Samsung Galaxy S3 review

UPDATE: Our Samsung Galaxy S III review has been updated with a section on the Android 4.1.2 update. Scroll to the end of the review to read more.

Samsung’s place at the smartphone industry’s top table is well earned. Its last two flagship handsets have been exemplary, and it has slowly but surely built up a fanbase only Apple can claim to rival. The Samsung Galaxy S III, as the firm’s biggest launch yet, has a lot to live up to, and this is one of those rare devices that actually lives up to the hype.

See also: Samsung Galaxy S7 rumours

The Galaxy S III ups the ante in a number of significant areas, none more so than its display. It’s 4.8in in size, up half an inch from the 4.3in of the Samsung Galaxy S II, it matches our current A-List champion (the HTC One X) pixel for pixel with an HD resolution of 720 x 1,280, and our first impressions are that it’s breathtakingly gorgeous.

The colours are bright and highly saturated, just like on its predecessor, but nothing quite prepares you for its hyper-real feel. Video content and photos pop off the screen so dramatically they almost look 3D, and every detail of every movie scene is laid bare.

The technology behind this is Super AMOLED. That’s surprising, given its pentile pixel array is technically a downgrade from the Super AMOLED Plus technology used in the Galaxy S II. In use, however, you’d struggle to notice the slightly grainy quality it lends tiny text.

When measured with a colorimeter it fails to match the display on the Galaxy S II and that on its rival, the HTC One X. The maximum brightness on a pure white screen is 240cd/m[sup]2[/sup], compared with the 300cd/m[sup]2[/sup] of its predecessor. The HTC One X’s IPS display measured 490cd/m[sup]2[/sup] in this test and the [a hreg=”http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/smartphones/370735/apple-iphone-4s”]iPhone 4S[/a] was way up at 581cd/m[sup]2[/sup]. The perfect contrast AMOLED brings to the table means that, again, it isn’t something you’d immediately think to criticise it for. Even in bright, sunny conditions, this screen is readable as long as you angle it away from the sky.

Physical design

The design of the Galaxy S III is a little less impressive. It’s available in a brushed metal-effect blue or “marble white”, but either way the build isn’t too clever. Samsung says the rear panel is polycarbonate, and finished in a “hyperglazed” coating; to us it looks and feels like polished plastic. Remove it, and it’s disconcertingly bendy and flexible.

To be fair, the bendiness doesn’t matter when it’s clipped in place on the rear of the phone, and this is far from an ugly slab of plastic. In fact, we rather like its smoothly rounded corners and rear panel, and the subtly curved edges of the glass on the front. It’s as slim as you like at 8.9mm, and despite the huge expanse of glass at the front, it doesn’t weigh an awful lot either. At 132g, it’s 8g lighter than the much smaller iPhone 4S.

We do have some practical concerns over the design of the Galaxy S III, however, and these surround the controls at the bottom of the screen. They’re made up of a central physical home button flanked by a pair of capacitive touch buttons. This is nothing out of the ordinary – both previous Galaxy S handsets had the same arrangement – but here they’re much more sensitive and placed too close to the edge of the phone. We regularly found ourselves activating the context menu and backing out of apps by accident.

Hardware and performance

Once you’ve seen the Galaxy S III’s benchmark results, however, we suspect you may well be prepared to put up with such minor foibles. The CPU is of Samsung’s own manufacture – a 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos 4212 chip with 1GB of RAM – accompanied by a Mali-400 MP GPU, and when we put it through our usual battery of tests it came top in every one.

Its time of 1,430ms in SunSpider is the quickest of any phone we’ve tested; a score of 5,413 in Quadrant batters every other handset into submission, including the 1.5GHz quad-core HTC One X, which scored 4,927.

In use this translates to a supremely fluid feel. In and around the operating system, and navigating around complex web pages, it feels as smooth as you’d ever want, and even loading and rendering hefty web pages such as the BBC homepage feels snappier than usual.

Surprisingly, we didn’t experience 100% smooth frame rates in games. While playing Shadowgun we saw choppiness on occasion, but most of the time the power on tap is more than ample. What’s more, even flat out, the Samsung Galaxy S III never reached the finger-searing temperatures of its predecessor.

After a few minutes blasting away gas-masked enemies, we measured the phone using an infrared thermometer, and found it reached 39ºC, where the Galaxy S II was capable of reaching an unbearable 56ºC.

A further advantage the S III holds over the HTC One X is its microSD slot. This means you can comfortably opt for the cheapest model with 16GB storage in the knowledge that it can be expanded later on. With support for SDXC cards, you can add up to 64GB.

Battery life & power saving

To prevent the powerful CPU and high-resolution screen consuming battery life like a pride of lions devouring a lone wildebeest, Samsung has squeezed in a beefy 2,100mAh battery. After downloading 50MB of data, playing an audio file on loop, forcing the screen on for an hour and making a 30-minute phone call, we left the S III checking email, and it had 60% capacity left on the gauge after 24 hours – on a par with the HTC One X and most other big-screened smartphones.

That isn’t bad, all things considered, but it’s only part of the story. First up, the battery is removable, which means that when it starts giving up the ghost 18 months hence it won’t mean the end of your phone or a trip to the repair shop. That, coupled with the fact you can carry one or more spares with you to extend runtime, edges it in front of the HTC One X on this front.

Second, Samsung has implemented all sorts of other tricks to extend battery life. “Smart stay” is the most ingenious, and uses the front-facing camera to monitor when you’re looking at the screen. If you are, it will temporarily disable the screen timeout; if not, it returns to its initial state, dimming the display then switching it off as normal. The advantage of this is that you can set the screen timeout lower than you might otherwise without fear of it going dark halfway through reading a paragraph.

