Samsung’s music player is equally good.
There isn’t anything to match HTC’s high profile Beats Audio branding, but
there are lots of audio presets that enable you to get the best quality out of
your music collection.
Also present in a feature-rich music app is
Music Square. This analyses all your music and then enables you to create
automatic playlists based on how passionate, exciting, Joyful or calm the songs
are. Inevitably it is a bit hit and misses in action, but worked well enough to
put a different spin on standard playlist creation and management.
To
complement these impressive media players Samsung has included some content
stores to the S III, in the form of ‘hubs’, but these are definitely in bloat
ware territory.
To complement these impressive media
players Samsung has included some content stores to the S III, in the form of
‘hubs’, but these are definitely in bloat ware territory. There’s a
downloadable music streaming app that is listed as free but is actually charged
at $15.55 per month and is no better than the likes of Rdio or Spotify.
The Video hub is a very sparsely populated
movie and TV store. The Games hub offers a few games that you can find
elsewhere.
Worst of all, Samsung includes its own app
store that in some instances is unavoidable. For example, if you choose to edit
a photo from the Gallery app you’ll be prompted to download the free Photo
Editor from the Samsung store, and you’ll need to create an account in the
process. The rest of the apps on show are largely the same (but much smaller in
selection) as you’ll find in the Google Play store. Having two places to find
and download apps is needlessly confusing.
Scrolling
around the screens was entirely lag-free, including on large and complex
webpages, and 3D gaming was equally smooth.
Apart from these hubs, bloat ware is
surprisingly thin on the ground with the S III. Surplus software is in short
supply (Samsung’s Chat On messaging app notwithstanding), so you’ll even need
to head over to the Play store to find apps for Twitter and Facebook, or to
download any file viewers. The main area where we would have liked Samsung to
do a bit more is with the Camera app. The camera itself is superb, shooting
high-quality stills and video that can rival the output from any phone bar
Nokia’s camera-centric handsets. Yet HTC has recently raised the bar on camera
software, and the S III feels weaker in comparison. There are lots of good
features - shutter lag is virtually nonexistent, a burst mode with ‘best shot’
selection will help ensure you always capture those key moments, you can shoot
video and take snaps at the same time, and the image stabilization in video
mode works very well (albeit it crops into the image to achieve the effect).
But there’s no way to adjust key settings like saturation or sharpness, few
effects (with a useful HDR mode the best) and the sharing options are also
limited. However, the camera is one of the standout features of an impressive
hardware line up.
The quad-core processor devoured every task
we threw at it. Scrolling around the screens was entirely lag-free, including
on large and complex webpages, and 3D gaming was equally smooth. As already
noted, video playback was excellent regardless of format or size. There were a
few instances where a firmware update could smooth the performance over even
further. Exiting the Chrome browser (which we installed separately) would
occasionally cause the home screen to redraw; suggesting tweaks on memory usage
would be beneficial.
Our review handset had 16GB of internal
storage, which is the lowest of three configurations (up to 64GB), although
with an easily accessible micro SD slot taking cards up to 64GB you’re unlikely
to encounter storage shortages any time soon. Users of the S III also get 50GB
of free cloud storage through Dropbox for the next two years.
Its
predecessor is the biggest selling Android phone to date, and the level of hype
that greeted this handset’s launch was unprecedented
With so much going on the S III, and so much
powerful hardware on board you might expect the battery life to be the one area
where the phone falls down. That isn’t the case, Samsung has totally nailed it.
Through a combination of a larger-than- average (2100mAh) battery and some
clever stuff going on with the processor, the S III is able to deliver a full
day’s heavy use with relative ease. Go a bit lighter and you’ll be well into
your second day before you need to consider reaching for the charger. Battery
usage can vary wildly from one user to another, of course, but we were
routinely getting up to five hours of screen time, where many other devices
will struggle to get much beyond three. The phone charges pretty quickly, too,
taking around three hours through the official charger. So often phones present
a compromise is between battery life and functionality. With the S III there is
no compromise, and no need to ration your usage. There will be no excuses for
other flagship phones to not repeat this level of battery performance in
future.
The Galaxy S III had a lot to live up to.
Its predecessor is the biggest selling Android phone to date, and the level of
hype that greeted this handset’s launch was unprecedented. Samsung has well and
truly delivered. It isn’t perfect, of course, and we would like to see the
company explore different materials for the casing in its future phones.
But the S III represents a sublime marriage
of hardware and software, helps the continued progress of Android, and will no
doubt soon supplant the SII as the world’s most popular Android phone. Quite
simply, it’s brilliant.
|
Information
|
|
Price
|
$784.5
|
|
More information
|
www.samsung.com
|
|
Technical
specs
|
|
Operating system
|
Android 4.0
|
|
Processor
|
Exynos 1.4GHz quad-core
|
|
Memory
|
1GB RAM, from 16GB storage
|
|
Dimensions
|
136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm
|
|
Weight
|
133g
|
|
Display size
|
4.8-inch
|
|
Display resolution
|
720x1280 pixels
|
|
Battery life
|
excellent, meaning you won’t need to
worry when away from the charger for a day
|
|
Expansion
|
slot micro SD
|
|
Performance
|
Super-fast quad-core performance,
excellent battery life
|
|
Design
|
Not cutting-edge design, but feels good
in the hand
|
|
Features
|
Everything you need and so much more in
the palms of your hand
|
|
Value for money
|
Expensive but it won’t be going out of
date any time soon
|
|
Verdict
|
Quite simply this is as complete an
Android phone as we’ve seen. Lives up to the hype
|
|
|
|
