Introduction
In a fashion, dramatically different that the one from last year, the US version of the Samsung Galaxy S III has arrived on the market. There is no waiting, measured in months like in the case of the smartphone's predecessor. This time, Samsung made sure that its flagship will arrive to the most lucrative market in a timely manner.
The Samsung Galaxy S III is available for all major US carriers, but all versions look the same
The above event however is hardly the most important thing about the newly launched smartphone. It's the handset's design and, to be more specific, the lack of any changes to it, compared to the I9300 which impresses the most. For the first time ever, Samsung's Android flagship has arrived to the Land of the Free sans any cosmetic changes for all US carriers - a big deal any way you look at it.
The visuals of the US Galaxy S III might have remained unchanged, but the smartphone's internals have gone through a serious makeover. Gone is the Exynos chipset with quad-core CPU and Mali 400 GPU. In order to play nice with the 4G networks stateside, the Samsung Galaxy S III has received Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 silicon with two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.5GHz. In order to ease up the pain over the lost duo of CPU cores, the Yankee Galaxy S III has twice as much RAM, compared to its global sibling.
Here goes the full list of the US bound Samsung Galaxy S III features:
Key features
- Quad-band GSM and quad-band 3G support (carrier dependent)
- HSDPA and HSUPA support; LTE connectivity (carrier dependent)
- 4.8" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of HD (720 x 1280 pixel) resolution; Corning Gorilla Glass 2
- Android OS v4.0.4 with TouchWiz launcher
- 1.5 GHz dual-core Krait CPU, Adreno 225 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon chipset, 2GB of RAM
- 8 MP wide-angle lens autofocus camera with LED flash, face, smile and blink detection
- 1080p HD video recording at 30fps
- Dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 b, g, n
- GPS with A-GPS connectivity; GLONASS support, Digital compass
- 16/32GB internal storage, microSD slot
- Accelerometer, gyroscope and proximity sensor
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- microUSB port with USB host and TV-out (1080p) support, MHL, charging
- Stereo Bluetooth v4.0
- FM radio with RDS
- Great audio quality
- Super slim at only 8.6mm
- 2MP secondary video-call camera
- Full Flash for the web browser
- NFC support
- Document editor
- File manager comes preinstalled
- Extremely rich video and audio codec support
- Impressively large 2100 mAh battery
Main disadvantages
- A body with dubious aesthetics
- No dedicated camera key
- S Voice is hardly as functional as ads might make you believe
As you can see above, the US Galaxy S III ticks every box an Android power user can imagine. The smartphone is simply loaded with talents - both in terms of hardware and software.
For those of you, who are in a hurry to bash the dual-core CPU of the handset, we suggest you wait until after we walk you through its benchmark scores. Chances are that your fears are unfounded. We have already put Qualcomm's latest silicon through its paces, and found it to be quite zippy. Besides, 2 gigs of RAM and LTE or 42Mbps HSDPA connectivity are not exactly a bad tradeoff.
Design is entirely a matter a personal taste. We can attest however, that the smartphone will easily grow on you over a serously short period of time.
Samsung Galaxy S III US version live photos
As you have probably guessed by now, the hype surrounding the US bound Samsung Galaxy S III is huge. So are the expectations. Continue reading to find out if the handset lives up to both. As always, we'll begin with an unboxing, followed by a design and build quality inspection.
Editorial: The Samsung Galaxy S III is available in a number of carrier versions in the US. There's one for AT&T (SGH-I747), one for T-Mobile (SGH-T999), one for Sprint (SPH-L710), another one for Verizon (SCH-I535) and another one for U.S. Cellular (SCH-R530). We had the AT&T and the Sprint versions for testing. You should rest assured that hardware- and software-wise all the carrier versions are the same so the findings in this product review apply to them all.
You also might notice that this review doesn't include all of our proprietary tests. The reason is it has been prepared and written in the States, far away from our office and test lab. Still, we think we've captured the essence of the phone in the same precise, informative and detailed way that's become our
trademark. Enjoy the good read!
User interface
The Samsung Galaxy S III runs on the latest Android available at the moment - 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, which has been heavily modified by the latest TouchWiz UI from Samsung.
We've already seen the interface, but the video demo warrants another look. It is the quickest way to get a feel of the UI:
The interface is strongly influenced by what Samsung did with the ICS update of the Galaxy S II, but the new flagship predictably received the better treatment for both looks and functionality.
The lockscreen is a great example of that. It's a standard "tap and drag in any direction to unlock" deal and there're ripples accompanied by water-drop sound as you drag your finger. Four customizable shortcuts are available at the bottom of the screen - drag one up to activate the specific app.
The lockscreen packs a ton of new functionality
You can also enable a news ticker at the bottom of the lockscreen, which is a great way to stay up to date on current events. The ticker can be expanded to view all news items.
The news ticker keeps you up to date with current events
You can enable a second clock on the lockscreen, which shows up when you're roaming. There's also help text that will be useful at first, but you can disable it when you've discovered all the tricks. You can also disable the regular clock, the weather display, the ripple effect and the voice prompt that lets you do a voice command right on the lockscreen.
There's one final cool but not so useful trick - you wake the phone (tap the power button or the home key), then press and hold the screen and rotate the phone horizontally. It will unlock and start the camera as soon as it's in the right orientation to snap a photo. We found that it's quicker to just keep a Camera shortcut on the lockscreen and use that.
Once you make it past the lockscreen, you'll notice that the dock at the bottom of the screen now fits five custom shortcuts or folders. The rightmost one opens the app drawer as usual, but you can change the other four to any shortcut you like or even a folder full of shortcuts.
The dock at the bottom of the screen now has four customizable shortcuts
Speaking of the bottom of the screen, you'll notice that there aren't any on-screen control keys - Samsung decided to stick with their traditional hardware Home button flanked by capacitive Menu and Back buttons, instead of the on-screen Back, Home and Task switcher buttons.
This makes upgrading from a Galaxy S II (or just about any other Samsung droid) to the S III a pretty smooth experience. On the other hand, Google's guidelines say that an on-screen menu button goes in the top right corner of the screen. This means doubled functionality and you don't get one-click access to the task switcher (you have to press and hold the home button as before).
