Review: Samsung Galaxy S II

One Android phone that, right now, is probably one of the most anticipated devices since its announcement at February’s MWC is the Samsung Galaxy S II, the successor to the earlier, then-impressive Samsung Galaxy S. Which is why, if you’ve been waiting with bated breath for more details on the Galaxy S II, it may come as good news to you that ZADroid recently received a pre-release Galaxy S II unit to review, and we three thoroughly put it through its paces in the triple-barrel review you’re reading right now.

If you actually see this phone in the flesh, you'll appreciate just how ridiculously thin it is.

Physical Features
The Galaxy S II is larger than its predecessor, due to its 4.27″ display, measuring 125.3×66.1mm versus the Galaxy S I’s dimensions of 122.4×64.2mm. However, and this is the impressive bit, Samsung has managed to shave off another 1.5mm off the thickness of the device, meaning the SII is only 8.49mm thick! If you actually see this phone in the flesh, you’ll appreciate just how ridiculously thin this is, and it beautifully balances the larger width and height which would have been awkward in a thicker device.

With regards to button placement, the SII doesn’t deviate far from the design followed by its predecessor, with the power/lock button on the right-hand side of the device, and a volume rocker on the other side. The 3.5mm headphone jack is still found at the top of the device, but with the SII Samsung has flipped the micro-USB port to the bottom of the device. The front face of the SII also follows the same recipe as the SI, with a physical home button flanked by capacitive menu and back buttons.

The back of the phone is built mostly in the same way as the SI, with the raised chin at the bottom. However, the shiny plastic from the SI has been removed, opting instead for a textured plastic cover for the battery, SIM and microSD compartment.

Philip: Here at ZADroid, we tend to grouch about Samsung’s tendency to build devices that use too much plastic in their bodies, leaving one with a feeling that the devices feels cheaper than it really should be. With the SII, however, one of the first things I remarked to my colleagues at the office was that, and I mean this in the very best way possible, the Galaxy S II doesn’t feel like a Samsung device. The SII is truly beautifully built, and the textured back just finishes the construction of the device perfectly.

Sean: I have to agree with Philip here, the Galaxy S I and the 550 both felt very plastic to me, but the Galaxy S II really doesn’t feel like a Samsung device. A colleague at work even commented at the fact that he thought it felt and looked nicer than his Desire HD. What got me is the fact that even though this is a large phone I could place it in my pocket and noticed it less than a HTC Tattoo which is a tiny phone.

Albert: I think the reason the SII feels so solid is that there’s not much to work with. It’s crazy thin, and very, very light. I had to do a double-take more than once to check it was still in my pocket. That being said, it doesn’t feel fragile at all. In fact, I didn’t feel the need to treat it with any more care than I do my almost two year old Hero. It truly is a beautiful slab of insanely-hard-to-photograph obsidian.

When you press that wake button, the display really brings the phone to life.

Display
As mentioned above, the Galaxy S II has a 4.27″ capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 480×800 pixels, built using Samsung’s new Super AMOLED Plus display technology. The “Plus” suffix denotes an incremental advance in the original Super AMOLED technology, whereby the PenTile subpixel matrix is replaced with the more common RGB subpixel matrix, resulting in a clearer display, even though the PPI of a 4.27″ Super AMOLED Plus is actually equivalent to the PPI of a 4″ Super AMOLED display. The screen is, like the SI, protected by everyone’s favourite protective layer: Gorilla Glass.

The blue/green tint that was noticeable on some Galaxy S I units was not apparent on our review unit, so that’s good news.

Philip: What’s there to say about a display that’s pretty much bloody perfect? Other than saying that it’s pretty much bloody perfect, of course.

Sean: Can’t say much more than the fact that it’s perfect. Even a user who has a phone from the fruit we shall not name commented on the display saying he loves it.

Albert: Yep, I’d have to echo both Philip and Sean, it’s an amazing display. When you press that wake button, the display really brings the phone to life.

