Samsung Galaxy S III Review

When Samsung launched the first Galaxy S in 2010, we were plenty excited about it. Atleast over at this side of the planet, it meant that in a couple months everyone knew about Android. At the time, the Galaxy S basically was the best Android had to offer. And as such, it became one of the most popular Android phones out there. That was followed by the Samsung Galaxy S II in 2011, which was equally, if not more, successful, being touted as almost unbeatable in many areas, and a first Android phone for many people I know, even though it was priced at a premium.

Earlier this year, Samsung curiously skipped Mobile World Congress 2012 in February where all the other OEMs were announcing their Android flagships, and announced the much-anticipated Galaxy S III at their own event later. Expectations were high. High end specs were taken for granted, but people were also hoping for something more, and perhaps a better build quality new Galaxy Phone. After the announcement, many folks were a little disappointed because the phone didnt really look that great. Not eye-catching enough, perhaps, but maybe what’s inside this phone will make up for that? Read on for our Samsung Galaxy S III Review, to know more.

The Samsung Galaxy S III comes with pretty much what you’d expect from a device in this price range.

No NFC smart tags though, which is curious since the SGS3 has NFC and I’d imagine Samsung would have wanted to inform users of that right out of the box.

No case either, but it’s a rare in-box sighting with most manufacturers today. More details over in our Samsung Galaxy S III Unboxing post.

The Galaxy S III has a different design than the original Galaxy S and the Galaxy S II. There’s now rounded corners and curves everywhere, with no hint of the rectangular silhouette of past Galaxy S devices.

Samsung implies that the shape is “Pebble” like, with the entire thing being inspired by Nature, and designed for humans. Which supposed to be fancy talk for it being supposedly very people-friendly to use.

There’s yet another increase in screen size though over it’s predecessors, which means it’s dimensions are a lot larger and like the other Quad Core Android flagships, it’s a bit wide and difficult to operate with one hand. It’s just slightly bigger than it’s competitors in this class at 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm, but I guess having large dimensions is part of being the flagship model of an Android OEM nowadays. Atleast Samsung has tried to decrease the size of the bezel to lessen the impact on usability of the screen. And thanks to all the plastic, it weighs just 133 grams.

That being said, the SGS3 is pretty okay looking with it’s inspired-by-nature design. It feels good in the hand and since it’s slim and light weight, it doesnt feel as bulky as it seems.

There was rumored to be a ceramic coating around it for a more premium appearance, but instead you have the ol’ fashioned glossy plastic.

It’s technically polycarbonate I’m told, but it just doesnt feel as high quality as the HTC One X or Nokia’s Lumia phones. As a result, the construction doesnt inspire too much confidence.

Coming to the front of the SGS3, you have a huge 4.8 inch HD Super AMOLED display, at a resolution of 720×1280 pixels for a pixel density of 306 ppi. Samsung has been pretty good with their screens in the past, with AMOLED being a crowd favorite for a while now. Personally, I found the colors extremely saturated which doesnt look great in some scenarios, like browsing the internet where things look just way too darn colorful. Otherwise, when you’re watching a video or viewing photos, it does look quite nice. It’s a bit unnatural, so thankfully Samsung has allowed users to change the saturation level with pre-defined presents like “Natural,” “Dynamic,” and more.

The True Blacks combined with the great contrast and vivid screen give it a slight edge over an LCD in the media department, so I still preferred the screen on the HTC One X, myself, because of one minor fact: The Galaxy S III uses a Pentile Matrix for it’s screen instead of a regular RGB one.

It’s not a huge problem, and the screen is high resolution enough that you might not notice it, but if you put it next to the screen on the One X and look very closely, you’ll see that the screen on the Galaxy S III has a bit of pixelization going on. And as we mentioned on last week’sUnleashTheVideo episode, once you see that, you cant unsee it.

Visibility in outdoor sunlight is also a bit of an issue. Apart from that, viewing angles are good, and colors are nice and warm, with the HD Super AMOLED screen looking a lot better than the screens on previous Galaxy devices. I still think LCD displays have more accurate reproduction though.

Above the screen you have a front facing camera, centrally located earpiece and a proximity sensor and ambient light sensor.

And below the screen, you have the home key, surrounded by an old school capacitive menu key on the right and a back key on the left. The home key at the bottom is a little hard to reach because of the size of the phone, but it’s had good feedback to it. I’m also not a fan of the placement of the capacitive keys because I thought they were way too close to the edge, but eh, you get used to it after a while. I wish Samsung either used the same capacitive button arrangement HTC uses with their One series devices with a recent apps button instead of a menu button, or just used onscreen navigation keys like the Galaxy Nexus.

At the top of the SGS3, you have the usual standard 3.5mm audio jack, and a power/screenlock key. The key isnt very well built to be honest, since it doesnt have enough feedback to know if you’ve pressed it or not.

On the left side you have just the volume rocker key, which feels the same as the power/screenlock key.

On the right side you have the lone power/screenlock key.

At the bottom, you have the lone microUSB port.