Moving on, the notification area looks pretty much the same - you get Wi-Fi, GPS, Silent mode, Screen rotation and Power saving (which replaced the Bluetooth toggle). There are five more toggles just off screen. You can scroll them sideways to reveal more functions - Notifications (toggles icons in the top row of the screen), Mobile data, Bluetooth, Driving mode and Sync.
The notification area has more toggles
The first five toggles are visible by default, so you always need to scroll for the other five. Pushing Bluetooth to play second fiddle is quite deliberate - Ice Cream Sandwich comes with Android Beam, which uses NFC for sending files, bookmarks and links, and the Galaxy S III builds on that functionality with S Beam - it does the NFC handshake, but switches to Wi-Fi Direct to speed transfers up. We'll get back to that in the Connectivity section of this review.
Even though the dock at the bottom fits five icons, the homescreen and the app drawer fit only four on a row. However, there are now five rows in the drawer so you still get more shortcuts per page.
Following the ICS convention, the app drawer has a tab that lets you pull out widgets to the homescreen easily. This wasn't available on the ICS-running S II. Unlike stock ICS though, you cannot move between tabs by swiping through the pages - you have to explicitly hit the tab. Some will find this more logical (scrolling past the available apps to find yourself in the widgets takes some getting used to).
The app drawer houses both app shortcuts and widgets
The app drawer has three view modes - Customizable grid (where you can rearrange icons freely), Alphabetical grid (if you think you can find apps quicker if their alphabetized) and Alphabetical list (this one makes shortcuts easy to hit, but isn't very space efficient). You can also view just the downloaded apps.
The available view modes for the app drawer
The app drawer has a zoomed-out overview too that lets you rearrange pages, but you can't create empty ones. Hitting the menu key reveals some more options, including hiding apps or enabling tap to uninstall mode.
Once you get several apps running, you can use the task switcher to go back and forth between them. It's an ICS-style vertical list with a screenshot and a name for each app. Swiping an app sideways removes it from the list.
There's a button at the bottom of the list to bring out Samsung's home-brewed task manager as we saw on the updated Galaxy S II, but now there's an extra button - Remove all. This is the quickest way to clear up both the list and some RAM (though we didn't encounter a situation where the Galaxy S III ran out of RAM).
The task switcher has two custom buttons courtesy of Samsung
Let's go back to the homescreen and the widgets. Ice Cream Sandwich comes with various widgets and Samsung have added more still. Some widgets are resizable too - a feature we've seen in some custom UIs is now available natively in ICS.
To resize a widget, you tap and hold on it as if you're going to move it but after the phone vibrates, you lift your finger. Four handles appear that let you resize the widget in every direction. How much you can stretch/squeeze a widget depends on the widget itself - it will glow red if you've moved beyond the supported size.
Resizing the Flipboard widget
As usual, you can pinch to zoom out and easily manage homescreen panes - add, delete (but you can't have more than seven) or just reorder them. You can have 7 panes at most, which are enough to fit plenty of content even if you use widgets that cover an entire pane.
You can have at most 7 homescreens
Live wallpapers are a great way to prettify your homescreen, but also make it useful too. The News wall creates an attractive slideshow of headlines, while Stock wall does the same for stock quotes. Photo wall creates a collage of photos from your Gallery.
Three of the new live wallpapers in action
One of the features that debut on the Galaxy S III is Smart Stay - it uses the front-facing camera to detect if the user is looking at the screen, so that it never dims or locks while you're reading. This makes reading web pages and ebooks very comfortable, even if you've set the screen timeout low to preserve the battery.
A retail package free of carrier branding
Having a retail box, which is free of carrier branding is a big deal in the United States - up until now, it has been a privilege reserved only for Apple's iPhone.
Well, that's the case with the Samsung Galaxy S III. The box contains all the basic accessories, required for everyday use of the smartphone. There's the microUSB data cable, which couples with the wall-mount charger or is used for charging off a computer connection and file transfers. Also, you get a single-piece headset of reasonable, if unspectacular, looks and that's it.
The retail package
There's no microSD card supplied (though with 16GB of internal memory you still get adequate storage out of the box). There's no TV-out adapter either or any other extra value accessories. This might be disappointing for a flagship device, but the Galaxy S III's direct rivals don't offer much more than that, so we won't be deducing any points here.
Design and build quality
At 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm, the Samsung Galaxy S III is certainly not the most compact smartphone around, but you could hardly expect anything better with a 4.8" screen. In fact, Samsung engineers deserve credit for fitting such a massive display in a chassis, which is a mere 4.5mm wider and just over a centimeter taller than its predecessor. The handset isn't too heavy either - 134g sound more than acceptable given its size and, while it will certainly be felt in your pocket, it is by no means a burden.
Finally, the US version of the Samsung Galaxy S III has taken after the looks of its international sibling - a sharp departure than last year's state of affairs when there were a few too many Galaxy S II incarnations.
We were less than impressed with the Samsung Galaxy S III on those first official photos. The fact that it borrowed design ideas from the last two Nexus smartphones instead of building on the sleekness of the S II was generally met with frowns around the office.
However, once we held the device in our hands, we realized that its design is actually not too bad. For one, the materials used look better in person than they do on photos and the sturdy build helps a lot too. Then there's the impressively slim waistline, which really adds to the general appeal of the device.
And yes, we still feel the glossy finish is a questionable choice as it lacks the high-end vibe that a smartphone of this caliber deserves. However, the Samsung Hyperglaze coating makes sure the S III doesn't look like a budget handset in real life as the press photos suggested.
Hyperglaze means that there's another, see-through layer of plastic on top of the back panel - similar to what we saw on the Meizu MX. This layer helps mask some of the fingerprints and is actually decently grippy.
The 4.8" Super AMOLED of HD resolution is where the Samsung Galaxy S III magic happens. The image quality is every bit as impressive as its specs suggest - tack sharp and with perfectly deep blacks, it's probably the best you can find on the market.
The display is phenomenal
The colors are nicely saturated by default, but the display settings menu offers a choice between four different modes, so you can opt for more natural colors as well. We did prefer the livelier dynamic and standard modes, but the natural and movie modes will probably have their fans too. What's important here is that the S III display offers a level of flexibility that no other screen on the market can provide.
Sunlight legibility is splendid too - the HD Super AMOLED isn't the brightest around, but its reflectivity is so low that even outside in the brightest day, you'll still be able to see what's on the screen quite clearly. As a matter of fact, the Galaxy S III managed to top our sunlight legibility charts.