It worked well, too, although don’t be overly keen with the timeout settings. When we set it to 15 seconds, occasionally, the screen would dim momentarily before waking up again.

Meanwhile, there’s a whole host of other options in the Settings menu, including CPU speed capping, and a tool that optimises the colour and brightness of the screen based on its content. Either way, if you find you need to eke a bit more life out of the battery, there are plenty of tools here to help.

Software

The software tweaks don’t end with battery saving, with a selection of other neat party tricks to play with – some useful, some not. The voice-recognition feature, S Voice, falls into the latter. If you remember it’s there, or accidentally activate it with a double-press of the home button, you might fiddle with it for a few minutes, but it’s far too hit and miss to be of serious utility.

More impressive, but also a little gimmicky, is “Pop up play”. Fire up a movie in the Samsung’s native video player, tap the icon in the bottom right-hand corner and the video shrinks into a small box that can be dragged around the screen, allowing you to check some fact or another on a website, or reply to a text and keep watching the film.

Edging into the realm of the genuinely useful is the Galaxy S III’s auto-dial facility. When a contact or text conversation is onscreen, lift the phone to your ear and it will make a call for you. We also love the way the photo gallery app picks out the faces in your pictures, offers to tag them the first time, then attempts to recognise them in subsequent shots. It works well, too, even when the subject is gurning in a particularly unattractive manner.

Last, but by no means least, the Samsung Galaxy S III also comes with Dropbox preloaded, and the first time you sign in or create an account, you’ll be credited with 50GB of storage for a period of two years.

Camera

It seems a bit of a shame having to shunt the camera bit to the end of the review, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of note. The Galaxy S III has an 8-megapixel snapper, with a single LED flash to help out in low light, and it’s capable of shooting 1080p video. Performance is snappy, and as with the HTC One X there’s a natty burst mode, which can shoot a sequence of 20 shots at a rate of 3.3fps.

It takes excellent shots, too, full of crisp detail, and as with the Galaxy S II it has a cracking macro mode. Other features include electronic image stabilisation, and there’s a host of options to help you get the right shot, from manual ISO selection to white balance, and a broad array of scene presets, including a fake HDR facility.

Disappointingly, there’s still no dedicated shutter button, which makes launching the camera a little slower than we’d like, and it’s a shame there was no resolution bump over the Galaxy S II – but otherwise, it’s a highly respectable effort from Samsung.

Verdict

In wrapping up, we should probably mention that the Galaxy S III also has NFC and, via that technology, the facility to beam content from one S III to another. Plus, via AllShare Cast it has the facility to stream video content directly to your TV. Unfortunately, since Samsung hasn’t provided us with an extra device or the streaming box, we can’t test those features.

That small encumbrance doesn’t get in the way of us delivering our verdict on the Samsung Galaxy S III, and it’s an overwhelmingly positive one. This is a fantastic smartphone, with a stupendous screen and staggering performance, which is packed with handy extras that make life easier and a little more fun.

We prefer the physical design of the HTC One X, and those over-sensitive back and menu buttons do have the potential to annoy at first. But the Samsung scores big on practicality, and its memory expansion and replaceable battery more than compensate.

Finally, for now, the Samsung is the cheaper device. If contracts remain as reasonable as they are right now – we found one at £26 per month (for a free phone, no less, 750MB monthly data and 300 minutes), we wonder why anyone would consider anything else.

Update

The Samsung Galaxy S III was originally released with Android 4.0.4, but Samsung has been hard at work updating its handset ever since. As well as upgrading the phone to the latest version of Android – 4.1.2, or Jelly Bean – Samsung has enhanced the S III with features ported across from some of its other devices.

One of these is Multi-Window mode, originally found on the Samsung Galaxy Note II, which allows two apps to run simultaneously in a split-screen view. The divider between the two can be moved up or down the screen so you can see more of one or the other app, and although the phone feels a little sluggish in this mode to begin with, it soon settles down.

Page Buddy adds an eighth homescreen with context-sensitive options for when earphones are plugged in or the S III is docked. The new Gallery app is ported straight from the Note II, and includes improved navigation, plus options to tag images with contact, location or weather information.

The range of quick-select buttons in the notification drawer can now be customised, and the brightness control can be removed from the drawer entirely. The keyboard now supports what Samsung calls “continuous input”, allowing you to drag a finger from letter to letter to form words, rather than tapping. It’s a similar system to Swype and the new keyboard on Android 4.2.

The S III also benefits from all the improvements Google’s Android 4.1.2 update brings, including the Google Now contextual search application, expandable notifications and improved smoothness. There’s no sign of Photo Sphere or the accessibility improvements (triple-tap to zoom the homescreen and voice navigation, for example) from Android 4.2, though.

The Galaxy’s update does improves performance. We recorded a score of 5,413 from the S III in our original review, but now that figure has improved to a mighty 5,752 – a whisker behind the 5,892 of the Samsung Galaxy Note II, and far ahead of the Nexus 4’s 4,993 result. Performance has improved in SunSpider, too: its old 1,430ms result has been cut to 1,280ms. Alas, battery life hasn’t got better, but the Galaxy’s result in our 24hr run-down test, where it had 60% remaining on the gauge, is still perfectly acceptable.

Even without the updates, the Samsung Galaxy S III was the smartphone to beat, but with them it’s even better. We suspect, until the S IV arrives, it will remain at the top of our A List.

Details
Cheapest price on contract	Free
Contract monthly charge	£26.00
Contract period	24 months
Contract provider	Mobiles.co.uk
Physical
Dimensions	70 x 8.9 x 136mm (WDH)
Weight	132g
Touchscreen	yes
Primary keyboard	On-screen
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	1.00GB
Camera megapixel rating	8.0mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	4.8in
Resolution	720 x 1280
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Android