Coming to the (very glossy) back, you have an 8 Megapixel camera, single LED flash, with the loudspeaker grill right next to it.

The lower bump of the original Galaxy S and Galaxy S II are now long gone, but you can still replace the battery and add in a microSD card underneath the (rather flimsy) back panel. As is the trend with most phones nowadays, you have to use a microSIM card in the SGS3.

At the end of the day, the Samsung Galaxy S III is definitely not the best looking phone out there. It’s okay at best, but doesnt really stand out too much compared to other manufacturers flagship phones.

The Samsung Galaxy S III runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, with their TouchWiz UI on top. This time around they’re calling it “TouchWiz Nature UX” though, in-keeping with the Inspired-by-Nature theme of the phone.

I like nature as much as the next nerd, but the water lockscreen (and it’s sounds) quickly got on my nerves after a day or two.

Some folks might like it though. To each their own, eh? The nature theme doesnt end with the lockscreen though, and both ICS and TouchWiz throw in a lot of new features and Samsung’s bought along some new functionality that we’ll talk about separately below.

TouchWiz by itself is pretty much the same as previous versions in terms of how it looks and acts.

From the second it loads up, you know you’re looking at a Samsung phone, and there’s the usual horizontally scrollable main menu, multi-page homescreens with widgets, etc. Very slight cosmetic changes here and there.

Some apps are exactly the same as on the SGS2, though have been entirely replaced by Samsung Apps.

For example, there’s no calendar anymore, which is now replaced by S Planner.

Coming to the Messaging app, typing is easy enough thanks to the large 4.8 inch screen and the well designed on-screen keyboard.

It works great in both portrait and landscape, and you can always download Swipe or SwiftKeyX or other keyboard alternatives if you want a different one.

Then there’s internet browsing, where the stock Android web browser does a good job of hanging anything you throw at it. Load times are quick, and scrolling, zooming and panning are all smooth with no slow downs. There’s also Adobe Flash support and the web browser can even cope with it switched on.

Ofcourse thanks to the fact that the SGS3 runs Android 4.0 ICS, you can also install Google’s Chrome browser for an even better experience, in my opinion.

Part of it’s internet features is also Email, and since this is an Android device, you have support for all kinds of email services. And if you’re a Gmail user, Android is pretty much the best experience you’ll get. There’s also Samsung’s ChatON IM service pre-installed that they seem to be shoving in everyone’s face. An option for folks who want a new method of text instant messaging, I guess.

Coming to media, the built-in music player looks stock, but has a couple TouchWiz additions.

You can play back MP3, WAV, eAAC+, AC3 and even FLAC and there’s more equalizer presets, a “Music Square” that lets you listen to the kind of music in your library that you’re in the mood for. Sound quality is pretty good, but the loudspeaker is average at best.

The video player can play back MP4, DivX/XviD, and WMV file formats, and has that awesome pop-up play feature which means you can keep watching your video while doing various other things on your phone. I’m still not entirely sure how useful it is though.

One very cool little feature, is that the video thumbnails in the gallery grid are animated, which is the first time I’ve seen that on mobile. I’d imagine it’s useful to see a video preview of each clip if you have a ton of videos on your phone?

They can be played back at up to 1080p resolution, and yes, videos and images too, both look gorgeous on that huge 4.8 inch HD Super AMOLED screen. That being said, I was a little annoyed by the lack of sorting options in the gallery, which is a completely different experience that what I’m used to. Everything’s just right there, whether you downloaded it or captured it using the camera.

Overall, TouchWiz is slightly more polished now and a lot more stable. It’s not my favorite Android UI at all (that would be HTC Sense v4), while some folks on the other hand, absolutely love it. Thankfully there are plenty of Android launchers and apps that you can download to change things according to the way you like it.

Admittedly, some of the advantages that the SGS3 currently has, like S-Voice, might become a little less important once Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and it’s Voice Search rolls out to competing devices, but for the time being, it’s nice to have, and it sets the SGS3 apart.

Samsung literally introduced a dozen or so software features in the Galaxy S III to differentiate it from it’s Android rivals, and hoping to make life easier for users, in-keeping with the “people friendly” philosophy.

Some of them are:

S Voice:

Basically, Samsung’s version of Siri from the iPhone. It’s a personal voice assistant that you can ask all kinds of questions, which it then “understands” and answers or performs.

If you’ve phrased your questions correctly, S voice does a pretty good job, and is almost on par with Siri. It was able to understand my strange Indian-American-Middle-Eastern accent properly, which I thought was huge. You can perform tasks like:

- Check the weather
- Play/Pause Music, or skip or go back
- set an alarm or snooze it (Say “Snooze“)
- Open up the camera or other apps (Say “I want to take a photo“)
- Turn wifi, bluetooth, etc on or off

And well, basically whatever you’d want from a phone personal voice assistant. You’ll either use this a lot or not at all.

SmartStay:

Smart Stay was actually something I found rather useful.