Performance and Battery Life
The Galaxy S II is powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, depending on a system-on-a-chip of Samsung’s own design, the Exynos 4210. The Exynos 4210 uses the ARM Mali-400 MP as a GPU. It seems that some regions may actually receive a different revision of the SII, the GT-i9103, which, instead of the Exynos 4210, runs on the Nvidia Tegra 2 platform, with a GeForce ULP GPU powering the graphics side of things. However, the unit we reviewed was the GT-i9100, so that’ll most likely be the one that lands on South African shores next month. The SII also bumps the RAM capacity to a gigabyte, and sports 16GB of integrated storage, with support for expansion of up to an additional 32GB via a microSD slot.

The SII’s battery is rated at 1650mAh, and the phone includes a separate wall charger with an attached microUSB jack. Charging off your computer is also possible through a USB-to-microUSB cable, but this method suffers from the lower current available via the USB hub, in that actively and heavily using the phone while charging like this will actually result in the phone using more current than is supplied through the USB cable.

Philip: As this was a new unit, and I was the first to review, I suffered through the battery’s initial “learning” phase. With moderate to heavy use, and a persistent WiFi connection, I only managed to get up to 12 hours of use from a single charge. Using my HTC Wildfire in more or less the same way gets me a battery life of 24 hours, on average. As both Albert and Sean managed to get considerably better battery life out of the unit than I did, I hope this was only due to the newness of the battery.

Sean: Performance wise I can’t fault this phone at all. It whizzed through everything I threw at it. On the battery side of things, I was running it with power saving option on and I got anywhere between 18 and 22 hours out of it. The time it was on 22 hours I basically just plugged it in as it’s a habit I’ve learnt with smartphones when going to bed.

Albert: The SII’s performance is mindblowing. So much so that the speed and responsiveness of everything on the phone means that the flaws of lesser devices are now suddenly blatantly obvious. I found myself stopping, taking a picture, and posting it to Posterous with more frequency, because it was so quick and effortless on the SII. I used the device for a day or two before giving it to Philip, and was also quite bummed by the battery life, but the last few days before giving it back things were much better. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Data and Sync were enabled, yet I ended the day with at least 25% battery life remaining.

Camera
Update: This review incorrectly stated that the primary camera was 12 megapixels. This has since been corrected with the actual 8 megapixel rating.

On the camera front, the Galaxy S II is equipped with a 12MP8MP rear camera (including an LED flash), and a 2MP camera on the front for video calling. The primary camera is capable of recording video at 1920×1080 with a framerate of 30 frames per second.

Philip: In general, Samsung phones have always had CCD sensors of exceptional quality, and the Galaxy S II does not break with this trend. The SII really has a spectacular camera. Colours are bright, the image stays crisp even when you zoom it in, and it even manages to pull off low-light photos that look great. Videos also look pretty damn impressive at full HD resolution, although it’s easy to introduce camera wobble.

Sean: Besides the camera wobble on video recording, this is one of the best cameras I’ve seen in a phone to date.

Albert: I would buy this phone just for the camera. The best camera is the one you’ve got with you? So true with this phone. I took a lot of photos, and in all conditions, the photos looked great. The camera application is definitely one of the best out there, and features like auto-stitching of panoramas work well, and are very nice to have.

Software
With the Galaxy S II, Samsung has updated their TouchWiz custom user interface to version 4.0, and in this case, it’s built on top of Android 2.3.3, otherwise known as Gingerbread. The TouchWiz update improves on most aspects of its predecessors, but essentially, nothing has changed too radically. The application drawer now supports additional capabilities, such as grouping applications in folders in the list.

The lockscreen is a simple affair, with the current date and time being overlaid on top of the lockscreen wallpaper. If you have pending messages or a missed call, the lockscreen will display scrubbers which, when swiped, will launch the related application directly: a nice shortcut. To unlock, you just have to swipe the lockscreen’s “pane” from one edge of the phone to the other, at which point it will fade away to reveal whatever was on your screen before it locked itself.

The Galaxy S II also introduces a number of “Hub” applications, such as Social Hub and Games Hub, which are meant to be single points of entry for each experience. Social Hub, for example, is an application which aggregates all your social networking and instant messaging accounts, giving you a unified “inbox” for events in your social networking sites’ feeds.

