Samsung Galaxy S2

ok, so this is the samsung galaxy s3 review, we're going to take a look at the physical hardware itself. so, as you can see it's got a lovely look to it. bevel, it's not too thick, it's a bit thicker than i was sort of imagining. you might go with this phone, thought we were going edge be to edge pretty soon. front facing camera couple of sensors the speaker grille there

power button is on the side here. this is a physical home button but thenthere's two soft buttons either side. this one brings up your edit in any application or home screen and this one is your back button. if you long press on this, you bring up your task menu and if you double click quickly it will bring up the s voice which i'm not a big fan of but i don't like any of these silly voicey talky things. on the side you can see, i'll just adjust the focus slightly,

you can see the volume rocker on that side on that side you've got your power button. along the top is your headphone jack and i believe that is a microphone pick up probably for when you are on speaker phone. on the bottom is another hole, which again might be another speaker pick up, i'm going to have to try and check that

and a mini usb. you can see that the edges are really nicely bevelled. i mean, it's a very very solid little phone. it's quite weighty in the hand but not for the size. it actually feels very comfortable. i've used a few phones that were really light and actually you feel like you could, you know, go like that and the phone would just fly out of your hand. what i've really found with the samsung galaxy s3 and also the galaxy nexus as well which is, you know, based on the same kind of inspirationdesign

these tapered edges really work. the phone feels comfortable, not too heavy everything that personally i'm lookingfor in a phone. the weight's good. the plastic back? well, everyone has their own opinion ofthese things. you can also see on the back there the camera, eight megapixel shooter an led flash that in my opinion is rather blue.

you're going to want to do some colour correction on that. and a little speaker that is actually pretty powerful. we'll come to that later. and obviously, the samsung badge on the back, i went for the white samsung phone forone simple reason well, like two. i've never owned a white phone before and i thought i might as well give it a try, and two the pebble finish version of the samsung s3,

apparently has a bit of a manufacturing fault at the moment so the back covers for some reason haven't passed samsung's meticulous attention to detail or whatever. and so the stocks are a bit short everywhere. but i generally thought to myself you know, if they've had problems with 100,000 of these back panels or what have you, the chances are the first stock that came in probably has the defect so i'd rather just not bother with that. dodgethe issue get the white one. two birds one stone basically. personally, i'm quite chuffed with my first white phone, i was always wary

because i was concerned it might turnout like the apple cube which ended up with an eggshell pattern after a while but you know, that just put me off for life. and this is it. on the home screen see, it's incredibly bright. i mean really really is a bright display it's pentile

which some people say meh, pentile because it's not rgb so i won't bore you with the details golook it up online pentile amoled super amoled screens. samsung galaxy s3 personally yes, i can sort of see what people are on about but who cares, seriously who cares?

it's a beautiful looking display it's incredibly bright and the colors are excellent. i mean, the colour reproduction in photos, yes' it's a little bit off once you transfer it to your pc but come on... with the multitude of photo editing apps out there these days, the ones on the phones the one on the computer the one in google plus if you happen tobe using it. i mean obviously it takes a buttonclick these days to make your photo

look good again. what's the problem? the eight mega pixel shooter really does a great job and some of the new features on the shooter itself are quite excellent. they've actually speeded the sensor up so it can now take photographs a lot more quickly than it could before, allows you to shoot up to i think three frames a second twenty photos and a burst, really really impressive. oops, just come back to the home screen.

all in all a really nice piece of hardware and the quad core processor really keepsup, do you know what i mean, it's fast, really fast. that's it. if you haven't already ordered one, why the heck not? ok, so here we are with the samsung galaxy s3 brand new phone, came out a couple of days ago and what do i think? i think it's amazing! quite literally one of the best phones i think i've ever used and i've used a lot of phones

it's running samsung's touchless five which is a vast improvement over previous touchless. generally with the processor being clocked at 1.4 ghz and being quad core backed up with 1gig of system ram you are looking at a very very very nippy machine. this is easily the fastest phone i've ever used and personally i think it's faster than the one x your mileage may vary, not too sure it's quite as fast as the 1s though

although unless you're throwing a benchmark at these things we're kind of splitting hairs for a couple of frames a second. she's backed up with a exynos processor which is what's delivering your quad core which also integrates the mali 400 gpu. personally, i've never been all that fond of the mali gpu it's an arm holdings creation designed to go alongside their other armprocess technology.

