The S III runs Ice Cream Sandwich with
Samsung’s own TouchWiz Ul on top. TouchWiz hasn’t always been a popular choice
among many Android users but the version here is the best yet by far. For the
first time TouchWiz is less about skinning the device to create differentiation
-making it look different for the sake of it - and more about adding real
functionality to the software.
The
S III runs Ice Cream Sandwich with Samsung’s own TouchWiz Ul on top
There are still a few quirks in usability
of TouchWiz. You can’t create folders of apps on the home screen by simply
dragging one on top of another, for example, as you can in ICS. Instead you
have to create a folder first. And changing the icons in the dock requires you to
drop the icon onto a home screen first, before then moving it into place. This
can result in some serious icon juggling if your screens are already packed.
We’re also not too keen on the fact that Samsung has stuck with the
desktop-based Kies application for some system updates, instead of delivering
them over the air as almost every other phone does.
But there are improvements as well. One of
the things we didn’t like about ICS is the way it combines the volume for phone
and notifications into a single setting-TouchWiz makes them independently
configurable once again.
For the most part TouchWiz is less less
brashly designed than previous iterations have been, and there’s bags of extra
software that adds real interest, if not always real value. TouchWiz is crammed
with apps; all branded as S- something. S Calendar replaces the basic calendar
app, and comes with an excellent array of widgets. S Memo is for note-taking
and supports stylus input (but, unfortunately, not the excellent S Pen from the
Galaxy Note series).
The
idea of S Voice is that you can speak to your phone if you want to compose a
text message, add a date to your diary, check the weather, or perform any
number of other functions on your phone.
S Voice is the supposed highlight. This is
Samsung’s equivalent of Apple’s Siri speech recognition system and, like that,
it fails to move beyond a mere gimmick. The idea of S Voice is that you can
speak to your phone if you want to compose a text message, add a date to your
diary, check the weather, or perform any number of other functions on your
phone. It’s a nice idea, but for speech recognition to work it needs to have
near 100 per cent understanding of natural speech. S Voice is too limited with
regard to the phrases that it can interpret, and not accurate enough in
understanding those. Too often it responded by telling us it didn’t know what
we meant, or merely offering up a Google search as a consolation, which was
highly frustrating.
Pop-up
play in The SIII
You can see where S Voice might be useful
in the future, but in its present form it is not much more than a proof of
concept. The same thing could be said about the S Ill’s motion gestures. These
perform certain functions depending on how you are holding or moving the phone.
If you’re reading a text message, lifting the phone to your ear will dial the
number of the SMS sender; pick the phone up and it will vibrate to remind you
of unread notifications; when at the bottom of a list or long webpage,
double-tapping on the top of the phone will scroll you back to the top. There
are many more as well, and they all work pretty much as advertised, but we
found we didn’t have the inclination to learn the gestures, and their
functionality is so minor that you could probably go weeks without using any of
them.
Another idea that has potential is Pop-up
play. This enables you to carry on watching a video in a separate window while
using other apps on the device. We don’t recall too many instances where we
weren’t willing pause a video in order to reply to a text message so, again, it
is something that we couldn’t see ourselves using. A better use case would be
if you could leave, say, BBC News playing from the iPlayer app, while using the
phone for other things, but in its current form Pop-up play is only available
in the stock video player.
The S represents a sublime marriage of hardware and software
This video player is one of the S Ill’s
triumphs. In our tests we found it able to play pretty much any video we
tested, regardless of size or format. And on this screen they looked fantastic,
too. One neat trick to show off the power of the handset is a DVD-style
‘chapter’ feature that splits your videos into 12 segments, each displayed with
a live thumbnail. Strangely the video player also includes some very basic
editing features, while the ICS video editing app is not included at all.
