Samsung Galaxy S3 One Month Review Android - Androidizen

Hello everyone.
So I've had my Samsung Galaxy S3 for just
over a month I think now.
And I wanted to
really let you know how I'm getting on with it. You'll have seen from the other reviews I
made
the week I got the phone.
I was really really impressed with it, so am I still impressed with it ,well..
yes, in a word.
It really is an incredible piece of kit.
It's still as fast and response as it was
on day one when when I got it.
I'm actually running a custom ROM on here now, I've rooted the phone,
got a custom ROM on there,
a few extra features,
makes my life a little bit easier which is the whole point of rooting.
But I crucially kept touchless 5 on there which I'm actually enjoying quite a bit.
I think it's a bit nicer than stock Ice Cream Sandwich and quite a bit nicer than
Sense 4 on HTC's phones.
Just the layout generally,
you know, the way everything functions
is very very slickly done.
I don't personally find touchless 5 particularly slow or getting in my
way atall, I actually find some of the features it has
quite helpful.
You know what I mean? So for instance one of the
more useful ones I seem to use more often than not.
Just having that
translate
across so that when you want to delete something
just drop down there. Sure, not quite as easy as Jelly Bean flick it up
There you are, T Mobile, my bill's now ready.
Let's not have a look at how much I've spent on my T Mobile bill.
It's going to be a lot.
And you know, the quad core processor, I know there's has been some debate between those
of us on the international phone and some of our
cousins in America.
You know America has got the dual core,
we've got the quad core.
Performance wise, I've had a look at videos from the dual core
everything looks about the same, you can't say Samsung undersold
those people who got the dual core, frankly, they're just as fast. If you happen to be in
the international territories and you're getting the quad core you're not going to
feel like you've been hard done by at all or anything like that
Those four cores, within the
Samsung Galaxy S3 I believe clock individually at
1.4gHz.
That's an awful lot of power per core
and it doesn't output a particularly large amount of extra heat.
What I've noticed, is
this area around here,
does become
particularly warm, say after
twenty minutes worth of gaming etc not just a 2gig game but some of the others
really going to stretch it,
you know, something like Grand Theft Auto,
any of the other intensive 3D titles you really can feel it start to
warm up and crucially,
at no point does it ever feel too hot to hold.
Also the point where you kind of go Ooh,
that feels wrong, that's bad my phone's going to explode or something like that
never feel that.
Unlike certain HTC phones I'm not going to mention
that got so hot I couldn't hold it.


Fault maybe?
Not from what I've seen of HTC phones they run hot.
Be interesting to see how Tegra 3 changes things.
Interestingly.
Tegra 3 versus my Samsung Galaxy S3, I borrowed one of my mate's phones,
can't remember what it was, it's got Tegra on it,
It's the 1X whatever they call it, It's their new flagship anyway.
Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me at the time but I would have
had the two head-to-head.
Yes, the Samsung smoked it! There's no two ways about it.
Tegra looks great, don't get me wrong. Tegra 3 looks beautiful
but when it comes to pushing raw pixels
the Samsung Galaxy S3 wins, and if you happen to be rooted
and you visit XDAdevelopers.com
have a look around for a set of patches basically for your
phone
that allow you to
run
basically it allows you to trick your phone into thinking it's a Tegra 3 device.
I've not got it set up here at the moment.
because I've just done a new ROM
but the idea is that if you've got a Tegra app,
particularly a game that's THD I think on the Play Store what you can do is
trick your phone into thinking it's got an NVIDIA processor inside there

