Feb 13, 2012 - 
Android 
3 Comments
Android 3 Comments Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II 16GB Sim Free Smartphone – White
- 4.3″ SUPER AMOLED Plus
- Live Panel
- Readers Hub
- PC-like Web Browsing
- Dual Core Application Processor
Samsung GALAXY S II Smartphone 3G 16 GB WCDMA UMTS GSM touch Android white GTI9100RWAXEU Phones Mobile Phones
List Price: £489.99
Price: £350.00
A super excellent smart phone,
I bought Galaxy S2 after a thorough review of the phone and continuously monitoring feedback given. I must say, I am not disappointed but truly amazed how intuitive and well designed. I would agree with most of the reviews before and will try to cover some aspects not so far covered in reviews in the hope that it will help other prospective buyers in making a decision to buy a smart phone, after all you would be paying more than for a 42″ HD TV.
I have been a iPhone 4 and Blackberry user and use the phone for e-mails and browsing a lot. Before deciding to purchase this phone (now have used it for about a week)I considered Blackberry Torch and iPhone4 and very much aware of capabilities and limitations of these.
e-mail, contacts, calander: you can set up multiple e-mail accounts (I have set up and using 3 accounts: gmail, hotmail and MS Exchange server). All work very well. You can synchronize e-mail, contacts, and calendar of all these accounts on the phone and they appear on the the respective application colour coded making it possible to see from what account it came from. Further you can access e-mails separately on different accounts on the same e-mail app.
Browser is very good and reliable. Yes, flash content can be viewed. Browsing is much faster and smoother than iPhone4.
Apps: Yes, it is not as extensive as the iTunes but there are enough Apps available (some preloaded, available from Samsung, and from Android market). Most Apps are free compared to iTunes. I did not have any problem with the Apps I downloaded so far.
Music Hub: It is primarily for you to download music from 7digital. The player there is not great. But there is a separate App for music which works fine with your downloaded music.
Social Hub: for e-mails, integrates well with Facebook, my space, twitter, LinkedIn etc.
Games Hub: There are free games for you to download and play as well as premium games for you to purchase.
Kies: provides the interface management App when connected to the computer (same as iTunes for iPhone). This is possibly one of the weakest. It is very slow to update. Having said that it works fine if you are bit patient. But to add music or download/upload photos or movies you really do not need it. You can use widows explorer to do that job directly accessing the phone and placing or taking content you need directly from or the the folder concerned.
Kies Air: this is one the good things. You can access all your content from the phone on a web browser by pointing the browser to the IP address given by Kies Air. For this you need to get connected on the your home wireless network. It works fine, and you can play music, view photos or videos wirelessly on any other device that is connected to your network and which has a browser. If you have a TV with a browser (Smart TV or other)or laptop you can play content fro the phone on it without any wired connection.
I connected my Galaxy S2 to a friends iPad this way wireless and could view photos but could not play music as iPad do not support flash. Good for the Galaxy S2 and shame for iPad/iPhone.
Maps, navigator, Google earth and similar Apps work fine. The Navigator works fine and is very responsive. It consumes the battery power and if you want to use it for long needs to be charged through the car charger. You would require a USB car charger and the supplied micro USB cable.
It has FM radio, treat on the move compared to iPhone. Comes with great set of high quality headphones with additional ear pieces.
The notification system is very good with all notifications iconised on a bar top of the screen which can be pulled down whenever you want to see the notifications.
Yes, with all these facilities battery life is low and you need to charge every day if you are a heavy user of these all functions. One way to improve battery life is to limit pushing of e-mails. These can easily be done on the settings menu.
Camera rear(8MP)works really well. The front camera at 3MP is also very good. Managed to get few very good quality photos. The quality of photos is better than iPhone. Screen quality is equal or better than iPhone. Comparing the screen size the iPhone4 now seems like a distant toy much smaller. There are many Apps available on the Android market (most as free downloads) which can integrate all your photos in (for example Facebook, Picasa etc.) one App.
Office & Pdf Documents: The Polaris App is pre-loaded in the phone. It can read and edit all office documents such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
Voice commands: Works fine. You can easily dictate your e-mails and all is then converted to text. I could get over 90% accuracy even with my first attempt. It is a treat to use.
