TechReview: Samsung Galaxy S3 Review

Writ­ing tech reviews is not the typ­i­cal con­cern for my blog, but I have done it before, and when I man­aged to get my hands on the S3 to use, I sim­ply could not resist; I have owned the first and sec­ond gen­er­a­tions of the phone and was look­ing for­ward to the third.

After using it for a few weeks, I can say that while the phone has its quirks, it really is a very good to have. I’ll be address­ing the phone in the point of view of some­one who has an iPhone and is look­ing to switch (like iDid when iFirst jumped ship to Android cou­ple of years ago), and in light of peo­ple who have the HTC One X in their con­sid­er­a­tion set.

You can also have a look at my Storify feed which lists the related tweets as I have been using the phone.

Build Qual­ity

The first aspect of the phone you’d be exposed to is the build qual­ity, which, I have to say, is not as good as I have expected. Its pre­de­ces­sor, the Galaxy SII, feels more ele­gant in the hand; the tex­tured matte back and the shiny rec­tan­gle where the cam­era sits were beau­ti­ful; the S3, how­ever, will have iPhone users in seizures and look­ing for the near­est iTem­ple to cleanse their hands. I am not say­ing that the plas­tic is phe­nom­e­nally bad; it is just decent, and feels less elegant.

That said, the phone feels com­fort­able, which is impor­tant given its size. The screen has a nice bevel like the HTC 1X but not as pro­nounced; it cer­tainly is bet­ter than the SII’s bevel (where it bevels down). The design sports a curved form and a slightly curved back, so while the plas­tic does not feel as refined, it feels com­fort­able. I was not fond of the white S3; the gloss made it look even cheaper. The peb­ble blue — the ver­sion I got — is pleas­ing and the metal-​brush gives off a high qual­ity appear­ance under the light.

To be hon­est, though, I man­aged to get over the build qual­ity by the mid of the sec­ond week. If build qual­ity is very cru­cial to your deci­sion, then the HTC 1X and the iPhone are unmatched.

If there’s a tan­gi­ble dif­fer­ence between the screen on the S3 and the One X — or any phone — is the coat­ing. It feels sort of “oily” to the touch and the fin­ger just “slides”. On the One X, you feel slight resis­tance from the screen. Some of my col­leagues were able to tell the dif­fer­ence and oth­ers could not, so it is a sub­tle and sub­jec­tive observation.

The Inter­face

As of this writ­ing, the S3 is loaded with Ice Cream Sand­wich (4.0.4) with Samsung’s Touch­Wiz 5.0 inter­face. Typ­i­cally of ven­dors, the Android OS is bloated with their cus­tom inter­face and apps that most peo­ple would not really care for. I have never been a fan of Touch­Wiz; it is just too colour­ful and seems to tar­get a younger demo­graphic (3−10 year olds). This ver­sion of Touch­Wiz, though, has “matured”, and looks quite sim­i­lar to the stock Android OS, only replac­ing the beau­ti­ful blue hue with a green one as well as the toggles.

Touch­Wiz theme also applies to many of the default appli­ca­tions, replac­ing the blue on white stock colours with purplish-​blue on very dark purplish-​blue. I never liked dark-​themed appli­ca­tions myself. The HTC 1X on the other hand is themed with the more ele­gant Sense UI, with a beau­ti­ful white, lime green, and grey inter­face that sim­ply looks beau­ti­ful.

On the other hand, hav­ing used both phones I can tell that the HTC’s Sense inter­face con­sumes a lot of mem­ory, slow­ing down the inter­face giv­ing the HTC 1X the swipe lag Android phones and tablets are known for (iOS users know this too well). The Touch­Wiz on the S3 works per­fectly. I have never believed that a non-​stock Android inter­face can be this fast, but Sam­sung pulled it off with this edi­tion of Touch­Wiz. The phone is just  respon­sive. No mat­ter how many wid­gets I add and how fast I swipe, it never lags. I even played a video on over­lay (more on that later) and not a hint of slow­down. Brilliant.

The good thing about Android devices though is that, regard­less of whether you’re on Sense or Touch­Wiz, you can replace your launcher and some of the default apps like SMS, dialler, and con­tacts, so the colour theme is not a ter­ri­bly annoy­ing issue for me. For those who dis­like HTC’s Sense launcher, you can try Nova or Apex for a stock feel. Touch­Wiz repli­cates the stock launcher ele­gantly, but if it still annoys you then the alter­na­tive launch­ers work just as well.