It prevents the screen from timing out whenever you’re actually looking at it, using the front camera to track your eyes. Kinda creepy, but if you’re the sort of person that likes to fall asleep while reading your phone, well here ya go. For me it came in really useful for when I was reading tweets on the metro, or a quick book or blog post. It’s had moments where it behaves odd, but it works fine most of the time.

S Beam:

S Beam lets you use Wifi Direct to send an image or video file to other compatible Galaxy devices, which have NFC. You touch the phones together and your file transfer goes along.

AllShare:

AllShare uses Wifi Direct again, for AllShare Cast Video Streaming, AllShare Play File Sharing and Group Cast which shares your screen with multiple other Galaxy devices on the same Wifi network, which I thought was pretty cool.

There’s even Buddy Photo Share, which sends photos taken with the camera, to any folks from your contacts, that are recognized in a picture. It can be automatic or manual.

Samsung will be providing an SDK that it hopes developers will make use of AllShare, so there might be more things coming.

The Samsung Galaxy S III has a quad core 1.4 Ghz Exynos 4412 processor with an ARM Mali-400/MP4 GPU and 1GB of RAM. As a result, the Android/TouchWiz UI is very quick and smooth, with no dropped frames or lag anywhere. It’s quicker than the HTC One X, but not as fast as the LG Optimus 4X HD, which has a much more stock UI to aid it’s speed.

You have 16GB of onboard storage, but the SGS3 is also available in 32GB and 64GB versions. There’s a microSD card slot so you’ll never really run out of space either way.

Coming to connectivity, you have quad-band GSM, quad-band 3G, 4G HSPA+ (up to 21.1 Mbit/s), Wifi, Bluetooth v4 and NFC all built right in. Nice.

The Galaxy S III has an 8 Megapixel camera at the back, sticking with the same resolution as the SGS2. There’s a lot of improvements now, with a new backside illuminated sensor which allows more light into the sensor for better low light shots, and there’s also the same Burst mode and Best Picture mode made first seen on HTC’s One series devices. There’s also no shutter lag anymore thanks to Android 4.0, allowing the camera to take a picture under a second.

There’s also various scene modes like HDR, Beauty, etc and different focusing modes like Macro, Face detection or good ol’ reliable Auto. As expected, you can also change white balance, metering, resolution, contrast, quality, etc.

The outdoor results are pretty decent, managing plenty of details. They’re not exactly very sharp, but the images are not fuzzy either. While images sometimes end up overexposed, especially in bright conditions, but otherwise colors are nice and vivid yet natural. It’s the same for indoor images, but ofcourse the darker the scene, the more noise creeps in to an image. It does an okay job, and even the single LED flash was surprisingly powerful, though it does end up ruining colors imho.

Here’s a couple camera samples from the Samsung Galaxy S III to give you a better idea:

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Coming to Video, you can record up to 1920×1080 HD maximum resolution, with the same list of settings to tinker with.

Overall quality is good, with accurate colors, 29 frames per second, and while the results arnt very sharp, just like the images they’re not too fuzzy either. Here’s a couple camera video samples from the Samsung Galaxy S III to give you a better idea.

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The call quality on the Galaxy S III is pretty good, with voices coming in loud, clear-ish and natural over the phone’s earpiece.

The noise cancellation helps keep background noises out, so that folks on the other end of the call can hear you properly as well. No complaints as such.

The 2100mAh battery in the Galaxy S III kept it going through a day of moderate usage. You’ll be able to get a little more than 24 hours, maybe, but you’ll still have to charge it at the end of every day.

That’s atleast an hour or two of battery life over HTC’s One X, but pretty much the same as LG’s Optimus 4X HD. Your call.

Here’s a detailed video overview of the Samsung Galaxy S III. Just to give you a better idea.

There’s no doubt that the Samsung Galaxy S III is a fantastic little phone, just like it’s predecessors. Most of that is due to it’s impressive spec sheet, which admittedly is matched by intense rivals like the HTC One X and the LG Optimus 4X HD. What makes the SGS3 stands out though, is the extra functionality that Samsung has thrown in to try and improve most things that you use your phone.

TouchWiz is still not my favorite Android UI, but even I will admit that it feels much better than previous versions. Definitely not the worst Android UI I’ve used, for sure. It throws in a lot new nice touches but doesnt cover up the nice stock ICS UI that’s under it. And as a result, it’s smooth and doesnt lag around even if you’re using a live wallpaper.

That all being said, the Galaxy S III is definitely bulky compared to your usual phone, even in today’s world, but it’s just slightly larger than it’s rivals, like the Optimus 4X HD and One X. You cant use it one handed, but it’s what you should expect from all Android quad core beast-phones today.

The camera is decent and comparable to it’s rivals, but I’m not a big fan of the design and build quality of the Galaxy S III, which is why some people are still choosing the HTC One X over it. Still looks better than LG’s 4X HD though, in my opinion. Then there’s also the small issue that it costs a tiny bit more than the other quad cores in the market right now.

At the end of the day, it’s actually kinda hard to find fault with the Samsung Galaxy S III. Chances are, if you pick this up, you’re going to be very happy with it.

Definitely recommended.