in this instance, the mali's now been clocked at 400mhz. that's twice as fast as previous phones, the s2 had a 200 in there, every other phone i've seen coming out is running the two hundred. this is an absolutely stonking piece of kit. honestly guys, the galaxy s3 is the phone to beat this year, the iphone has got a long way to go if it's going to keep up. if it's even going to catch up at this point.

my favourite feature of this phone and it's so, so simple, hold down your power button, press that option there, you can then control the volume of various elements of your phone so you can have your notifications louder, or your system sounds, or your new ringer. it's lovely, it's simple, wow! i'm going to have a fuller review coming up in a little bit, just because my battery has now died on my camera. ok here we are with the samsung

galaxy s3. now what i'm going to show you quickly are some of the latest features. so if you touch this you can see the very very slick interface. there's quite a few pre-installed apps that come with the s3 most of them i'm afraid not very good!

for instance you've got video hub, music hub s voice which is samsung's version of siri. honestly, i am so bored of this voice control nonsense! you know, we could do it like ten years ago. it didn't work then, itstill doesn't work now and it's a bit of a cheat because all it's doing is sending data back to a data centre somewhere in america processing your information and returning a result. why, when we've got all the power in these phones would we

want to do that? what's the point? just doesn't really make much sense to me. flipboard. if you know it from the iphone is alsoinstalled pre-installed really really cool and dropbox. here's a really cool tip for you. sign into your personal dropbox account if you already have one or set up a new dropbox account on your phone

and you'll immediately get 48gig of storage space in dropbox for two years courtesy of samsung. genius. i'm reliably informed if you happen to log out of your account and log into say, your friend's dropbox account from your phone, they'll also get 48gig. share and share alike! another thing is all share which is basically your dnla the digital network living alliance it allows you to share your content from your phone directly to any dnla

device including xbox 360 when it works, ps3, the wii and a host of other things like boxee box and what have you. that's really about it from the samsung installed stuff. widgets, the usual complement of widgets but nicely laid out. flip through each panel. s memo is actually really really cool, but you need the s pen to really make use of it properly to actually draw onto the screen and take notes as you're working. you notice the physical home button

down at the bottom, you can double tap to bring up the s voice but you know, i really hate s voice, i really hate siri so i don't even use that. at some point might very well root my phone and find a way to get rid of that and replace that button with somethingelse. if you long press it will then fire up all of your tasks. one thing i do really like here which is new and unique on the samsung galaxy s3 is this removal button, allows you to close all your apps quickly

or you can fire up your task manager. go straight in, see what you're running, what i quite like about this is it will also show you your ram and you can quickly clear your memory down if you need to, your storage space and any stuff you've got downloaded andinstalled. sadly you can't easily uninstall all of the junky samsung apps which is a pity s voice

unfortunately you have to root the phone which may very well have to happen because i just can't see why you are losing about 500meg of space to a load of samsung apps that i'm never going to use. why why samsung why??!!! it just doesn't make sense. standard ice cream sandwich options there for things like your folders, so you can just drop the app straight into a folder. play store.

one of the things that i found quite entertaining galaxy s3 creating a message and you've got scribble or slide i think it may also be called. doesn't always get it right, depends on your fingers, all done just by sliding. you can change those options if you pressand hold here, down there,

you can then see you get a number of extra options you can actually speak to your phone and it will convert it, you can use a scribble option or no option. this is quite good as well - clipboard. hover over the clipboard anything you'vegot stored on the clipboard will appear here and you can store multiple items, which is very very cool. discovered last night by accident! aha, that's where all the stuff i put on the clipboard has gone! let's have a look in settings.

so data useage, which is common to ics is available shows you exactly what app's been usingwhat most when you've been using your phone. how much data you've been using, you can set alerts, display, loads of those display options including smart stay which is really cool. if you are holding the phone to your face, well not to your face, obviously, but if you are looking at your phone, the camera, the front facing camera will flick on and it will double check to see if you are still there and looking at the phone.