The viewing angles are extremely wide too - there's some color loss when you reach the extremes, but the icons and text remain almost perfectly clear, giving that printed look that we love so much.
In case you were worried about the PenTile matrix that the Galaxy S III employs - well, don't be. You'd need to be looking from such close range that your eyes will hurt before you notice any pixelization. It's plain to see that the HD PenTile screen of the S III is sharper than the RGB WVGA unit on the Galaxy S II, despite the increased screen size. It's just that at these ppi levels the differences are extremely hard to spot, so PenTile is nothing to be worried about.
And here's how the Samsung Galaxy S III did in our dedicated display test. You can learn more about the testing process over here.
| Display test | 50% brightness | 100% brightness | ||||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | |||
| Samsung Galaxy S III | 0 | 174 | ∞ | 0 | 330 | ∞ |
| HTC One X | 0.15 | 200 | 1375 | 0.39 | 550 | 1410 |
| Samsung Galaxy Nexus | 0 | 112 | ∞ | 0 | 247 | ∞ |
| Motorola RAZR XT910 | 0 | 215 | ∞ | 0 | 361 | ∞ |
| Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II | 0 | 231 | ∞ | 0 | 362 | ∞ |
| HTC One S | 0 | 177 | ∞ | 0 | 386 | ∞ |
| Samsung Galaxy Note | 0 | 287 | ∞ | 0 | 429 | ∞ |
| HTC Sensation XE | 0.23 | 172 | 761 | 0.64 | 484 | 752 |
| Sony Xperia S | - | - | - | 0.48 | 495 | 1038 |
Below the display you get the same three keys as on the international version of the Galaxy S III - capacitive Menu and Back buttons and a regular press Home key.
The three key combo under the screen
The usual extra functionality upon a long press is enabled - the Menu key handles Google search on the device, while the Home key brings up the task switcher. And if you click the home key twice the voice control kicks in.
Above the display we have the earpiece, as well as ambient light and proximity sensors. There's also a 2 megapixel front-facing camera for video-calls and a status LED up there.
There's quite a lot going on around the earpiece
The left side of the Samsung Galaxy S III features the volume rocker.
The volume rocker sits on the left
Unfortunately, all there is on the right is the power key. Once again Samsung is releasing its flagship droid without a dedicated camera key.
There's no camera key on the right
The top of the Galaxy S III hosts the 3.5mm audio jack and one of the microphones. The is a also a tiny Qualcomm sticker there, which is the only visual suggestion that the US Galaxy S III packs different internals from the I9300.
The secondary microphone is alongside the 3.5mm audio jack on top
The microUSB port at the bottom is used for both data connections and charging. Not only does it support USB host but it also comes with MHL, enabling HD TV-out connectivity. You'll have to purchase an adapter to use that extra functionality, though. The other thing of interest here is the mouthpiece.
The main mic is next to the MHL-enabled microUSB port
The back of the Samsung Galaxy S III is where the 8 megapixel FullHD-capable camera lens is located. It's flanked by an LED flash and the loudspeaker grille. You also get a Galaxy S III logo on the back, as well as one from the carrier which offers the device.
The 8 megapixel camera lens is flanked by the LED flash and the loudspeaker grille
Removing the paper thin battery cover reveals the microSIM slot, the solid 2100 mAh battery and the microSD card slot.
Taking a peek under the hood
The US version of the Samsung Galaxy S III achieved the impressive endurance rating of 40 in our battery test. This means that you will need to recharge your handset every 40 hours if you use it for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback every day.
As you can notice above, the telephony, web browsing and video playback times are quite impressive. It is the standby performance of the Galaxy S III's battery which was a minor letdown. Keep in mind however that this particular element will likely be depending on the network the device is connected to.
Another positive side is that the Samsung Galaxy S III is extremely easy to handle. The handset's designers have somehow made it in such a way, that even a one-hand operation is possible. For a device with a 4.8 screen, that's downright impressive.
Handling the handset is surprisingly easy
S Voice challenges Siri, isn't quite there yet
You've probably seen our S Voice vs. Siri vs. Speaktoit Assitant post, but we'll recap our impressions of Samsung's S Voice here.
S Voice understands English, French, Spanish and Korean, Italian and German (take that Siri!). It can be activated by voice too - the default prompts are "Hi Galaxy" (as before) and "Hi Buddy", and you can add custom ones too. That makes for completely hands-free, voice-only control of the phone. Note that this puts a strain on the battery, but there's an option to activate this feature only when the phone is plugged into a charger.
S Voice can do the usual - search the web, make calls, send texts (which Android natively supports and so does Vlingo), but you can also use it instead of the notification area toggles, to control the music player, look up weather and traffic info for a city, set timers and alarms (and snooze them too) or launch an app.
S Voice has plenty of options
Some apps get special treatment - for example, you can say "I want to take a picture" to activate the camera and say "Cheese!" to snap the photo. Facebook is another example - you can update your status using S Voice. Same goes for Twitter.
It's also a tool for quickly looking up facts - it's powered by Wolfram Alpha (which handles some of Siri's answers too). It has an enormous database covering topics ranging from Culture and Media to Physics. Unlike Siri, S Voice extracts only the relevant bit of info that Alpha provides and showing you more details only if you want them.
S Voice can also be used as a calculator. Once again, it only gives the relevant answer (Siri shows the whole output from Wolfram Alpha, which tends to get carried away with the amount of detail - e.g. you don't really need a visual representation of 2 + 2).
One of the things that made a negative impression was that the speech to text transcription was somewhat worse than Siri (which isn't perfect either). S Voice understood the commands most of the time, though there were cases when it didn't quite catch our words correctly.
This was most prominent when we tried to send a text message with voice dictation only - sometimes it would get as much as half of the sentence wrong.
S Voice also needs some polishing when it comes to removing unnecessary prompts - it asked for GPS to be active when checking the traffic in a city (even though we weren't in that city and it shouldn't matter where we are anyway), it stumbled when there were multiple numbers that an SMS can be sent to (it reverted to regular touchscreen interaction, forgetting we're trying to talk to it) and then it crashed when we tried a question just for fun.