Another thing that annoys me about Touch­Wiz is the Ara­bic font. It is just… weird. You can replace the fonts though in the set­tings and you can down­load some Ara­bic fonts using this app. It’ll replace the Ara­bic font in most areas but would show the default font in other areas. It’s an OK workaround, but I wish Sam­sung would decide on a bet­ter Ara­bic sys­tem font.

You can also trans­mit the music and videos on All Share to your Sam­sung TV or hook up the devices in crazy ways to get files and play games and stuff. This video explains it all.

There is one impor­tant aspect of the screen that I need to men­tion, which is the white bal­ance. The colours on the S3 are great (once you go to set­tings and tone down the dis­play set­tings to “nat­ural”), and it looks fine as it is. If you put it next to the One X, how­ever, you’d notice the dif­fer­ence in colours; the One X is supe­rior, hav­ing a more nat­ural, warmer “earthly” look com­pared to the colder white on the S3. You will not notice the dif­fer­ence unless you have Face­book open on both devices and have them next to each other. Like with any screen, the eyes will adapt to the white bal­ance and only after look­ing at another screen would you notice the dif­fer­ence. I took a screen­shot of both but the under­ly­ing OS takes the same colour so both are iden­ti­cal (and my mon­i­tor is cal­i­brated dif­fer­ently than both phones anyway).

The plus side, though, is that the S3 has a ded­i­cated menu but­ton whereas the One X replaced the menu but­ton with the task man­ager and inte­grated the menu within the inter­face itself as a dick­bar. While both screens are the same size and res­o­lu­tion, the S3’s screen appears to be big­ger only because the dick­bar con­sumes real estate on the One X.

Music and Video

Thank­fully, the appli­ca­tions play music files and video files ^_​^. iPhone users will be pleased to know that the S3 can play prac­ti­cally any video and audio for­mat I have thrown at it, so it doesn’t have to be encoded into Apple’s iCant­PlayAny­thin­gElse for­mat. You can down­load plenty of music and video play­ers from the Google Play store if you have one you like in particular.

As for qual­ity, the S3 has a sig­nif­i­cantly louder speaker than the One X. Play­ing the same YouTube video on both devices sounded bet­ter on the S3 but looked more or less the same on both screens (some minor colour dif­fer­ences). How­ever there were two things I have noticed: (1) the video loaded faster on the One X, and (2) YouTube offered an “HD” set­ting for the video on S3 and an “HQ” set­ting on the One X for the same video. Not sure what the basis of this was as I am cer­tain that the One X is more than capa­ble of play­ing back HD.

There is a gim­micky fea­ture on the S3 for video play­back which is more of a dis­play of pro­cess­ing power than it is for func­tion­al­ity, which is that you can “detach” a video and “dock” it on your screen as an over­lay while you browse your Face­book or type in an email. Use­ful? Prob­a­bly you’ll just try it once or twice, but it is mostly for show off.

As for music, there is the tra­di­tional “hiss” when you crank up the vol­ume so if you’re con­nect­ing the device into your car’s aux or RF you will need to spend a few good min­utes find­ing the right bal­ance between the vol­umes on both the S3 and your car’s audio sys­tem. The One X has Beats Audio, so I will just keep it at that.

An inter­est­ing fea­ture which works roughly 80% of the time is the Music Square, which analy­ses your music and cat­e­gorises them into var­i­ous “moods”. You can then use the matrix to let the S3 pick songs that suit your cur­rent mood or vari­a­tions of the mood; you can swipe across the board to have it select a com­bi­na­tion between the moods. It is very inter­est­ing and a quick way to play any­thing that fits what you’re look­ing for with­out you hav­ing to man­u­ally go through your playlists or albums. It’s not per­fect when you’ve got con­fus­ing music, but gen­er­ally it works rather well.

Cam­era

The cam­era is prob­a­bly the killer fea­ture for me. HTC had a great cam­paign with their sky­div­ing pho­to­shoot, but they clearly had no clue of what Sam­sung had under their sleeve. The cam­era is GREAT, but not with­out flaws.

