Review: Samsung Galaxy S II

The Samsung Galaxy S II carries a lot of expectations on its slender shoulders. The world’s fastest and slimmest dual-core handset has to follow the trailblazing path laid by it’s predecessor, the Galaxy S, a phone that has managed to sell 10 million units, and who’s specs still hold up well today (1GHz processor, 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, 16GB memory, Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread). The Galaxy S II needs to be more than just a minor evolution, as is the case with HTC’s recently released Desire S, which offered an increase in RAM and a more efficient processor over the Desire, but not much else. What the Galaxy S II must do is take everything that was great about the Galaxy S and turn it up to 11.

The Galaxy S II has a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, quad-core GPU, 16/32GB of storage, 8MP camera with flash, 1080p recording and playback, 4.27-inch Super AMOLED Plus 800×480 screen, Touchwiz 4.0 UI, Android Gingerbread 2.3.3 powering things, and is just 8.49mm thin and 116g light. Read on and see what we make of it.

(Click on images for full size.)

Hardware

There’s no two ways of saying it – the GSII is an extremely sexy piece of hardware. The first thing that will strike you when you pick up the handset is how light it is. Extremely light. Compared to the HTC HD2, which is 157g, the GSII feels almost scarily light in the hand. The HD2’s weight lends it a feeling of solidity, helped by its metal and plastic construction. The GSII, though, doesn’t feel as if it would stand up as well to drops and bumps. It has a rigid frame, with no flexes or creaks, but the lack of weight and plastic construction are a constant worry when using it. However, this can be fixed with the addition of a case, and the huge benefit is that, after a day of use, I had none of the strain I usually had after extended web browsing or texting sessions on the HD2. The GSII is also extremely thin, just 8.49mm at its thinnest point, mind-bogglingly skinny for a phone packed with so much technology. After a few hours of using the phone, my HD2 (at 11mm thick) felt bulky and obese after the rakish GSII. The ‘bump’ at the bottom of the phone, which houses the antennas and radios, helps the GSII sit comfortably in the hand, and even small hands will find that all parts of the screen are accessible.

On the front of the device, the single piece of Gorilla glass that makes up the face of the handset is extremely glossy, but also incredibly finger-print resistant – slip it into a pocket, and any fingerprints on the screen will melt away thanks to the oleophobic coating. Underneath, you’ll find Samsung’s latest screen technology, Super AMOLED Plus, powering a 4.27-inch, WVGA 800×480 resolution panel. Above the screen are the earpiece, a slightly raised strip of plastic, with the 2MP front facing camera to the left along with the light and proximity sensors. The Home button at the bottom is ringed in chrome and is pleasantly ‘clicky’, and flanked by two capacitive buttons, a back button to the right, and a menu button to the left (which doubles as a search button with a long press). They are very sensitive, with the touch area extending beneath each lit key allowing for users to prod blindly at the general area of the button and still hope for a press to be registered, and offer a reassuring vibration to let you know you’ve hit the mark. The right hand side of the handset contains the lock button, the left side the volume rocker, both of which work as you’d expect. On the top sits the 3.5mm headphone jack, and a secondary microphone to aid with stereo audio capture. On bottom, there’s the main microphone for in calls, and the USB port. Around back, there is the scarily-thin, but nicely textured, battery cover. It’s extremely tricky to peel off the handset, and doesn’t feel like it will stand up to repeated removals, so I’d advise caution for those seeking to frequently swap SIM and Micro SD cards. There’s also the 8MP camera, complete with LED flash, and the single loudspeaker.

Scarily-thin Battery Cover

Screen

TouchWiz 4.0 and stock Android

Samsung have updated the original Super AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) display on the Galaxy S, now called Super AMOLED Plus. It’s not just advertising jargon, the new screen really is light-years ahead of its predecessor. The colours are incredible – vivid, deep, and with great contrast ratios. Blacks are, well, black – even on the most advanced LCDs, black levels are deteriorated by the light required to active the panel. On AMOLED screens, each individual pixel is lit as needed, so when black is called for, the screen switches off the sections of the panel required to display it. The result is some of the greatest images you will ever view on a mobile handset, images are bright and clear, and HD video pops with life. Viewing angles are great, with the screen still faithfully producing accurate colours from almost perpendicular angles. Outdoor viewing is made easier by the display’s increased brightness, and I found it to be perfectly useable in direct sunlight. Some may argue that the colours are slightly over-saturated, but I’ve found it to be a suitable trade off for the depth and breadth of the screen’s capabilities. Photos really cannot do it justice. It leaves the capable LCD panel of my HD2 looking washed out, and grey where blacks should be. It really is incredible.

Software

Samsung have once again added their Touchwiz skin to the Android operating system. It seems to really divide opinion amongst users, some feel it’s not as comprehensive as HTC’s Sense UI, others believe it distracts from stock Android. I’m left with mixed feelings. There are some aspects I really like, others I do not. First, with the positives – it looks great. Samsung’s tweaks are designed to make the most of the screen, with colourful additions to menus and stock apps, big, bright widgets, and various other graphical tweaks that enhance the user experience and make it feel like the premium handset it is. Every menu and border is enhanced with a blue theme, icons are bright and colourful, and transition animations are slick and smooth. The resizable widgets are a welcome addition, allowing more or less information to be displayed by each of the widgets that support it, although I wish that more of the widgets were supported as some, such as the calendar, could be reduced from their full-screen size. The system of placing widgets on the screen is also intuitive, with apps appearing in a drawer at the bottom of the screen, where they can be scrolled through and dragged onto the screen. There are 7 home screens to place apps and widgets on, and flicking between them is lag-free and easy. Users can also pinch to zoom out and see all of their home screens at once, just like Sense. The app launcher scrolls horizontally, unlike the standard Android vertical system, but again, scrolling is smooth and easy, and pinch zooming is also available here to view every app window at once.

