliable, intuitive to use, easy to read and with some neat features. Picture performance of course remains crucial and there's no better way to judge it than watching some video content.
But it's not just key for watching catch-up TV or movies of course — the quality of the screen will impact on how good the smartphone experience is at almost every turn. Samsung has a new Video Hub which allows you to rent or buy from a limited but decent selection of films. There's the Google Play Video store, too, and Samsung's Kies video software will convert video formats allowing you to load on the likes of Xvid and MPEG4 videos if you want to upload your own content.
The phone comes in a white and a dark navy blue or, as Samsung calls it, "Pebble Blue". But when you pick up the phone, the first thing you notice is its plastic build. Samsung says its actually polycarbonate. That's not to say I don't like the feel of the smooth and glossy plastic -- it fits nicely in hand -- but the iPhone 4S and the HTC One X feel like more-solidly built devices.
Even the edge of the phone, which looks like metal with its silver finish, is plastic. Of course, there's a major benefit to that plastic: it makes it insanely light. The 4. Which brings me to that big screen. The display is bright and vivid, and compared to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus the colors look more realistic and not overly saturated. Don't get me wrong: This is a screen you will love looking at and touching. And the wider size actually makes it easier to type on the phone, an important thing for those that might be moving from a phone with a physical keyboard to an all-touchscreen device.
But the 8-megapixel camera could be the standout hardware feature. The camera is one of the best I've tested on a phone. Shots are clear and it handles low-light situations as well as the iPhone. You can take photos while shooting video, easily share photos with friends with Samsung's ShareShot feature, and the Best Shot feature will take a series of 8 shots and picks the best one for you.
And that's where the hardware of this phone fades to the background. The software features that Samsung has added really enhance the Android experience -- and are what makes the phone catapult the HTC One line and other Android phones on the market. Samsung has refined its TouchWiz software that runs on top of Android 4. It has mostly added some new widgets and restyled the app tray, and added a physical home button.
Holding the button down will launch a list of open applications; there you can swipe away apps to close them or open one up. Sharing photos is a big part of the equation. Then there's that ShareShot feature; it requires another Galaxy S III, but if you connect them, you can take a picture with one and see it appear right away on the other.
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