Samsung Galaxy S III: What We Know

Remember the awesome Galaxy S II? Well, the truly brilliant S II has a new successor in the form of the Galaxy S III. Bringing to the table a quad-core Exynos processor, a 4.8-inch, HD Super AMOLED screen and Siri...I mean, S-Voice, does the S III deserve the crown as Samsung's latest flagship?



Looks wise, the S III is a bit of an amalgam of the companies S phones of late, although it does lean more toward the Galaxy Nexus in terms of curves and contour. Is it nice? I'll be honest, I'm a little torn. On one hand, it does have it's own striking look, but I feel the S II was a lot more distinct in it's appearance.

The 4.8-inch screen is counter-balanced by the thin bezel, making a result that's not only comfortable to hold, but also respectively light as the phone weighs just 4.7 ounces and measures just 8.6mm.

The S III retains the physical home button, only now slimmer and is flanked only by a pair of capacitive buttons (home and back) that light up and disappear to the point of "Woah, was they really there?"

The 8-megapixel camera is reported to be similar to what we've seen on both the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note, so not a bad shooter by any means, although we'll remain judgement until we've tested it ourselves. However the new camera app supports dual still and video capture (much like the HTC One X), adds face tagging for existing contacts and boasts improved face identification and tracking.

The screen is a beautiful 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display, that looks utterly stunning. But there is a bad point -- PenTile, which means that pixelation is still visible despite the 306 ppi density, due to the sharing of sub-pixels. It's by no means a bad display, far from it, but for some, especially after the preview we showed of the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha this week and it's sublime screen, it may have been a bad choice by old Sammy. The screen is, however, cocooned in Gorilla Glass 2 which is a nice touch.

All the guts and glamour in the S III is powered by a 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor, aided by a fresh GPU that is supposedly 65 percent faster than the companion Mali 400 graphics chip on the Galaxy S II, so, to put it bluntly, the thing is fast. Once we're able to test GTA III and the a few more games and apps, we'll report back with how that Exynos processor handles gaming.

Media playback and web-browsing is effortless, with pinch-to-zoom showing no signs of strain, and though the unit was running on WiFi, with a fast enough 3G connection you should suffer no kind of slowdown while browsing.

Then there's Siri...dammit, S-Voice. Although we've not seen this in action, Samsung have said that your commands will be able to unlock the phone, control the music player and capture photos, as well as a host of other features. Like a certain voice assistant rival, it does require a data connection because voice patterns are processed in the cloud.

Overall, so far the Galaxy S III looks good, not the almighty wonder we expected, but once all the features are readily available and polished, there's a very good chance that Samsung will have another best seller on their hands.