Here’s Samsung Galaxy S3 and It’s Disappointing (Specs, Features, and More)
Samsung Galaxy S3 is now official. It’s Samsung latest flagship Android smartphone and the official smartphone of London Olympics 2012.
I watched the online live video stream of the Samsung Galaxy S3 event. The presentation was bad. Made me miss the late Steve Jobs. Worse, there were already many S3 reviews published before the event started. No more surprises. The world read the articles before Samsung CEO took out the Galaxy S3 from his pocket at the event.
I found Samsung Galaxy S3’s tagline a bit funny – “Designed for humans”. May I ask which phone is not designed by human for human? ;)
Read on for Samsung Galaxy S3 specs, features, availability, and my two cents.
Table of Contents
Specs
As Samsung’s flagship smartphone, Galaxy S3 has the most updated hardware: 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor with 1GB RAM. Running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).
4.8-inch Super AMOLED HD display with a resolution of 1280×720. 8MP rear camera with and 1.9MP front camera. LTE 4G for certain market. Support NFC feature.
Some of you might be happy to know that Galaxy S3 has a 2100 mAh removable battery and microSD card slot supports up to 64GB.
The higher capacity of battery doesn’t mean more battery hours for Galaxy S3. I will explain my points later.
Design
With the great hardware, the Galaxy S3’s design looks a bit dull for me. The body is huge, with dimensions of 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm. It uses brushed plastic. Weight only 133 gram. Available in 2 colors: Pebble Blue and Marble White.
Features
Samsung has developed a number of unique features for Galaxy S3. Here are some highlight features:
1. Best shot
Samsung Galaxy S3 can take burst shots of 8 and automatically choose the best one for you. I wonder what’s the magic behind this?
2. S Voice
The Samsung version of famous Apple iPhone’s Siri. You can talk to your Galaxy S3 to to wake it up, set alarm, answer phone call, control music volume, and launch camera.
Based on my Siri experience, I hope Samsung S Voice would recognize our different dialects, else it is just another fancy useless feature.
3. Direct call
Want to call the person you are texting? Simply lift your Galaxy S3 to your ear and it will automatically call the person’s number for you. Love this!
4. Smart stay
Smart stay use the Galaxy S3’s front camera to track your eyes. If you are looking at the phone, it won’t go into sleep mode. It’s useful when you take minutes to read the content on the 4.8-inch display.
5. S Beam
S Beam is a combo of NFC and Direct WiFi to allow you sharing documents, contacts, pictures, music, videos, etc with friends nearby, wirelessly.
6. Pop up play
When you are watching video on Galaxy S3 but need to carry out another task, such as reply bosses’ emails, google for info, Pop up play allows you to resize the video window and have it floating above in another app, so that you don’t need to pause your video.
It sounds cool but it looks like a useless feature in the Samsung demo. The popup video is not too big nor too small, just enough to block your view and it becomes very annoying. You need to constantly move around the pop up video so that it doesn’t block your app.
I would rather pause video, launch app, done my task and return to full screen video view. Don’t you agree?
More battery juice?
Samsung Galaxy S3 has 2100 mAh battery, an upgrade from S3’s 1650 mAh battery. Larger capacity means longer battery life. However, Galaxy S3 has larger display and thus need to light more pixels.
Also, the “Smart Stay” feature needs to keep the front camera will take up battery juice to be activated all the time to track your eyes. (of course, we believe there’s option to disable the feature)
Therefore, I believe you will get same battery life as S2 if not lesser.
Price and availability
Samsung Galaxy S3 will be available in Europe at the end of May 2012. North America get it in June. Asia, this summer.
Samsung is yet to reveal the S3 pricing. Will update when we get the info.
My two cents
Many friends felt disappointed about Samsung Galaxy S3. Plastic body, ugly design. Little hardware upgrade from S2, only matches the recent HTC One X. Camera burst shots that we seen on HTC One, Siri-like S Voice, and useless pop up play. Though, Smart Stay is an interesting idea that we would like to test.
In a nutshell, I don’t see any reason why one would want to wait for Samsung Galaxy S3 for month(s). My friend bought Galaxy S2 just 2 days before the S3 event.
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p>What says you?