and the game runs with all the lovely effects turned on and actually,
it's not that slow.
You feel that you're dropping maybe five to ten frames a second off 60,
and maybe fifty,
so for more intensive games there's a bit more of a drop, but crucially, it works.
I think in essence it's just emulating Tegra 3
but using the processor power of the quad core Xenos processor on the Samsung.
Check it out on YouTube as well, there's some great videos.
But as I say, have a look for that.
it really tickled me.
Just because someone says
'oh, that only runs on THD,' right, if you've got enough
processing power anything can be emulated, still waiting for a PS2
port though.
You know, come on, let's have a PS2 emulator some time soon.
We've now got oodles of power.
If we can do it on the desktop sort of we can probably do it on the
phone by now.
You know, I'm not going to say too much about Samsung's built-in apps.
They're all right at the end of the day
S Voice, I don't like it, I've made that clear in my previous videos. It's a really piss poor
implementation of
voice control.
In actual fact, having got a Galaxy Nexus with me as well,
the Google Now voice service is like a thousand times better than S Voice
is here.
Sorry, Google Now I think it's called.
or even Siri. You know
connecting voice apps, it's not just enough to return a line of text or drop something
into a calendar, it really is about being
contextual.
and I think Google's absolutely nailed it with Jelly Bean.
Speaking of which, Jelly Bean,
is not coming yet for the Samsung Galaxy S3.
Some of the devs have managed to get up a ported ROM at the moment from the source
code but
lots not working... things like radio and stuff like that so I'm running Ice Cream
Sandwich at the moment.
Rumour has it Samsung are not going to be hanging around to upgrade their
flagship phone.
It's likely we will see Jelly Bean
officially release for the Samsung S3 around the same time as the Galaxy Note 2
is released
which is currently pegged at the end of August
but that is a phone, fablet,
whichever way you go, is it a phone, is it a tablet?
It's just ginormous. I'm very interested to take a look at one of those when they come out.
Let me know in the comments if you're also interested in seeing how the Galaxy Note 2
stacks up.
It may very well be the next one I purchase after grabbing the
Google Nexus 7 tablet
later on in the month.
At the end of the day
if you go out and buy the Samsung S3 now, you are getting Jelly Bean. This isn't
the case that you know that in six months time they'll say you couldn't
port it or we couldn't get it running or we couldn't get all our rubbish and extra
apps stuffed onto the phone so we're not bothering to port it.
Your phone's obsolete. No no!
The Samsung Galaxy S3
is getting Jelly Bean.
It will receive it in the next couple of months and it will be fully ported.
Whether you choose to use touchless five or whether you stick on another ROM from a developer
you know that has any of the other launches, like Go Launcher
installed that's entirely up to you if you root your phone,
bearing in mind it invalidates your warranty.
At the end of the day this is a sound investment.
This is not a Nokia Lumia 900.
This is not a phone that is obsolete a week after it was released to the market.
I mean come on, Nokia Microsoft, blimey!
Way to put a hole in your
customer's willingness to part with their money.
Instead of putting a hole in their pockets you simply put a hole in their ability to even pay you.
Who is going to buy a phone that is effectively obsolete
the week it was released?
In fact, it was obsolete before they even started manufacturing the damn things.
They may as well not have bothered. Why didn't they just skip. Anyway I'm going off topic again.
Back on topic now.
One of the things I absolutely adore about the S3 really is its screen size.
I mean to begin with I was following some of the
rumours and people saying oh my God, it's a 4.8 inch screen how is that
going to work for people?
and look at the Galaxy Note and I thought, blimey 5.4, 5.6,
that is a big screen, that's