First, the good stuff. IT IS FAST. Launch­ing the appli­ca­tion from the lockscreen or the home­screen has it open in less than a sec­ond. There is ZERO shut­ter lag, just like the One X. Sorry, iOS users, but you really are miss­ing out on a lot of moments. The burst mode is good, but not as fan­tas­tic as the One X (I hardly use it, but hav­ing the option is good). The HDR is much bet­ter than the iPhone’s. The front cam­era is of very high qual­ity and the videos and pho­tos that come out of it are really good. The cam­era sen­sor is very sen­si­tive to light, so the scenes hardly look dull. The best fea­ture, though, is the auto-​focus: IT IS JUST TOO GOOD. It’s faster than the iPhone’s and the One X’s, and the macro focus is bril­liant. I have never imag­ined I could get so close to a sub­ject and main­tain it in focus. The One X failed mis­er­ably when I tried to get it to focus on some­thing within the same dis­tance as the S3. The bokeh is good, too, and you can get more detail out of objects in the photo than the cam­era on the One X. The first row of pho­tos are taken with the S3 and the sec­ond row with the One X (note that the light­ing con­di­tions were ter­ri­ble in the café):

The not so good stuff: while the HDR is bet­ter than the iPhone (in my opin­ion), it is a bit too HDR-​ish; almost every­thing gets a green tint. I don’t use it much but it in the few instances where I had to take an HDR shot, I was not too happy with how the colours turned out, but was quite happy with the expo­sure (which is the point of HDR). It’s a cell phone, in the end, so I am not expect­ing some­thing like this out of it. Also, since it is more sen­si­tive to light — it can go up to ISO 800 — you’d get a lot of pho­tos with lots of grain on them if you keep your ISO set­tings on auto. So keep­ing it on auto is fine for most of the day, but when the light­ing con­di­tions are tricky, you may want to fid­dle with the set­tings yourself.

That is from the default cam­era. The app I pri­mar­ily use is called Vignette, pos­si­bly the best cam­era app I have used on any mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem. You have more con­trol over colours, bor­ders, and effects, while retain­ing the auto-​focus and macro capa­bil­i­ties of the cam­era. ISO and noise are more con­trolled as well. But regard­less of which appli­ca­tion you use, the sen­sor and focus sys­tem is the same, and they’re both great.

Other Func­tions and Battery

Other func­tions on the phone have a lot to do with “motion”, and there is a spe­cial set­tings menu just for that. With sim­ple motions you can do things like make a call to the per­son you’re SMS­ing by rais­ing the phone to your ear. You can swipe the screen for a screen­shot (which I find awk­ward). You can mute the phone and music by plac­ing your palm on the screen and do other funny things with motion that will make you look like a wiz­ard with a wand in a café.

There’s also a “stay awake” set­ting which will have the phone track whether you’re look­ing at it before it goes into standby. It’s a good fea­ture to have, but like car head­lights that turn off on their own, you’ll even­tu­ally tog­gle it off. And it obvi­ously does not work in the dark, either.

The bat­tery is fan­tas­tic. It could eas­ily last you 10 hours with mod­er­ate to heavy use, 16 hours on mod­er­ate use, and 26 hours on light use — also bear in mind that using it on WiFi or 3G will of course vary your results. For my uses, though, I unplug at 7:30 AM and come back home 12 hours later with some bat­tery left. I am on 3G most of the day and my aver­age “screen time” per day is 3 hours — 4 hours.

Wrap­ping it all up

To be hon­est, it is a tough choice between the S3 and the One X; where one falls short, the other excels. The One X has bet­ter build. The S3 has bet­ter cam­era. The One X has nicer UI. The S3 is more respon­sive. You can go on for­ever. It as as though both com­pa­nies had a board meet­ing to decide on how to con­fuse people.

It ulti­mately falls on you on decid­ing what is impor­tant for your daily use. For me, the cam­era is a clear win­ner. The white bal­ance aggra­vates me as a pho­tog­ra­pher, but as long as I don’t look at an HTC One X screen I will be OK. Though there are plenty of bells and whis­tles you can get on other phones (or cus­tom ROMs, when they’re out), the cam­era, screen feel, and UI respon­sive­ness were the fea­tures that won me over.

Pros: Cam­era, respon­sive­ness, com­fort­able, sexy screen, bat­tery life.

Cons: Build qual­ity, white bal­ance, Touch­Wiz theme.

Update [2012.06.11]: A few peo­ple have pointed out that I have not men­tioned the S Voice any­where in my review. This is because voice-​recognition appli­ca­tions like S Voice, Siri, and oth­ers have a hard time under­stand­ing my heavy Ara­bic accent, so I can’t judge the phone’s per­for­mance based on my accent and an imma­ture technology.

Update [2012.06.12]: @JoeAkkawi posted his review and tack­led the audio/​video and per­for­mance more. Go have a look!