If you’ve been also waiting for it, you know exactly what we’re talking about. Millions around the world have been waiting for Samsung’s new version of the legendary Galaxy. The phone has already shattered records in its first quarter of global sales, with a staggering 50 million units sold, leaving the best selling phones – namely the iPhone – way back in the race.
Design and specifications
Even though Samsung has spent the past year perfecting this new device to live up to the expectations of millions, as a first look, the S3 doesn’t really strike you as the most beautiful phone, and we can think of a few phones on the market today that would give Samsung a run for their money in terms of looks.
Once again, Samsung has chosen to go with a plastic body that comes in two colours, Pebble blue and Marble white. One can argue that it’s not the best material to build such an expensive and anticipated phone; nonetheless, they’ve done a pretty good job with it.
The phone fashions a 4.8 Super AMOLED touchscreen protected with Gorilla Glass, and stacks 720 x 1280 pixels. Again they didn’t go with the Super AMOLED Plus, this might not be the best available choice in the market, but it delivers a pretty good image with vibrant colours, even in broad daylight.
But after all, beauty is just skin deep. So let’s look at what really makes the S3 one of the best phones available today. Samsung ships this bad boy with a Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A9 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 16/32/64 GB of internal storage, with up to 64 extra GB on external SD cards. So far, this is more than you’ll ever need on a smart phone (with today’s technology anyway).
The phone comes with an 8 MP camera with an LED flash that also shoots full HD 1080 p videos at 30 frames per second, and a 1.9 MP front-facing camera that supports 720 p video at 30 fps. At this point, and with the super processing power, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that the camera’s performance is one of the best we’ve seen, super responsive and really –really– fast.
The box ships with the standard charger/USB cable, a pair of standard ear phones, and of course, your user manuals.
Software and performance
The Galaxy S3 comes with Android 4.0.4 (Ice cream sandwich) with an extra layer of Samsung’s TouchWiz 4 user interface, which might take a little bit of getting used to, especially if you’ve never used a Samsung Android based device before, but it does the job quite nicely. The main interface has two touch buttons for the Back, and Menu functions, and a slightly bigger tactile home button. We can’t stress enough how much we love the fact that Samsung has chosen to put a menu button on the interface instead of the Recent Apps button most ICS phones are coming with these days. To us, long pressing the home button – as it always has been – is a better way to access recent apps and doesn’t deserve its own button.
The overall phone performance is phenomenal; it operated smoothly for as long as we tried it (a couple of weeks), no hiccups or issues of any kind. And the 2100 mAh performed reasonably well, and slightly better than its predecessor on the S2.
Apart from that, the software functionality Samsung has packed into the S3 is where the phone really shines. You’ll find yourself spending hours playing with the “S” features that came with the phone, including S Voice, a Siri-like voice activated assistant service, which does a decent job, but is still quite limited in terms of features so far, we expect more to come in future updates.
S Beam, is data sharing service that works only with other S3 devices, which we thought was wishful thinking from Samsung, until we saw the latest global sales reports, after all, you can share files with at least 50 million phones worldwide at the moment, and still counting.
Another neat feature of the S3 is Tectiles, they are special RFID stickers that you can use with the NFC feature on your phone and can be purchased separately. For example, you can stick one on your meeting room table to activate the silent mode, or on your nightstand, to set up specific alarms in the morning, all those options can be set in the dedicated Tectiles app, quite a neat feature that we wished had came in the box.
The verdict
Aye, or did u really expect anything else? The Galaxy S3 has proven to be a market-changing device that allowed Samsung to dominate 35% of the global market in one quarter! Not only for because of the good marketing campaign they’ve launched, but because the phone is, indeed, a front runner!