5, 4.8, wow, that's going to be tricky
but actually
the great thing that I think Samsung have done on this phone is this...
It's not how big the phone is, necessarily,
but how thin it is because actually
if you have a device that is both big and thin,
so your hand fits it more naturally,
you're not losing as much into this piece of your hand.
Actually, you can have a bigger screen and the rest is just down to really good
engineering where you put your buttons. For instance, the home button is
not on the top of the S3. It's on the side, and it's not at the top of the side where you might expect
it's part way down, so actually, when you hold it in your hand naturally
look where your thumb is, it's
always by a button
for most people.
Even if you've got small hands you're still going to be in easy reach.
I gave this to my wife, she has tiny hands.
She finds no problem with the S3.
Ladies, if you're looking for an alternative to the iPhone 4 or 4S
and you're looking for a phone that, you know has a
good feeling in the hands,
good for girls, good for ladies, you're not going to go far wrong with the S3, like I say
my wife has small hands, she has no problem.
Somehow there's double entendres all over that guys, feel free to point them out in the comments!
Like I say, lovely, lovely piece of engineering work on that.
One of the things I really like, and I'm sure other S3 owners might attest to this,
is you don't necessarily press the button when you turn your phone on.
Kind of roll your finger across it, is how it feels.
It's like easy to kind of just roll your thumb.
Pick it up, and just go...like that.
Just like that. You don't press it just roll your thumb
across it as you pick it up.
Yes it's a button,
but I just found a better
way to
optimise your experience.
Roll your thumb across it. Try it now if you've got an S3.
How much better does that feel?
Awesome, that's how it feels.
OK, onwards, the camera in the S3.
All right, I will say that the one thing I was moderately disappointed with
was the low light performance of the S3.
It's good, it's good, don't get me wrong.
But it could be a bit better and it's the flash that lets it down yet again, sorry
the LED, the light bulb, the little piece of crap that's stuck in the front of it that does
absolutely no good at illuminating a scene over about three metres, however, it will
completely blind anyone at about 2ft away.
So you know,
one day they will either put zeon flash on absolutely every phone camera or
they will come up with LEDs where you can actually adjust how much power goes to them
so you can adjust the brightness
would be useful or even a sensor, an optical sensor.
How about this, an optical sensor that knows how far away the subject is so doesn't
blind them. Awesome stuff,
but anyway, I digress.
Eight mega pixel camera
and it does a fantastic job. The more light you have, the better the pictures look,
obviously.
But that low light performance is a bit flaky. However,
what I did notice is the low light performance when using video
is really good and actually I think personally,
video is how I'll be using this phone mostly.
Yes, it's nice to quickly take a shot, rattle it off in rapid burst shots etcetera,
what I love about this camera is the quality of the video.
It's smooth.
Even with the camera stablisation
turned on
it does create a very stable picture
even if you're kind of walking
it's all right, know what I mean.
You don't tend to get too much warp either which is a common factor
if you've ever watched a YouTubve video where Google have
attempted to fix a video for you, to fix
the stutter etcetera.
Unfortunately it does tend to create quite a lot of warp and that is where
the
middle of the image almosts looks like it is bulging and the outside of the image
is kind of
almost moving
independently of the rest of the picture.
And that's basically caused by the image stabilisation attempting to
lock everything in.
Obviously, if you are recording it on the camera in real time,
at the time you shoot it much better than doing it in software later
and it does a good job.
App wise,
I've not had any problems with any apps other than a couple of games that
obviously weren't designed for the power of the S3,
or for it's screen resolution and you get a few forced quits in there.
Tends to be with some of the older titles, some of the older
sort of not very good titles which haven't had big budgets thrown against them
etcetera.
Can't really reveal any names, mostly because I can't really remember any.
You know, install it, doesn't work, get rid, etcetera.
One thing I have to say though is
watching video footage on this, browsing the web,
just doing any operations with it, anything you kind of, you know on
other phones where you think you would do that, but it's not exactly the best experience
I've ever had,
you know, it takes you three minutes to start your camera and take a picture for instance,
or firing up your web browser means sitting there for a while while it
thinks about opening your web browser. And sitting there even longer while it actually
downloads something from the web, etcetera.
I've never found that with this phone.
I always find the general operations with Android devices,
in general is very fluid.
You know, things are logically laid out,
you can move between applications
using a long press.
And so you have actually got
true sort of multi-tasking going on.
My apps are still running in the background if they need to, perfectly happily.
The system will manage the memory beautifully fine for me.

Let's fire up a quick video.
I've got my screen rotation lock on at the moment.
There you go, we'll pop that video out.
That's my cat using some cutlery!
When did you ever see a phone that simply
picked up a piece of video
and then display it on the desktop?
A phone top, as it were.
Within the Ui.
And so you can carry on watching it and that video will float over absolutely anything.
So let me just find something a little bit longer.
Because it's quite a cool feature, know what I mean?


