Samsung Galaxy S III vs Samsung Galaxy S II

In June 2011 I switched to Android having been using Symbian for many years, and having had a Nokia N900 running maemo for the 18 months prior. The N900 was a cool device, but very geeky/techie and little activity in terms of commercial applications.

[photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafeblandford/ ]

The switch to the Galaxy S II was like black and white. I was stunned by just how good the S II was. Sure at some level the N900 could do many of the same things – take/share photos, video, decent web browsing – but to me this was the coming of android. The point in time at which android, married to the fantastic S II hardware was slick, usable, functional with wide appeal.


I’d come close to getting the original Galaxy S – but had been caught up thinking about what Nokia’s next move would be. Where was Windows Phone going, what about maemo followons, the relationship with Intel – but more on that in another article.
Back to the S II. What a phone. Lovely for photos. Georgous sexy display, good choice of accessories including the obligatory power users 2000 mAh battery extension. Plenty fast enough for apps. Decent Storage, a healthy 1GB ram. So good I was definately getting to the “how could they possibly improve on this” level.
In truth of course I knew what was coming – screen sizes were continuing to increase (look at the note!), resolutions were increasing (as my OH’s HTC Sensation trumped the S II specwise) and with the Galaxy Nexus we saw some attention paid to the camera to remove the lag associated with phone pictures when compared to say a DSLR.
So when the S III was announced it clearly looked great but I kept on thinking “my next phone is the S IV” – until that is an opportunity arose that made financial sense to go for the S III (and sell the old S II)


I’ve now had the S III for a few weeks so thought it worth summarizing my thoughts – where’s it better, worse, different than it’s predecessor
The screen – georgous OLED as ever, but once you play around with twitter, web browsing, doc reading for a few minutes you quickly appreciate the size boost and crucially the resolution increase. It may be tagged with the “pentile” moniker but in daily use I’d take this over a full res LCD any day. OLED quite simply is georgous to look at.

• The camera – in good light the lag is removed. I expect a big part of this is continual auto focus, but it’s really handy when taking photos outdoors. Very noticeable. I reckon the pictures themselves are improved too, and I’ve not noticed the pink spot I had on the S II.
• Notification light – YAY at last. I had this on my N900 and missed it with the S II. Nice to have it back so it’s easy to see messages are waiting. The downside? I now feel more compelled to respond quickly. Actually I’ve detuned some notifications to get a little more peace and quiet.
• Software – nice to see finally that out of the box touchwiz supports folders, and sorts alphabetically. frankly it was a little crazy there was no alpha sort before, but being android there were plenty of alternative launchers anyway. I used nova – though am still with touchwiz on the S III. Default theming is more ICS like such as in the dialler and scrolling feels a little better.  Lock screen gains functionality.
• The enhanced notification bar stands alone as a very noticeable feature – far more icons to control functions jkay style – we now have wifi, gps, sound,rotate,powersave,notifications, data,bluetooth, driving, sync, brightness all available after a quick swipe

There are other areas where the specs are up, but for me I didn’t have an issue with the S II or just

• Battery life – now 2100 mAh, Original S II was 1650 mAh, but I had a 2000 mAh official extended battery in any case. And it’s too early to compare real life hour usage figures.
• Processor – quad instead of twin, so arguably marginally slicker but then the S II was no slouch and therefore it’s not a big deal

And what didn’t I especially like?

• The samsung keyboard now has some swype like functionality built in. Except it’s not as good as full-fat swype. Easily remedied though by a visit to swype.com

So all in all some lovely improvements – with no doubt more to come software wise with jellybean, but if you have an S II still – enjoy it. It remains one of the BEST android phones around, even a year later. IMO it was truly a landmark android device and really set out what a top end android device was.

Nigel.