Still, if you look past its quirks, S Voice can be a handy tool in situations where your hands are occupied (especially while driving, when you can't take your eyes off the road either). In all other scenarios you will be much better off using your fingers than your voice. Things might improve in the future but we are still a few years away before such technology becomes an essential part of the smartphone user experience.
Synthetic benchmarks
The US version of the Samsung Galaxy S III is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset with two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.5GHz. Due to its newer architecture, Qualcomm's latest creation performs on par with quad-core chipsets from the previous generation.
Benchmark Pi is a simple single-threaded benchmark, and a Qualcomm chips' favorite, so we knew what we can expect from it. The Galaxy S III achieved the highest score we've seen to date - not a bad start then, we say.
Benchmark Pi
Lower is better
- Sony Xperia S536
- Samsung Galaxy S II452
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus408
- Samsung Galaxy S III344
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)338
- HTC One S306
- Samsung Galaxy S III (US)273
- HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)279
Linpack offers multithreaded benchmarking, making it essential for testing multi-core beasts. Curiously enough, the US Galaxy III beat the quad-core sporting I9300, but fell behind HTC's offerings.
Linpack
Higher is better
- HTC One S210
- HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)196
- Samsung Galaxy S III (US)182.9
- Samsung Galaxy S III177.1
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)126.1
- Sony Xperia S86.4
- Samsung Galaxy S II77.6
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus77.1
Quadrant is a composite benchmark (it tests CPU, GPU and I/O). The US Galaxy S III scored below the I9300, and right in line with the US version of the HTC One X - hardly a surprise as it shares internals with the latter.
Quadrant
Higher is better
- Samsung Galaxy S III5365
- HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)5146
- Samsung Galaxy S III (US)5111
- HTC One S5047
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)4842
- Sony Xperia S3173
- Samsung Galaxy S II3053
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus2316
The Samsung Galaxy S III relies on an Adreno 225 GPU. It has a 720p screen to fill with pixels (up from WVGA on the S II), so we were curious to find out how it fares.
In NenaMark 2, the Qualcomm equipped US Galaxy achieved a better score than the I9300. The handset lost only to the HTC One S, but keep in mind that the latter has a significantly lower screen resolution.
Note that older Samsung models used to have a 60fps framerate ceiling set in the software and we're not sure yet if the Galaxy S III is running into such a limit, artificially lowering its score (NenaMark reports the results in FPS).
NenaMark 2
Higher is better
- HTC One S60.5
- Samsung Galaxy S III (US)59.9
- Samsung Galaxy S III58.8
- Samsung Galaxy S II51.6
- HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)49.1
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)47.5
- Sony Xperia S37.5
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus24
GLBenchmark is available on iOS devices too, so it can give us some idea of how the Galaxy S III compares to the PowerVR SGX 543 GPUs. We're using the Egypt test in offscreen 720p mode so that results are directly comparable even though each device has a different physical screen resolution.
The Adreno 225 inside the US Galaxy S III achieved the lowest score here. This is hardly a surprise however, as all devices with this GPU we've tested this far, have fared poorly in this test.
GLBenchmark Egypt (offscreen 720p)
Higher is better
- New Apple iPad140
- Samsung Galaxy S III103
- Apple iPad 290
- Apple iPhone 4S73
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)63
- Samsung Galaxy S II62
- HTC One S56
- HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)55.7
- Samsung Galaxy S III (US)54
SunSpider is a JavaScript benchmark and as such isn't strongly affected by the number of CPU cores - it mostly reflects the raw performance of a single core and how optimized the JavaScript engine itself is.
SunSpider
Lower is better
- Samsung Galaxy S III1447
- Samsung Galaxy S III1743
- HTC One S1708
- New Apple iPad1722
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)1757
- HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)1834
- Samsung Galaxy S II1849
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus1863
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.11891
- Apple iPhone 4S2217
- Sony Xperia S2587
BrowserMark adds HTML to the equation - behind the scenes JavaScript computation won't do much if the web page can't update fast and smooth.
BrowserMark
Higher is better
- Samsung Galaxy S III169811
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1113256
- Samsung Galaxy S II111853
- Samsung Galaxy S III (US)110382
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus103591
- New Apple iPad103264
- HTC One S98435
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)96803
- HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)92232
- Apple iPhone 4S88725
- Sony Xperia S74990
- HTC Sensation XE72498
In real life, the US Galaxy S III is lag free. The handset handled every task we threw at it without breaking a sweat.
All-in-one phonebook
The phonebook hasn't undergone dramatic changes in its new Ice Cream Sandwich attire on the Galaxy S III. It still packs an incredibly wide range of features and virtually unlimited storage capacity. The four tabs on top are still present, albeit slightly redesigned, and provide access to the Phone app, Groups, Contacts and Favorites.
As usual, there are various options to filter contacts by phone numbers, groups and multiple sorting. You can import/export contacts to/from the SIM card but you can't display them alongside the phone memory entries.
Samsung have kept the swipes in the phonebook, enabling quick dialing (right swipe) or sending a text message (left swipe).
The Galaxy S III phonebook
The Quick contacts feature is there too, displaying, upon a tap on the contact picture, a pop up menu with shortcuts to call, text, email or Google Talk.
Quick contacts in TouchWiz UI 4.0
Tapping on a contact reveals all the details available. In Ice Cream Sandwich fashion it shows only two tabs (used to be four). The first one is the About tab, which shows the person's photo on top. If configured, the right tab displays their latest updates from social networks or Google Talk.
Information is perfectly organized into different sections for phone, email, etc. You can use the back button to go to the full contact list, or tap on the top left corner, just like in vanilla ICS. The top right corner has shortcuts to contact editing and favorites.
Detailed contact view
If the phone book finds duplicate contact entries, it'll prompt joining them. Furthermore, there're a plethora of options once you hit the Menu button. You can view the call history, as well as join, unjoin and share contacts.
Samsung has even added a built-in reject list. It acts like a third party blacklist app and blocks the numbers on it from calling you.
Adding a contact to reject list
A new feature lets you choose a specific vibration pattern as an incoming call alert, just like you would a ringtone. A set of predefined patterns is offered, but you can make your own too.
Vibration patterns can be assigned to each contact
There's plenty of contact information you can assign to each contact and it still remains neatly organized. You have all the types listed (numbers, email addresses, etc) and, just like the previous version of TouchWiz UI 4.0, there's a plus sign on the right - tapping it adds another item of that type. Pressing the minus sign under it deletes the unneeded field.