I particularly approve of  Samsung’s messaging and email apps, which are close to stock Android in portrait mode, but in landscape, split the screen between a list of all message threads or emails on the left, and the selected message or email on the right. It’s intuitive and very useful.

Now with the negatives. Touchwiz really doesn’t go far enough. Facebook integration is present, likewise for Twitter, but they run through Samsung’s Social Hub, which only displays updates and messages, and isn’t as deep as HTC’s Sense. Samsung’s other apps are underwhelming, too. The Reader, Games and Music Hubs are all just window dressing for other apps to sell books, magazine, games and music to users, but there are better apps in the Android Market.

These really are nit-picky things, though. For the most part, Touchwiz will be sufficient for most users, indeed, I have warmed to it and can ignore my gripes, and those who miss stock Android will likely take advantage of the stock ROMs currently being cooked for the handset.

Messaging

Messaging is a very easy process on the Galaxy S II. There are two methods baked into the handset, Samsung’s own keyboard, and Swype. Samsung’s keyboard is a re-skinned version of the stock Gingerbread keyboard, and works as expected. It’s responsive, and text-prediction and spell-check work. In portrait it’s good for one handed texting, and it’s plenty spacious in landscape mode. One major gripe, though, is the way it displays spell-check suggestions. The bar the words appear in isn’t constant, and disappears after you have selected the word you want – this sounds good in theory, but instead you end up with the window in which you type constantly jumping up and down as the spellcheck bar appears and disappears. It’s not a major flaw, but it really becomes annoying if you’re the kind of person who watches the text window as you’re typing.

The other option is Swype, the keyboard that relies on you dragging your finger from letter to letter. It’s bigger than the Samsung keyboard, and as such more useful, and can be used for individual key presses with spellcheck. It’s a generally better keyboard than Samsung’s offering, although Samsung’s works better in landscape mode. They’re both comfortable for extended typing sessions, though, with texts and emails proving easy to produce without strain.

Processor

With its powerful 1.2GHz Exynos dual-core processor and a quad-core Mali-400 MP GPU, the SII chews through webpages, flash video, HD video, photography and almost every other app and use you could think of. The vast majority of the time, the phone flies. It’s the fastest phone I’ve ever used by far, certainly the fastest Android phone, and it blitzes the iPhone. The only other OS I’ve seen run this smoothly is Windows Phone 7, which in itself is impressive given how slick WP7 is. Every app launches instantly, loads quickly, presses are registered with little hesitation and everything just flows and works. In benchmark tests, the phone eclipses every other handset. I regularly saw 3000 or more in Quadrant, and have never witnessed the tests run so smoothly as I have on the GSII.

However, there were a few surprises. When pressing the Home button, there is a definite pause in the phone registering the press, and then returning to the Home screen. It’s not enough to detract from the user experience, but given the instant response from my HD2 running stock Gingerbread, I’m left wondering if Samsung’s Touchwiz and the complexity of the home screen is to blame. The lock screen, is another gripe. Given the smoothness present in the rest of the phone, it looks jerky in its sliding movement. It’s a small gripe, but it’s noticeable, nonetheless. The Gallery, too, is unusually jerky in its swiping. It’s jerky, and occasionally skips album columns. It’s an unusual thing, given that once in an album, swiping is fast and smooth.

Battery Life

Again, my results are mixed. With heavy use, you will struggle to see half a day out of the handset, but in this instance that means regularly using the phone, with Facebook, Twitter, email, gmail, and a messaging client all syncing in the background, as well as browsing the internet, texting, calling, viewing pictures, playing around with widgets and the home screens and playing music. It really isn’t typical of an average user, and even under such heavy use, half a day is impressive. Under normal use, you will easily see a day out of the phone – the average for modern smartphones. Of course, if you turn off GPS and keep background apps updating at more spaced out intervals, you will see even longer out of the GSII’s battery. Overall, it performed as expected, but wasn’t a revolution. The biggest surprise, though, was watching a 30 minute video and only seeing a 5% depletion in battery life. This bodes well for the handset as a media device, but this will of course vary depending on the resolution and brightness of the video being played.

Conclusion

Overall, I’ve fallen deeply in love with the GSII. I know the aim of a review is to be impartial, but from the moment I picked it up and marvelled at its lack of weight, to turning it on for the first time and seeing the beauty of its S-AMOLED Plus screen, to watching it blaze through the Touchwiz-overlayed Gingerbread OS, I knew this phone was going to be something special.

As a premium handset, it’s plastic construction and flimsy battery cover are a disappointment, especially compared to devices such as HTC’s aluminium clad Sensation, but this is the trade-off for a phone this thin and light. Likewise, I wish Samsung had been able to cram a few more hours into the battery life, and that Touchwiz could be further reaching and more efficient, but again, these are minor niggles.

As a whole, this handset nears perfection. You will never see Android run as smoothly, and look as good as it does here – aided no end by that beautiful screen. It feels great to hold, blazes through every task you can throw at it, and looks great with the screen on or off. To those unsure of whether to get this phone or not, do it. You will not be disappointed.

The Galaxy S II is a powerhouse of a phone in a wafer-thin package. Samsung really have managed something incredible here, they’ve taken every expectation from the Galaxy S, and smashed them.