And for those of us who like rolling with the custom ROMs out there, the great news is that Samsung has donated Galaxy S II handsets to four of the primary CyanogenMod developers, so it shouldn’t be long before the option for a stable ROM is out there.

Philip: I’ve never liked TouchWiz, and TouchWiz 4.0 is no exception. I absolutely despise the iPhone-like application drawer, since it always ends up a pain for me to find something specific, making me rely more on the phone’s search feature than the app drawer itself. The alphabetical list alternative is horrendously ugly, and uses its space as inefficiently as possible. Rearranging items in the pages is often annoying, because the rearrangement process doesn’t always work the way you expect it to, and placing an item along the edges of a page will often cause the interface to think that you want to move to the previous/next page. If it were my phone, Launcher Pro is the first thing that would be installed.

The default appearance that Samsung opted for on first start is… baffling. The lockscreen wallpaper is fine enough, although the lockscreen itself is quite a different story. The default homescreen wallpaper, however, is hideous. It’s basically just a blue to brown gradient, and it’s the most drab, boring, and uninspiring default wallpaper I’ve ever seen from a manufacturer.

And then there’s that lockscreen; oh!, that lockscreen. I have no idea what Samsung was thinking when they designed it, but I doubt they were really thinking at all. On the face of it, it doesn’t look too bad: it simply displays a customisable wallpaper, with the current time and date in the lower left corner. When you actually try to unlock it is where the problems begin. Firstly, it looks like crap, since it’s implemented as a pane that you slide away, so it’s all hard edges. It’s also extremely finicky about how you swipe it away: I found that it works best to swipe from one edge to the other, since beginning in an area around the centre of the screen will simply snap the lockscreen back to its original position. Extremely annoying. The only saving grace the lockscreen has is the scrubbers that appear when you have a missed call, for example.

Sean: I’m going to keep this short and sweet. I would be able to live with TouchWiz 4.0 but I’m in no way in love with it. My biggest gripe is with the lockscreen and that I feel there is a constant “obsession” with trying to be like an iPhone. Regarding the lockscreen I did feel that the scrubbers on the lockscreen was a nice touch, but would have been nice to see it display my Gmail notifications, calender events, etc. as well. If it was my phone, the first things I would do after setting up my Google account would be to install Launcher Pro and a different lockscreen.

Albert: Those that know me know that I think that manufacturer differentiation on a software level should go the way of the dinosaurs. TouchWiz 4.0 surprised me. It’s not good, but it’s not unbearable. What does irk me is that there are still applications that I would never use, but that I can’t uninstall. The other customizations actually add value – small things like the power manager that will automatically switch off sensors and services depending on the battery level, and the useless, but very cool motion-gesture-controls. With CyanogenMod probably well on its way to this phone, though, with Samsung’s blessing – you now have real choice.

Conclusion
Philip: Barring the battery life woes which seemed to only affect me, the Galaxy S II is an amazing phone, at least hardware-wise. I never experienced any slowdown or lag in my time with the phone, the camera is extraordinary, and the display is something that must be seen, it’s that good. On the software side, I’m no big fan of TouchWiz, but it is much better than the previous incarnation of the user interface skin. Besides, the gesture by Samsung of sending phones to the CyanogenMod team is heartening, and good news for being able to get rid of TouchWiz on the handset in the future. If you’re in the market for a new phone, this is one I’d happily recommend.

Sean: Even with my hatred for TouchWiz (or any manufacturer skins for that matter), I will go as far as to say this is the best Android phone I’ve used to date. With my upgrade coming up in July this is currently at the top of my list for consideration as my next phone. Add a custom ROM and Launcher Pro to the equation and I think you really have one of the best, if not the best, phones there is to have.

Albert: This is the best smartphone out there at the moment. Nothing else comes close, for now, and nothing will for the foreseeable future (in South Africa, at least). Solid hardware, great looks, and the assurance of updates for the next few years (even if it is via unofficial channels), make this one to seriously consider. And the launch price of about R6500 is just right. If the SII is any indication of what lies in store, I’m very excited for the future.

Build Quality: 10/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 10/10
Aesthetics: 8/10
Display: 9/10

Score: 9/10

Release Date: 1st week of July, 2011