Editing contact details
Of course, the real flexibility of the phonebook becomes apparent when you sign into your social networks. After syncing, the phonebook will automatically merge contacts (you can do it manually too), so that the contact details are pulled from the social networks too.
Telephony is great, voice commands are easy
The in-call quality of the Samsung Galaxy S III was really good with a crisp and loud sound. Reception was also problem-free and we didn't suffer dropped calls though in areas of very poor coverage the sound would occasionally break up.
The dialer and call log have been slightly redesigned and can be accessed through the phonebook, each with a separate tab. Smart Dial is available and works as advertised - it searches names and numbers simultaneously. Only one contact is shown (with contact photo) and you can tap the down arrow to view the rest (the number above the arrow indicates how many contacts have matched your query).
Smart dial works like a charm
One of the features that debuts on the Galaxy S III is Direct Call, which lets you dial a number by lifting the phone up to your ear while browsing contacts or reading/composing a message.
Voice dialing is available too and taken care of by the newly added S Voice, which activates on a double tap of the home button. All you need to say is "Hi Galaxy" and speak your command (e.g. "call Dexter"). Or "play " and off it goes. It takes a while to process voice commands but it has more uses than other voice-recognition apps for Android.
We are going to look at S Voice in full length later on in the review, but in short its Samsung's answer to Apple's Siri and it gets the job done, though not without hiccups.
S Voice is a nice start, but needs more polishing
The dialer also offers quick shortcuts for making a video call or sending a message instead.
Thanks to the proximity sensor, your screen will automatically turn off during a call. The available options during a call include taking a note, using the keypad, muting, holding the call or adding another call to this conversation.
The call log is the tab next to the dial pad. It displays all the dialed, received and missed calls in one list sorting your call history by contacts.
Call history
Versatile messaging
The messaging department is quite straightforward: there are no folders here, just a new message button. Under that button is a list of all your messages organized into threads.
Swiping on a message header will do exactly the same as in the phonebook - a left swipe starts a new message, while swiping to the right will start a call.
The Galaxy S III messaging center and swipe functions
There's application-specific search that lets you quickly find a given message among all your stored SMS and MMS.
One thing we really appreciate is that the tap to compose box is much bigger - as big as can fit on the screen, no more viewing only 2-3 lines of text from your message.
To add message recipients, just start typing the corresponding name or number and choose from the contacts offered.
Reading a message
Adding any multimedia content to the message automatically turns into an MMS. You can either quickly add a photo or an audio file to go with the text or compose an MMS using all the available features (like multiple slides, slide timing, layout, etc.). The multiple slides are all shown inside the compose box.
You can use S Voice to dictate your message or use Google's built-in voice recognition software if you don't feel like typing. If the latter is often the case, Samsung provides the option to change the input methods.
Responding to a message and the different options
When you're composing a new message you can use the Translate option to translate it into another language. The same goes for messages you've received. This feature probably won't see much use but it's there you ever need it.
What will come in good use, however, is the new Direct call feature. When you are reading a message from someone, their number will be automatically dialed by just lifting the phone up to your ear,.
The new Direct call gesture
Moving on to email, the Gmail app has grown handy shortcuts at the bottom of the screen but is mostly unchanged. It supports batch operations, which allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted. The default app supports multiple Gmail accounts, but there's no unified inbox.
The Gmail should be pretty familiar to everyone by now
A cool feature in Gmail is that you can swipe left or right to move between messages in your inbox.
The shortcuts on the bottom of the screen are new email, search, labels, refresh and settings.
There is also a generic email app for all your other email accounts and it can handle multiple POP or IMAP inboxes. You have access to the messages in the original folders that are created online, side by side with the standard local ones such as inbox, drafts and sent items.
The standard email app also does a good job • the combined inbox
The Galaxy S III also features a combined inbox, which brings together all your mail in a single folder. This can be quite handy if you have lots of accounts and you just want to check if there is a new message needing your attention.
Turning the phone landscape activates the split view - the left side of the screen shows the list of emails, while the right side shows a message. This is the same kind of interface we've seen on the Galaxy Tab though the bigger screen there made it actually useful - half of even a 4.8" screen isn't enough for comfortable reading.
Google Talk handles the Instant Messaging department. The G-Talk network is compatible with a variety of popular clients like Pidgin, Kopete, iChat and Ovi Contacts.
Text entry is handled by the standard Samsung QWERTY keyboard, which offers very big and comfortable keys. In landscape mode, the keyboard takes up most of the display and the even bigger keys make it one of the most comfortable virtual mobile keyboards around.
The big display makes for a big, comfy keyboard
Gallery and file browser
The Samsung Galaxy S III comes with the default ICS Gallery. It opens up in Albums view, which is what we're used to seeing - it lists all folders with photos in the phone. Rather than the familiar stacks, the app uses a grid of photos, two on a line.
Besides, Album view, photos are sorted by Location, Time, Person (photos with tagged faces) and Group.
The new Gallery app
Getting inside an album displays all the photos in a rectangular grid, which is horizontally scrollable. When you try to scroll past the end, the photo thumbnails will tilt to remind you you're at the end.
When viewing a single photo, you'll find several sharing shortcuts and a delete button above the photo, while below is a line of small thumbnails of all other photos in the album. You can tap those small thumbnails to move to other images or you can just swipe to the side.
Viewing a single photo • Simple editing options
The Gallery also supports highly customizable slideshows with several effects to choose from, customizable music and speed. You can also highlight specific images to be included in the slideshow.
The slideshow option is highly customizable
When viewing a photo with people's faces visible in it, the Galaxy S III will try to detect them automatically (and you can manually highlight faces where it fails). Buddy photo share will use your contacts' profiles to try and recognize who is who automatically.
Putting a name to the face • Manually marking a face
Social tag makes sure that whenever a face is recognized in the photo, their status message appears and you can easily call or message that contact.
The My Files app hasn't changed really - it is an efficient and simple to use file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files to another phone. My files will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can't access the system drive).
The My Files app
TouchWiz music player goes after Walkman
The Samsung Galaxy S III uses an updated version of the TouchWiz music player. Samsung has enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing SoundAlive technology, which features 7.1 channel virtualization. Samsung uses SoundAlive in some of their MP3 and Android-powered media players.