if you are, it won't turn the screen off, even if you've got the timeout set to two minutes. it's just such a labour saving device. i used to lose track of the number of times i would have to turn my phone on look at something and then i get distracted and then my phone turns off and i have to press the button again to log in. absolutely pointless. sms message that's just coming in. other than that, a lot of the options are verysimilar

battery, shows you how much battery is going for. what's drawing the power. as usual the screen's really killing it. location service, your dock the option for power saving which you can flick on and generally reduce all of the power on your phone so reduce the cpu, turns the screen on and off quicker turns off the haptic feedback, all the items that really draw on the battery.

storage, you can see all your storage information also the mount for your sd card if you need to. so some of the other really nifty features on the s3 your quick access buttons at the top here for kind of most used system features i suppose is what you could call them so you've got wifi, gps, generally muting your sound screen rotation basically whether the screen will automatically rotate or not, dropping the phone into power save mode

turn your notifications off, turn your mobile data on or off driving mode and obviously, the overall sync. you can also access settings directlyfrom there as well and you can get your network operator and thedate there. all the rest of your notifications down there and a click button to quickly clear everything in the list and it sends you back to your home screen nice samsung galaxy s3 review

if you pinch how strange it doesn't work! not all that reliable actually for some reason, let's try that again. well, we'll probably not bother with that then. there we go. so if you want to see all of your home screens, just pinch nice feature just pinch and show all of your home screens

then move to an appropriate one have a new home screen or drag and trash if you want to get rid of one, there's an americanism. that's really the core software features of the samsung galaxy s3. there's a few others around things like near field communication. allows you to tap two phones together, exchange information and it also has a wifi direct as well so if the other phone has wifi direct it will set up

a really fast wifi connectionbetween the two phones, transfer files very very cool. you'll also notice i've got chrome installed there at the bottom, very very excellent indeed. ok, so previous android phones have been pretty ropey with the number of apps you could run in the background. things would start slowing down etcetera. so i thought you might like to have a look at how the s3 copes. it has 1gig memory in there as you can see, i've got

quite a lot of games running and if you go and have a look at my other videos you'll notice that the frame rate is particularly great. i've got speed moto on and the frame rate is excellent even though there is plenty running in the background. just quickly show you now. you can see the frame rate is really really solid plenty of apps running everything's still really responsive. beautiful. here we are with the samsung galaxy s3 camera.

it's brilliant, pretty much the same sensor as the s2. it's been tweaked slightly to make it more responsive soit's faster. it basically can take eight shots simultaneously in a burst, a rapid three shots a second which is quite fast, up there with my dslr. all right, not quite the same quality, but at the top here you've got your front facing camera switch so you can switch between the cameras. flash seamless button your autofocus

and down here loads and loads of extra options so you can do self portrait tweaking on flash, focussing modes, timer resolution white balance the iso it's all there for you. net metering switch to outdoor mode you can turn on anti-shake they've really packed every kind of option in here if anything i would say on the s3 what they've really gone for on this phone is making sure that they

have as many options as possible. previous camera phone software was pretty lousy, let's face it. i think it does a pretty good job camera wise. no grumbles from me put it that way and normally i'm the first to complain. you can also, if you long press you can change which options appear in yourquick menu so for instance i might want to have myiso and my exposure available in the side so before i take a picture i can just quickly tweak it if i'm not happy with how the software has processed it.

not bad at all galaxy s3 . if you want to switch to video, there's a quick toggle there and we're straight into video mode. you can see actually, the video is pretty macro it comes in really really tight which you know is not bad at all. again you have some options inside. limit it for multimedia messaging

turn the light on or off and some additional options inside here setting recording mode etcetera. exposure values, the timer anti-hake if you'd like it. interestingly, you can also take a picture at the same time. ok, i don't actually know how to do that yet. i'll have to have a play with that. that's focussing, clearly. let's flick back

the camera. really like it. so far taken a few photos inside and outside. low light performance bit weak. my problem really is that the flash tends to give things a bit of a blue hue. so you're going to want to correct that in software post-production if you're going to be using it for anything kind of moderately serious. outside with loads of light on thesubject this is one of the best camera shooters out there.