I am using the Sunny Savers gel/Silicone hybrid cover (£3.95) which nicely fit in to the Galaxy S2. A perfect companion.
All in all a very good phone…
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|Samsung Galaxy S II vs. Apple iPhone 4,
As an iPhone 4 user since last year I had the chance to try out my first Android phone, the current top of the line Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) thanks to TRND. COM
And I have to say I am really impressed with what I saw and experienced with this Samsung phone.
—- Hardware (general build and feel) —-
Extremely lightweight, very nicely balanced. The handset size seems very good (perfect for a man’s hand although my wife also likes it very much), actually hides its actual size due to its thinness and weight.
Materials used have a good haptic touch, although it feels slightly less expensive then the iPhone 4 (probably because it uses more plastic and less glass/ metal).
The back cover is slightly difficult to remove because it initially feels flimsier then it actually is but unproblematic once you get used to it and no problem at all if you need to insert a microSD card, replace the SIM or change the battery.
A very high quality in-ear headset is included which I massively prefer instead of the Apple headsets – but this may be a personal decision.
-> Conclusion: In all the Samsung is on par with the iPhone 4, each has its own merits.
—- Screen —-
Large (4.3″), very crisp and sharp display, great colors (better then the iPhone4 Retina display in this regard but also a bit darker).
The screen (using an enhanced AMOLED technology which Samsung coined “Super AMOLED Plus” is probably the best stand-out feature of the Samsung and puts it over the top of all current smartphones.
-> Conclusion: In all slightly better then the iPhone 4 due to size and colours.
—- Operating System —-
Uses Andoid 2.3.3 (named Gingerbread), the most current smartphone version of Google’s Android OS. With many great and useful Android features (notification), but others like Apple are catching up fast to we need continued progress. And this is good for the consumer!
I had no crashes or reboots using the Samsung during the last four weeks, only once the Facebook app needed to be restarted but I guess that was the app itself and not the OS.
-> Conclusion: Probably just as good as IOS 4, I prefer the Apple although this may very much depend on the personal preference so I will call it a draw. (3:2)
—- Samsung OS Add-ins —-
Samsung added its own refinement (“TouchWiz 4.0″) on top of Gingerbread to enhance the experience.
I loved the fast access to settings like turning on/off Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi etc and some scalable widgets seems useful.
I am not too sure about the hubs concept – I personally rather like to use specific or native apps for specific media types.
Samsung also included a DLNA compliant server application, which enables the phone to wirelessly “send” pictures, videos and music from the handset to a number of devices like modern TVs, Playstation 3, Xbox360 or even to a Windows 7 PC.
I personally like the optional Swype keyboard which Samsung provides – this enables you to type words without lifting your fingers. After using it once on the Galaxy, I missed such a feature on the iPhone.
The Samsung also has a remote management feature (“Samsung Dive”), which enables finding or disabling the phone if it lost, similar to the “Find my iPhone” service of Apple.
Samsung provides an own software suite for Windows and OSX PCs called Samsung KIES, which even enables a wireless sync to the PC. Media management of KIES is good but not as good as Apple’s iTunes. There are a few sellers for Android music (most prominently Amazon) but Video content does not seem to be available anywhere.
-> Conclusion: Better then IOS 4, although this may really depend on the personal preference, especially if do not like to “bring your own media”.
—- Speed —-
The Samsung has a 1.2GHz dual core processor and it shows in general responsiveness – I never had the feeling of lag while using the touchscreen or apps. Of course measuring and comparing speed within apps is difficult (for example Angry Birds game seemed slower – lower FPS – then on the iPhone4) but the web load rendering on WiFi and 3G is noticeably faster than the current iPhone generation. Also a reloading of web pages was rarely required, possibly also be a due to increased memory (1GB RAM). The problem with speed within graphic intense games may be a general issue with Android OS, not anything Samsung can directly improve.
-> Conclusion: Slight preference of Samsung, but YMMV because this may depend on the apps used. Will probably be no difference for most users.