Music is sorted into various categories, but the most interesting one is called Music square - it's quite similar to the SensMe feature of Sony Ericsson phones. It automatically rates a song as exciting or calm, passionate or joyful and plots those songs on a square (hence the name).
Music square creates automatic playlists based on your mood • SoundAlive offers an extensive list of presets
From here, you can highlight an area of the square and the phone will automatically build a playlist of songs that matches your selection. For example, if you highlight the upper part of the square the selected songs will be exciting and if your selection is centered around the lower right corner, the selected songs will be calm and joyful.
The music player has benefited greatly from the TouchWiz UI
You can swipe the album art left and right to move between songs. You can also put the phone face down to mute the sound or place your palm over the screen to pause playback.
The Galaxy S III player is DLNA-enabled, so you're not limited to tracks on your handset - songs on devices connected to your Wi-Fi network are as easy to get to as locally stored songs.
Impressive video player
Samsung have put what is easily the best default video player on the Samsung Galaxy S III. It offers several view modes - grid, list, folders and nearby devices (which accesses DLNA devices).
The grid view is our favorite as it is a true tour de force - the visible video thumbnails (all eight of them) are actually playing the videos instead of being static images. They play at a reduced framerate, but it's an awesome preview and it shows what can be done when you have processing power to spare.
Two of the view modes available for browsing your videos
The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. The same SoundAlive audio-enhancing technology is available here too.
The video player has a simple interface but is quite capable
The video player lets you squeeze out the best viewing experience from the large, high-res screen. You can adjust video brightness, color tone and enable outdoor visibility too.
Another cool feature that showcases the power of the phone's chipset is the chapter preview - it detects chapters in the video and shows a rectangular grid, with live thumbnails (just like the grid view above).
Plenty of settings available • the chapter preview
The video player had absolutely no trouble with any of the files we threw at it - starting with .WMV, through .AVI (DivX and XviD) and .MP4 to .MKV (H.264). Resolution wasn't a problem either - the Samsung Galaxy S III played FullHD files. Large files worked seamlessly.
The Samsung Galaxy S III also made a good impression when it offered a list of subtitles and let us pick. Most players look for a file with the exact same name as the video file (save for the extension), which means quite often you have to rename the subtitle file to match the video file just so that the player will show you subtitles.
Picking the right subtitle file, the easy way
The video player on the S III has a feature called Pop up play - it moves the video in a small floating window and you can use other apps on the phone while still watching the video. It's the only such feature on the phone, there aren't any floating mini apps like Samsung's tablets have.
Pop up play in action
Audio output now louder
After the brain transplant required for the Samsung Galaxy S III to jump the big pond, the smartphone audio output has become louder, but isn't as clear as on the international version.
This makes the US Samsung Galaxy S III one of the louder smartphones around and the good news is that it has still retained its spotless frequency response. The signal/noise ratio and dynamic range readings have deteriorated slightly, but they are still pretty great and so are the distortion levels. Some extra stereo crosstalk has crept in, but the score is hardly much to worry about.
Overall we'd give the nod to the international Galaxy S III as the slightly more talented musician, but if you like to keep your volume to the maximum levels you might be better off with the US version.
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| Samsung Galaxy S III (US) | +0.02, -0.07 | -82.3 | 82.3 | 0.0096 | 0.022 | -78.4 |
| Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III | +0.03, -0.05 | -90.3 | 90.3 | 0.012 | 0.018 | -92.6 |
| Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II | +0.04, -0.09 | -91.4 | 91.9 | 0.0042 | 0.066 | -89.7 |
| Samsung Galaxy Nexus | +0.11, -0.69 | -90.6 | 90.6 | 0.0085 | 0.014 | -91.8 |
| Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 | +0.04, -0.08 | -90.4 | 88.9 | 0.0044 | 0.066 | -87.4 |
| HTC One X | +0.02, -0.08 | -82.1 | 82.1 | 0.137 | 0.393 | -80.7 |
| +0.10, -0.09 | -86.6 | 86.8 | 0.011 | 0.018 | -86.9 | |
| +0.02, -0.11 | -91.2 | 91.2 | 0.0020 | 0.012 | -93.0 |
Samsung Galaxy S III (US) frequency response
You can learn more about the whole testing process here.
8 MP camera is great
The Samsung Galaxy S III offers the same camera resolution but actually improves on the performance. It can capture stills of up to 3264 x 2448 pixels and 1.9 MP ones with the front-facing cam.
The latest Galaxy offers geotagging, touch focus, face and smile detection and digital image stabilization. Due to the fast dual-core processor it is also able to simultaneously record HD (1080p or 720p) video and take near full-resolution pictures (those are cropped to an aspect ratio of 16:9 to match that of the videos and what is shown in the viewfinder).
The camera interface is quite similar to what the Galaxy S II has. You get two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder - on the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, a virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut (which is a thumbnail of the last photo taken).
On the left you get several controls and the good news is that you can pick any four shortcuts to put there - you can easily have all frequently used features just a tap away. The fifth shortcut always points to Settings.
Samsung Galaxy S III camera UI
The Galaxy S III's camera has an F/2.6 aperture as opposed to the F/2.65 of its predecessor and focal length of 3.7 mm compared to the 3.97 mm of the Galaxy S II. This results in slightly wider field of view on the Galaxy S III.
Samsung were bragging left and right about the zero shutter lag of the Galaxy S III and we are happy to report that the smartphone is able to deliver. Pictures are snapped extremely fast and there's even a burst mode available where you hold the virtual on-screen shutter and the phone will make 20 consecutive shots in just 6 seconds or so.
The good thing is that the images, produced in burst mode are in full 8 MP resolution. We were told that the S III is actually capable of capturing full res shots at 3.3fps for much longer than that, but the 20 shot limit was set to prevent users from filling their storage with hundreds of identical shots.
There's an option called Best photo available in Burst shot mode - it snaps 8 photos in a row and lets the phone automatically pick the best one (where people are smiling and aren't blinking). There's also HDR mode for high-contrast scenes.
Photos from the Samsung Galaxy S III are sharp and with very low levels of noise and plenty of detail. Color reproduction is okay, though greens seem slightly more saturated than reds and blues. The dynamic range is very good too, thus adding up to what is certainly one of the best 8MP shooters around.