possibly not coming up to thequality of the ones with backlit sensors but you know those backlit sensors they cost you battery power. so a lot of people are interested in motionactivation. come into settings. motion and then click on the ones you're interested in. you've got direct call, call contact currently displayed on the screen so

if you lift the phone to your face with contact displayed on the screen it will automatically start dialling. smart alert some really really clever little actions in here. ok, so a lot of people are interested in the connectivity options that are coming through on the s3 in particular. if you go into the settings and go into more settings

in there you have a host of otheroptions so you can click your flight mode on and off samsung have a system called kies which allows you to connect to your pc basically and kies based devices, haven't tried that yet. the vpn connection, for those of you in corporate networks who are worried about your security tethering and portable hotspot i'm in the uk and it was enabled. if you're in america, good luck. i'm sorry about that.

nfc. for those of you who like using nfc tags like me or if you're looking to tap your phone together android beam which is basically the samething but allows you to transmit content sbeam which is the samsung galaxy s3 version of nfc i think wifi direct seen this on a couple of android devices but seems to be samsung's in particular. to set that up,

it works very similar to nfc except it, or bluetooth, if you've ever used bluetooth sharing two phones with wifi direct you can connect, you can share your files and what have you much quicker. if you've got a ps3, xbox, something like that dnla hook your mobile phone up to your ps3 or xbox remotely and you can share your content from your ps3 or from your s3 directly to your ps3. samsung galaxy s3 review and then mobile networks which is forthose of you that want to change any of your mobile settings data roaming everything likethat.

all tucked away in one nice easy area, not spread around like in some other handsets. s3 that's about it for your settings. hello everyone. so a few people have asked me how i modified my lock screen to get rid of some of the icons on there.

it did take me a little bit of fiddling before i found it but it's actually quite simple. and quite customisable. so go into your settings. go down to security. and in here you've got screen lock. screen lock options so here you can change the type of screen lock you've got. you can use the motion lock

i haven't tried that out yet, it's meant to be quite good though, face lock, face and voice, all of these things. ok, but the option we want is in lock screen options and in here shortcuts and i think you can see you've got a green tick against it. if you then click on that it will take you into set short cuts, you can see there one of your icons you can set any icons you like. obviously i would suggest

removing any of the ones that give peopleaccess to personal information like the email one for instance. i think the camera one'sgenerally all right. you know you've got to be careful with it because at the end of the day, anyone who picks up your phone can access those apps quickly. so you know, use a bit of common sense and only put the ones on that you're not too worried about people accessing. i think it just stalled a little bit there. i think it generally depends if you're someone who is a road warrior so there's a chance someone might be able to access your phone when you're around

or whether you're someone that just sits in your house all day and so you're not really worried. very very quick and easy, let's just add to it as well, for argument's sake press your back button, back again, come all the way out and we turn the phone off and there's our icons. quick and easy if i want to access one, simply press and move it to the outside. and then that's there. quick and easy customization of thosebuttons

it's a shame there's not few more optionslike being able to move them around to a different place and things like that, but hey, it's nice to have those features. like isay, use a bit of common-sense and don't put anything on there that you wouldn't want anybody to be able to access at the end of the day. now i'm going to go and change some of those options. hello everyone. right, so a few people have been asking how you stop s voice activating when you use the double click on your home button.

so, just to show you how that works, just get rid of s voice, it's so annoying. so my browser double click there my phone then stalls and then s voice comes up marvellous, i really don't want that. i don't like s voice, i want shot of it. i certainly don't want samsung galaxy s3 ...yes quite!! so, to get rid of it we go click on your settings option here. go into your settings,

launch s voice. launch s voice by double pressing the home key. go away. you can also go in here and tweak a whole load of other s voice related stuff as well turn it off, wake up samsung unlock. only listen while charging, all those nice little things to really tweak it to your liking or if you really want to just turn the damn thing off. then go back and that's it. s voice is gone, double tap now, it doesn't do anything

no more s voice. hooray!!

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