- Latest smartphone from Samsung with a big screen, lots of innovations and a desire to be an iPhone-botherer.
Review: Samsung’s Galaxy S III is one of the most feature-stuffed smartphones yet. Well, at least there’s room, as it’s equipped a 4.8in screen. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5.3in tablet-phone aside, this handset touts the largest display you’ll find on a mainstream mobile and it packs a quad-core CPU too.
- The phone is, literally, thanks to its 4.8in screen. Smart Stay, S Voice and Direct Call are among the cool gimmicks
And though the latest OS favours a Recent Apps icon as one of the three persistent buttons, Samsung has plumped instead to keep a menu button, alongside a back button. Personally I’d have put the back button to the left and the menu on the right, but there we are. Recent Apps is useful for switching between programs, but menu is more frequently used, surely.
- Locked screen and unlocked – widgets aplenty populate the various home screen pages
The phone’s display is very impressive. There are cavils from critics who complain that it uses Pentile Amoled instead of the newer Super Amoled Plus technology, but since the results are so good, it scarcely matters. It’s bright too, but in use the Automatic Brightness setting can often result in the display being unnaturally dim for too long. Otherwise, it’s a great, high-resolution screen.
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The bottom line:
The latest Samsung is a big step forward from last year’s Galaxy S II with lots of new features, a big battery that lasts and lasts and a powerful processor at its heart.
The trend over the last year or so has been for big phones. Not like in the early days of mobiles where ‘brick’ was a fair description. No, these are slim handsets with huge displays and the processing power of a smallish supercomputer. Chief among them is the Samsung Galaxy S III.
Technically, it’s not the fastest. The HTC One X has a processor that has even more power but the quad-core 1.4GHz chip on board here (matched with 1GB of RAM) means the S III is a tremendously fast phone, with no lag, no dawdling, no time to go and make a cup of tea while it’s building a web page.
Samsung Galaxy S III Specification
| Samsung Galaxy S 3 | Specification |
|---|---|
| Camera: | 8MP with LED flash |
| Video: | 1080p@30fps |
| Display: | Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 720 x 1280 pixels, 4.8-inches |
| Dimensions: | 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6mm |
| Internal memory: | 16/32/64GB storage, 1GB RAM |
| Card slot: | MicroSD up to 32GB |
| Colour: | pebble blue or white |
| Weight: | 133g |
| Touchscreen: | yes |
| Audio playback: | 3.5mm ear jack and speaker |
| Processor: | 1.4GHz quad-core processor |
| Operating system: | Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich |
| Battery life: | 21h 40m talk time (3G) |
| Keyboard: | virtual |
Verdict
Well, as you know, this a big handset. If the extra real estate appeals and if your digits can cope with the scale of the handset, it has an awful lot going for it, from its deeply enjoyable hi-res screen to the genuinely innovative, if occasionally gimmicky, features. A powerful chip with decent RAM, outstanding battery life and good call quality ensure that the basics are well-catered for, while the headline features will guarantee entertainment value down the pub… for a while, at least. ®
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