—- Battery —-
My own requirements are that any phone should last at least 36-40 hours with my normal usage pattern. 40 hours would be perfect. Take a fully charged phone from the bedside, use it normally during the day and only require charging again the evening of the NEXT day, when you go to sleep…
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|From an iPhone user…,
**** 8 WEEK UPDATE ****
Having had this phone for two months now I thought I’d update this. There are several things now about Android and the GS2 in general that are now apparent to me and may be deal-breakers for some of you, though it should be noted that most of these are applicable to all Android phones, and not just the GS2:
1. If you use your phone as your primary music player (e.g. like an iPod) then this is NOT the phone for you – it (as far as I can determine) has no dedicated hardware to decode audio and so it uses a lot of CPU power to play music. The phone will get very hot in your pocket from the CPU heat and within 4 hours the battery will be completely dead. This turned out to be a deal breaker for me as I use my phone extensively for music playback, and the iPhone is still the only phone I know of that gives 40 hours playback.
2. Gapless audio playback is not supported by Android, though some players buffer the next track to simulate the feature (e.g. PowerAmp) if you’re willing to pay for them. Gapless playback may be supported in future Android versions, though I don’t know how or when one could find out exactly what version of Android will support it.
3. There is a very common bug in the GS2 whereby an application called ‘Wifi Sharing’ will randomly start itself in the background and consume a huge amount of CPU power (doing nothing) and drain your battery SEVERELY. Your battery will be dead in 6 hours if you don’t ‘force close’ the application. The only solution at the moment if you have this problem is to install something like WatchDog Lite and set up an ‘alert’ to warn you when Wifi Sharing starts to overtake your CPU so that you can ‘force close’ it.
4. For all of Android’s beauty and the Touchwiz inteface Samsung has put on top of it, I’ve become aware of some quirks of Android, especially relating to the (VERY) inconsistent use of the menu button. Many applications use this button differently (or not at all), showing different menu items on this button depending on what screen/section you are in on the application. It’s definitely not intuitive in this regard compared to iOS, though some applications do use it appropriately and in a logical manner. On the other hand, the ‘back’ button is fantastic and I think Apple should employ one in their phones, too.
5. Screen burn-in. I’ve not seen many posts about this around the intertubes, but there is what can only be described as burn-in visible on the notification/status bar of the phone when you are using an application that hides the bar (e.g. having a white section where the status bar would otherwise be displayed). It looks exactly the same as burn-in looks on a plasma television; a slightly dark/grey area where the reception indicator, clock, and other indicators normally display. I suspect this is related to the super AMOLED plus screen technology though most people will probably never notice it – if they did it would be discussed in forums all over the internet.
6. Complications with applications are frequent. Unfortunately it would seem the Android market is severely fragmented due to the shear variety of different Android hardware (i.e. handsets) available. Almost every app you download will have comments attached saying things like ‘won’t work on HTC Desire… ‘ or ‘If you get the so-and-so issue then uninstall, reset and reinstall’ etc., etc., Coming from iOS, this is rather jarring and definitely does not fly on a 500GBP product. Furthermore, with the exception of the very common/popular applications, you are very likely to encounter flakey apps that consume too much battery power or randomly crash/force close (or ‘FC’ as it’s commonly called in the Android community)
7. Speaking of battery power… In my initial review (below) I mentioned how awesome it is to have widgets on the home screen. This remains true, but generally at the expense of battery life. This, combined with the battery drain experienced when using the phone for audio playback will very quickly drain your battery. You will be lucky to last the working day if you also use the phone on the road to receive and respond to emails in addition to your music, surfing, widgets, etc. This may be considered an acceptable trade-off, but no one warns you of it beforehand (at least I wasn’t aware of it, and just assumed I’d still get at least a full day out of the battery). I’ve since learned Android phones have a horrible reputation for poor battery life. Expect to last around 12 hours with medium-light use.
With all the above said, this remains an outstanding phone and by all accounts one of the very best phones available on the market. It is super-fast – faster than my laptop – and the physical design is beautiful. For any existing Android user this phone is a dream. For people coming from iOS, I hope the above update has warned you of some of the limitations…
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