News · 29 Apr 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
The first Samsung Galaxy S II reviews just popped-up today courtesy of Samsung UK who seems to have handled review samples to UK editors this week. The verdict seems to be really positive especially Vlad’s review. According to Engadget’s editor the Galaxy S II is simply the best Android smartphone ever created.
The handset’s biggest sell point is obviously its 4.3″ Super AMOLED Plus display which I hand the opportunity to check out in Barcelona in February during the MWC11. Gone is the annoying PenTile Matrix subpixel arrangements which is no replace by a normal RGB matrix. This essentially means that the WVGA Super AMOLED Plus screen has 1,152,000 sub-pixels compared to 768,000 if it was a regular Super AMOLED panel (see my Super AMOLED vs Super AMOLED Plus hands on comparison here). Interestingly Samsung is also allowing the user to tweak the screen’s color saturation via a setting called “Background Effect”.This is definitely a good thing given that AMOLED panels are highly color saturated most of the time.
The Samsung Galaxy S II’s second selling point is its Exynos 4210 dual core 1.2Ghz Cortex-A9 SoC which also pack and ARM Mali 400MP GPU (remember that there’s a Tegra 2 variant of the Galaxy S II) . When I came back from MWC11 the thing that really struck me was that even with all this power Android devices still didn’t offer a UX that was as snappy and smooth at lower-specs Windows Phone 7 handsets or iPhone 4. Now according to today’s reviews, the Galaxy S II doesn’t suffer from any major performance issues (contrary to the samples that were present at MWC11 as you can see in my hands on videos here and here). But from the looks of it it still isn’t on par with iOS or WP7 devices in my opinion. Things may be smooth but aren’t snappy:
What all this power useful for is definitely playing back and recording HD content. The Samsung Galaxy S II camera seems to be really good at taking shots and rivals the Omnia 7 which was IMO the best Samsung camera phone until today. On the video recording front the Galaxy S II is simply a beast and the 1080P footing @ 30FPS shot with it looks gorgeous but suffers from heavy shutter roll when panning and no anti-shake at all. Just like the previous Galaxy S this new one can practically playback any video content you throw at it.
All in all I would say that this is indeed probably the best Android handset to date. I will try to get my hands on a retail sample as soon as possible to give you my thoughts about it espcially the TouchWIZ 4 UI w/ all it’s new features and over all UX.
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