You have to admit, it's a pretty impressive sight.
We're used to doing it on the desktop,
not so used to doing it on tablets and phones,
now it's very very possible.
The technology in question that's doing all of that,
some developers came up with it a while ago and have used it to really really
clever effect, so for instance
have your terminal screen, if you happen to be a Linux user or like using Root, then
you have a terminal that
constantly lives on your desktop. It's not a widget, it's actually a live running app.
And likewise, I've seen one guy do like a live wallpaper connected to his camera
so that as he's walking down the street using his phone he has a little overlay which
shows him what's in front of him to stop him falling over things and bumping into
old ladies.
All of this is now possible because of the power of these phones.
Front facing camera.
I've used it a little bit but mostly I've used it for Google hangouts at work.
For instance, I was in London a couple of weeks ago,
and the team needed to speak to me.
They were having a meeting.
The big problem for them was that I was on my phone but they needed to show me
some stuff and they needed to kind of have that little bit of face to face time.
So they just threw me a Google hangout. Saw it on my phone
My phone basically rang,
and I went ' Oh, Google hangout',
hit the button and there's my team.
And I was suddenly talking to them, sat on the Mall!
And what was really impressive was a) I was in London and you know what the call quality is
like down there for data, lots of congestion
but also it was quite noisy
and they could still hear me
see me, and we could have basically a four-way video conference
and it worked.
It didn't suck.
You know, it wasn't Skype bad.
It was really really good, and you know, for me, that's something I've never
really experienced before in a phone. With a lot of technology it rarely
just works.
And I think a lot of that comes down to Google's absolutely fantastic play
and Samsung's good mixture of hardware and
good software at the end of the day, because, you know, you can have a great piece of
hardware as we've seen in the past and awful piece of software.
You know, awful software running the phone
well the whole thing's a disaster.
And likewise beautiful software, awful hardware
and the same is true.
What I think we might have here and what I think will be reinforced with Jelly Bean,
is that this is THE package as it were.
Quad core processor,
1 to 2 gig of RAM depending on whether you are 3G or 4G,
Our 4G cousins in the States need that 2gig of RAM there because of the data
speeds they're dealing with.
Plenty of buffer basically.
That's the other reason why dual core tends to be over on the international
phones because they are using 4G there, the dual cores tend to work better.
There's currently no quad core
processor package
which can integrate with the radio chip from Broadcom I think it is, or Qualcom,
the other company that manufactures them
and so in essence if you want 4G on your phone
then dual core is the only way to go currently which is why, as you know
Samsung have made so sure that their dual core processor is as good as the
quad core processor, no matter what territory you're in. When you talk about having
this 2gig of RAM in the US markets and
South Korea
I'm afraid most of that memory is going to be taken up with your downloads
so don't get too excited will you!?
If we ever get 4G in this country and it doesn't interfere with every
digital broadcast going
we should expect to see similar levels of performance and similar
memory bumps in the next generation phones in 2014. Most likely,
they will be up to two and a half tothree gig of RAM by that time,
as 4G speeds really ramp up.
You know, for me,
personally,
it's not a bad phone as well.
The hallmark of any phone is can you make a call and can the other person
hear you and do you get cut off?
And getting cut off tends to be a network related issue.
I've not had any problems with the network here. Admittedly, I'm not in
a big city, I'm in a reasonably large town.
This is currently running on T Mobile,
T Mobile, I've always had good reception from T Mobile wherever I've been.
In general I would say,
that
your download speeds and wifi speeds on the Samsung Galaxy S3 are around the best
out there.
So now I've spent most of my time waffling and all you've done is stared at this beautiful beautiful screen.
Sorry about that but you know,
at the end of the day, we've got lots and lots of other reviews on the channel which
help to show you what the Samsung Galaxy S3 is capable of, etcetera.

There's not an awful lot I wanted to show you that's new, I just wanted to talk about
how I'm getting on with this device.
Because it's rare that I find myself so utterly enthralled with a piece of equipment.
I got the Galaxy Nexus and I was like
yes, that's nice, it's a really cool phone,
it's missing a few things though.
I got the S3 and I've hardly put it down.
Ask anyone who knows me and normally
I lose interest pretty quickly.
Give me a week and I'm already at the new thing and thinking ooh, Galaxy Note 2.

Maybe I am quite interested in the Galaxy Note 2
because
is it a phone or is it a tablet? Is it?
Somebody must know.
It's a fablet.
But really,
the Samsung S3 is a lovely piece of kit. The Galaxy Note 2 fills
a very particular niche
that I'm probably the sort of person would gravitate to
Because I don't make an awful lot of phone calls and it does fit in your pocket.

So for now, I'm loving the S3.
I'll be keeping my S3 regardless if I get a Galaxy Note 2.
I'll probably end up with it and my wife stealing the S3 from me
because she's coveting quite hard, even though she's got my G Nex.

I just absolutely love this phone and at the end of the day
there is only one
thing that really counts
and that is how you yourself feel about the phone when you use it.
So do you know what? If you're sitting on the fence and you don't know whether to get one. In the UK and I don't know
what it's like in other countries, you don't need that cooling off period.
So if you order a phone over the telephone or internet or what have you,
you have a seven day cooling off period.
And that basically allows you to give the phone a try
if you don't like it you send it back and they cancel your contract.
That's a pretty good way if you're either sitting on the fence or your contract is up for renewal and you don't know
if you want to go for the S3, get one,
give it a try, if you don't like it after three or four days ring them up
and just say please take this phone away and send me something else.
I believe 9 out of 10 people will simply stick with the S3.
That's my honest belief.
And do you know something?
One last thing, one last thing before I go.

I am not paid for this review.
I'm not paid for the love I am giving to this phone, and nor do I want to be.
And that is the Samsung Galaxy S3 and that is my one month with the
Samsung S3.
It's still a lovely phone guys, you know
normally I get bored, I'm not bored.
I'm still loving it!