Samsung Galaxy S III camera samples
Photo quality comparison
The Samsung Galaxy S III joins the 8MP gang in our Photo Compare Tool. The first chart shows better sharpness over the S II - it's especially noticeable in the small numbers below the color patches. Speaking of colors, the second chart shows a pretty clean separation between each color square, though there is some oversharpening halo visible on some edges.
The Galaxy S III does a better job at finding the right white balance than its predecessor, even indoors under artificial lighting. The fine detail in the chart also pegs the Galaxy S III camera as one of the sharpest around.
Samsung Galaxy S III in our Photo Compare Tool
Video recording is top notch
The Samsung Galaxy S III is able to record FullHD 1080p and HD 720p video hassle-free. During recording you can also snap full-res 16:9 stills.
The camcorder interface is almost the same as the still camera's - you get the same customizable panel on the left for up to five shortcuts.
Samsung Galaxy S III camcorder UI
The 1080p videos are impressively smooth, noise-free and with plenty of detail and good colors. The video container used is mp4 and it creates clips with a bitrate of about 17-18Mbps, which is enough to encode the video with no traces of compression. The framerate stays pretty solid at 30fps.
The same goes for the 720p videos, which have an average bitrate of 12Mpbs. Unlike the S II, the Galaxy S III camera has the same field of view whether you're recording 1080p or 720p videos.
Both 1080p and 720p videos are recorded with stereo sound using the AAC codec with a bitrate of 134Kbps and sampling rate of 48kHz.
Here are a couple of video samples we uploaded to YouTube. Don't forget to choose 1080p and 720p respectively and watch them in fullscreen.
We've prepared an untouched 1080p@30fps video clip from the Galaxy S III for you to download.
The front-facing camera can take 720p videos too.
Video quality comparison
The Video Quality Compare tool is where you can observe how each of the contenders handles changes in lighting, what actual resolution they achieve in FullHD recording and what levels of detail are produced.
Samsung Galaxy S III in the Video Compare Tool
The Galaxy S II used to be pretty good, but the S III is noticeably better - in good light, even the small type in the banner on our Ferris wheel remains sharp and legible. Still, the fine texture on the fake blue sky isn't as noticeable as it is in, say, iPhone 4S videos.
The Samsung Galaxy S III produces very usable videos with very little noise even when the light isn't favorable. Finally, the synthetic resolution chart also gives the thumbs up to the S III.
Connectivity chock-full of new technology
The Samsung Galaxy S III will be available in the United States in LTE and 42Mbps HSDPA flavors. Which one you will choose is entirely based on your carrier preference.
Samsung's latest Android flagship raises the bid with Bluetooth 4.0 with High Speed. Its transfer rate isn't yet official but is expected to top 21Mbps. Wi-Fi Direct is a similar technology, which offers blazing fast speed.
The Wi-Fi support includes a/b/g/n versions, with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz band compatibility.
The Galaxy S III allows you to share all sorts of media via NFC by simply touching the devices back-to-back. Here it is in action.
You can share with other NFC devices as well, but functionality is limited to what is provided by the stock Android Beam. We tested this with the Galaxy Nexus and we had no trouble transferring webpages and contacts from our S III to the Galaxy Nexus.
Samsung have also released their own NFC tags, called TecTiles. A dedicated app from the Google Play Store helps with their setup. Here's how they work.
The AllShare functionality is now split into two: AllShare Play and AllShare Cast. The first is for transferring and sharing data and multimedia files to your notebook or PC. AllShare Cast on the other hand provides streaming content to and from different kind of devices (TV or computer) over DLNA.
Also, for wired connectivity we have the MHL port. By all appearances it is a normal microUSB port and works as one (a charger port as well). But the MHL port enables video output by using a MHL-to-HDMI dongle.
Once you plug the dongle into the phone you also need to plug a charger into the additional microUSB port on the dongle and the Galaxy S III screen will be mirrored on the TV.
The MHL port has yet another feature - it enables USB On-The-Go. You'll need an adapter for that too (there isn't one in the box) but this one is fairly straightforward - you plug it into the Galaxy S III and plug a standard USB cable on the other end.
A desktop-grade Web browser
While the interface of the Android web browser hardly has changed, the Samsung Galaxy S III has the hardware specs to propel it to great heights of user experience. The pretty large, sharp display with great colors makes reading a joy.
Browsing GSMArena.com on the Samsung Galaxy S II
The browser supports both double tap and pinch zooming along with the two-finger tilt zoom. There are niceties such as multiple tabs, text reflow, find on page and so on. A neat trick is to pinch zoom out beyond the minimum - that opens up the tabs view.
Page options and settings
The powerful CPU and GPU enable the stock Galaxy S III browser to play 1080p Flash video without a hitch. That was truly impressive stuff considering a lot of netbooks would choke on something like that. You can play touch-optimized Flash without breaking a sweat too.
1080p YouTube video working in the browser • Playing a Flash game
The Web browser comes with Incognito mode, which enables you to surf the web without the browser keeping track of your history or storing cookies. You can also switch to a more minimalist UI, which currently is in a Lab stage. It disables most of the browser's user interface and gives you a quick five-button layout to access the basics.
Brightness and colors option gives you four different presets to adjust the display according to your preferences. Automatic brightness is an option, too, and works only within the browser.
Web browser sports incognito mode
Hubs are here to stay
Hubs are not just for Windows Phone 7 - Samsung, at least, seems to think so. They've added a total of 4 Hubs to their new Android superphone.
The Social hub we've seen before - it combines your email accounts with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn) and IM accounts (Gtalk, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger) and shows all incoming messages as one list with handy shortcuts to reply, mark as favorite and so on. There's filtering by message source too, to help manage the inflow of incoming updates.
The Music Hub lets you browse music online (with search tools, charts, lists of new releases and so on). You can preview songs (30 seconds each) and buy tracks or whole albums.
The Readers Hub has been replaced with Google's Play Books store. You can subscribe to Internet newspapers, magazines or buy e-books. You can download free book previews. Extensive genre listings will help you discover new titles.
Meet Google Play Books
Finally, there's the Game Hub, which will quickly become your go to place for finding new games. The titles break down into Social and Premium games and there's a news section too. There's a try-before-you-buy option, so you can check out a game before committing your cash. The nice thing about that Hub is it includes the titles by Gameloft and EA, which are otherwise not available on the Google Play Store.
