It’s the biggest announcement from Samsung this year. It was rumored more than anything else with hundreds of leaked pictures. Technology enthusiasts were expecting a lot more than what Samsung delivered. Still, we call it satisfactory. Let’s get started.
We used the handset from Samsung for about a month. The phone has curves on its edges, a noticeable change as Galaxy S2 had bold edges. And actually, Galaxy S3 is all about curves! It’s got a fluid design (Samsung says so), and apparently, it has been designed for humans instead. All the other phones we have had till today were designed for Robots or Aliens or Animals. That’s silly tagline you have got there, Samsung! Apart the bad Marketing sense of Samsung, The screen can be called Gorgeous, Awesome, Out of this World and many other things, but none still matches it’s perfection. The resolution is too good and the screen responds to you like it had been waiting for your command for years (smiles). It’s a bit of huge to fit in an average person’s hand, but for guys with bigger, hands, it’s just fine and gives an impression of you holding an expensive smartphone. Well, it is expensive at a launch price of around Rs 40,000/$700. Now taking you through its specifications. It’s got an enormous 4.8” Super AMOLED display with scratch resistant Gorilla glass and Capacitive touchscreen technology, an astounding 1.4 GHz Quad- core processing chip, Android 4.0 Ice cream Sandwich Operating system coupled with Samsung’s TouchWiz User Interface.
The pebble blue color looks much better than the other color option, the white. The Software part- it’s a got the latest Android Operating System as we all know, and Samsung has played with it this time. As Siri was launched on the iPhone 4S, the sequel of the iPhone 4, so what do we expect with the Galaxy S3? Yes, a voice assistant. This one’s named S-Voice by Samsung. Nothing impressive with S-Voice. It’s installed as an application and needs to be opened via the main menu. Once you tap on S-Voice, you get a female voice greeting with the sentence “What do you want to do?” And you may tell it to open certain applications, Make an appointment, create a memo, make a call etc. It was not so amusing as we expected. It’s also got the standard set of connectivity features- Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and NFC this time included. Samsung has also included a feature name the S-beam, that allows you to share files with another Galaxy S3 with just a tap. One of the features we like being the Smart stay. You need to turn this feature from the settings menu in order to use it.
When active, this feature tracks your eyeball movements via its secondary camera located on top of the screen, and when you move your eyes away from the screen, the phone goes into sleep mode by itself. This could be one handy feature and it’s real fun using it. But it drains the battery really fast as it keeps the camera running in the background all the while. It’s also not so accurate all the time, for those who are wearing glasses and while using it in the dark, the phone will stay on even if you fall asleep right in front of it and sometimes it may irritate you if you turn on the Smart stay and wait for the screen to go off.
The best part of the Galaxy S3 has to be its camera. Samsung has added a bunch of features, for example the burst mode allows you to click 20 HD images in 1 second and the S3 also helps you choose the best picture out of the rest. It also removes minor flaws in a particular image, for example if your friend blinked during the shoot, the Galaxy S3 will replace his face with the better one from the other 19 pictures.
We also ran some of the Graphics and memory intensive apps on the phone and the Galaxy S3 takes it all and turns it into a breeze. With a screen size so large, it’s quite impressive at the price point. What we didn’t like was the Smart stay and the S-voice feature which cease to work properly. Overall, it’s a Good looking phone and for people who can let go of little drawbacks, The Samsung Galaxy S3 is definitely worth a buy.