The Game Hub is great for mobile gaming fans
Editing Office files is a breeze
The Samsung Galaxy S III comes with the Polaris Office preinstalled, which gets more and more love from hardware manufacturers by the hour. And for good reason, we guess - it's one of the most feature rich mobile editors we've seen. You can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and there's a PDF viewer to boot.
Polaris Office viewer and editor
Editing on the large 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display is a breeze and covers an almost full set of options - text style, justification, paragraph formatting, bullets, even creating tables (that's a first). If you're editing an Excel file, you get a formula wizard, resize rows/columns, border style, merge cells and so on. Even full-featured PowerPoint presentations are doable.
You can do practically anything with the app - it's better than the other mobile editors we've tested, even better than the Windows Phone 7 one (which had many editing limitations).
The app doubles as a file manager and also integrates with Google Docs and Box.net.
Organizer has everything you need
The calendar has four different types of view: list, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.
The organizer centerpiece - the calendar
The list view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. It's a very handy tool when you need to check your appointments for the next few days.
There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big enough and easy to hit.
The Samsung Galaxy S III features a decent alarm clock application which allows a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.
The Clock app has the alarm options
The Clock app also comes with a stopwatch and a timer. They are easy to work with and can come in handy.
World clock, Stopwatch and Timer make an appearance as well
The Memo and Mini Diary are self-explanatory. The first app, however comes with a twist, as it lets you make elaborate drawings using a rich set of tools. It's heavily inspired by the S Memo from the Galaxy Note and Samsung even sell a special display-friendly ball pen for enthusiasts. S Memo can also work with simple text. S Diary, on the other hand, lets you also attach pictures to the text.
The S Memo and S Diary
There's a YouTube app, which makes browsing YouTube videos from your subscriptions easier. Unfortunately, it cannot match the resolution the in-browser flash player can give you.
Google Maps Navigation puts the GPS to use from the get-go
The Samsung Galaxy S III comes with a GPS receiver, which got a satellite lock in couple of minutes with A-GPS turned off. A-GPS can speed this up quite a bit, but requires Internet access. We gotta say, we didn't experience any issues with the GPS performance.
With a screen as large (or larger) than most dedicated SatNav units, with excellent sunlight legibility and plenty of storage, money spent towards satellite navigation should go to buying a good app rather than a separate SatNav unit.
The Galaxy S III comes with Google Maps and Navigation. Voice-guided navigation has become a viable solution since the v5.0 update. Vector maps are smaller and easier on the data traffic and reroute is an option if you go off course without the need to connect to the Internet. In fact, the only time you need a data connection is when you initially plan the course - Navigation will cache the needed maps.
Google Maps with vector maps does a bit of 3D
Quite naturally, the app also supports the Street View mode. If it's available in the area you're interested in, you can enjoy a 360-degree view of the surroundings. When the digital compass is turned on it feels like making a virtual tour of the location.
Using Street View • What's near by?
If Google Maps Navigation doesn't do it for you, you can grab an alternative app from the Google Play Store - there are both free and paid ones.
Google Play Store is the Galaxy S III playground
The Google Play Store features several scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. Apps usually have several screenshots (some even offer a demo video) so you can get an idea of what the app looks like before installing it.
You can also check out comments and ratings, as well as the number of downloads and so on, to help you decide if the app is worth it.
The Google Play Store will give you access to hundreds of thousands of apps
The Google Play Store is full of all sorts of apps. From music / video players, to file managers and various tools, you'll always see something worth a try.
Kies Air - a web server on your phone
The Samsung Galaxy S III comes with Kies Air preloaded. The app connects to the local Wi-Fi network (or it can create a Wi-Fi hotspot) and gives you an URL to type into your computer's web browser.
From there you can manage just about anything on the phone - be it contacts, messages (including composing messages), browsing images, videos and other files straight in your desktop browser. You can grant or reject access to computers and see who's connected to the phone at any moment.
The cool thing is you can stream music with handy playback controls. It works for videos too.Note: You'll need a reasonably modern browser with Java and some video plug-in (QuickTime worked for us).
Final words
The Samsung Galaxy S III is a massive leap forward compared to any of its predecessors. It has been developed exactly the way a top shelf Android handset should be. The formula is simple, yet elusive to many. It includes getting the best hardware available and implementing it into a sleek and manageable device.
The smartphone is one of the fastest around, packs a gorgeous screen, and a fantastic camera. Connectivity will simply overwhelm you with options, and so will all the software tricks the Galaxy S III has up its sleeves, including gestures and voice controls. Battery life is up to snuff too - after all, 2100mAh was considered extended battery category just last year.
The design of the handset is an acquired taste but, like we told you earlier, once you hold the smartphone in hand it starts to grow on you. A camera button on the other hand would have been a welcome addition - especially given the superb snapper which the Galaxy S III packs.
All US versions of the Samsung Galaxy S III are priced extremely competitively at $199.99 for a handset with 16GB of built-in memory. This price range puts the device in the thick of the smartphone competition and, honestly, it is a welcome fact for Samsung's offering.
Just in case, here are a few other options which you might consider spending your money on.
We must begin with the HTC Evo 4G LTE. The Sprint exclusive smartphone matches Samsung's spec sheet and comes in a metal suit. It packs a dedicated camera button as well. HTC One X for AT&T also comes close to the Galaxy S III. The unibody sporting handset looks arguably better than its Korean rival, but comes with the paltry, non-expandable 16GB of built-in memory. In this category of Android smartphones, such a thing is unforgivable in our book.
HTC Evo 4G LTE • HTC One X AT&T
In case you don't want to have even the slightest amount of carrier branding on your device, consider the original I9300 unlocked and contract-free. The quad-core beast will run on AT&T's 3G network with no hassle. Just keep in mind that it will cost you well above $600 to grab one.
Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III
You can find plenty of well-equipped Android smartphones for less money than the Samsung Galaxy S III. Keep in mind however, that they will be featuring last year's top-of-the-line hardware.
So, is the Samsung Galaxy S III the ultimate smartphone these days? Honestly, we've learned over the years that such a thing does not exist. Samsung's latest creation however, is the closest that we've seen so far in 2012. It is therefore one of the easiest smartphones to recommend. And we don't mean only in the Android realm.
Source: GSMARENA
