Hardware
Everything you do with the Galaxy S III starts and ends with its 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen, so it’s fitting that Samsung has sought to minimize the amount of material surrounding it. As big as the display is, it doesn’t make the phone feel terribly unwieldy. You’ll still find yourself adjusting your grip to reach the top corners, but there’s almost no degradation in usability relative to a 4.3-inch device like the Galaxy S II.
As is now almost standard across flagship handsets, one piece of glass covers the entire front, punctuated by the home button at the bottom and the earpiece at the top. A silvery band wraps around the Galaxy S III’s sides, and its curvature is extended by the rear cover, which is white on my review unit or a faux-brushed aluminum blue on the alternate version. I’ve never been a fan of plastic being made to look like metal — it feels disingenuous both on the part of the company selling the product and, subsequently, the person owning it — and I find it makes the Galaxy S III look cheap. It’s okay for Samsung to use plastic to build this phone, but less so to feign that it’s made of higher-grade materials. The white version suffers from this issue in a more diminished way than the darker variant — its silver sides have been subjected to a similar treatment as the Pebble Blue GS III.
Aside from being somewhat aesthetically challenged, the Galaxy S III feels like a very well built device. It's thin, light, and shaped just right to make handling it a joy. While I still prefer the sharper looks of the HTC One X, the Galaxy S III feels gentler and easier in the hand. Perhaps we can finally accuse a mobile phone manufacturer of subjugating form to the needs of function.
IN SPITE OF ITS SIZE, THE GALAXY S III HAS BETTER ERGONOMICS THAN MANY SMALLER PHONES
Although the back cover is made of a glossy and seemingly flimsy plastic, Samsung’s previous Android handsets with similar plastic shells have tended to be very durable. The Galaxy S and Nexus S would pick up scratches easily, but you could drop them almost on a daily basis without fear of something cracking or buckling. Samsung also deserves credit for flattening out the rear of this phone — there are no more humps at the bottom as with the previous Galaxy S iterations, plus there’s no protrusion around the camera as you’ll find on the HTC One X.
Physical measurements for the Galaxy S III are almost identical to HTC’s One X, its most direct competitor, and in practice you really cannot tell a difference between the two. When you factor in that Samsung’s phone fits a significantly larger battery (2100mAh versus the One X’s 1800mAh) and actually lets you swap it out thanks to the removable cover, you have to hand the functional design advantage to the Galaxy S III. Its microSD card slot also makes it more versatile in terms of storage, however you can’t hot-swap Micro SIM cards on the Galaxy S III the way you can on the One X. Still, my general impression of Samsung’s new flagship is that the closer your scrutinize this phone, the more impressive it becomes.
The ergonomic advantages of the Galaxy S III also extend to the few buttons it has. I’ve grown to prefer Samsung’s choice of mounting the power button on the side, which is particularly handy with taller devices such as this. It’s also good to have a physical home button at the center, giving you a tactile reference point, much in the same way as the little nubs on the F and J keys on desktop keyboards serve to orient your fingers. It’s the little things that count. And speaking of little things, I love that Samsung has borrowed the disguised status LED light from the Galaxy Nexus, placing it in the top left corner of the Galaxy S III.Serving as the primary means for both input and output makes the display the most critical aspect of a mobile device’s hardware. Everything else can be perfect, but if you can’t stand looking at the screen, you will not enjoy using your phone. Samsung’s long been a leader in this area with its Super AMOLED displays, particularly the latest generation of Super AMOLED Plus panels. Regrettably, the Galaxy S III is a step behind the cutting edge of Samsung’s research — most likely because a S-AMOLED Plus display of this size and resolution is not yet feasible — leaving it with a 4.8-inch 1280 x 720 Pentile AMOLED display.
IS IT PENTILE? YES. IS THAT A PROBLEM? NO.
As keen as I am to consign the RGBG Pentile subpixel arrangement to the annals of history, the fact is that Samsung’s use of it in the Galaxy S III is not something that negatively impacts the user experience. If you try hard, you will be able to spot evidence of the Pentile matrix affecting the smoothness of fine edges, but that’s only of academic importance. This 4.8-inch display can be held up proudly alongside most other AMOLED panels. Sadly, while that may have been a great compliment a year or two ago, the quality and viewing angles of AMOLED have recently been bypassed by refinements in LCD technology. HTC’s One X is the standout demonstration of that — offering unrivalled clarity, color balance, and viewing angles. In all of those respects, the Galaxy S III is one or two tiers below the One X: its display has the usual blue tinge characteristic of AMOLED displays, which gets worse as you begin to look at it off-center.
Relying on the GS III’s automatic brightness is also problematic, as the phone tends to lean toward under-illuminating itself, making it usually a little too dark for comfortable use. Exactly as with the Galaxy S II, the auto-brightness jumps around in discrete stages, making for abrupt changes in brightness instead of a more gradual transition.
Touch responsiveness from the Galaxy S III’s screen and the two capacitive buttons underneath it (framing the physical home key) is perfectly reliable and gives no cause for complaint. On the whole, I’d say this is a display that will serve the vast majority of people extremely well, provided they’re never unfortunate enough to see it side by side with a One X.
The Galaxy S II set a high bar for smartphone camera performance, but the Galaxy S III has beaten it. Image quality on this phone is simply excellent. Full-resolution pictures look sharp and detailed, allowing you to crop in on areas of interest, unlike the HTC One X, which can furnish you with some neat results, but never at the full 8-megapixel resolution. The fact the Galaxy S III can achieve that feat means it has a higher usable resolution than the One X — and pretty much any other smartphone on the market.
Laudable though the camera may be, it is not without its shortcomings. The primary one you’ll notice from the gallery of sample images is a limited dynamic range. The Galaxy S III exposes images in accordance with what it thinks you’re trying to shoot — it usually guesses correctly, though I’d have preferred the tap-to-focus function to also force the camera to expose specifically for the spot I’m focusing on — which can result in overly dark or bright areas in images with a wide range of brightness. You’ll see a lot of pure-white skies in the picture set shot on a sunny day in London, which the aforementioned lack of tap-to-expose functionality makes it difficult to correct.
In recognition of this relatively common weakness to its sensor, Samsung has also added an HDR mode to the Galaxy S III, taking multiple shots at different exposures and combining them into a composite image. That option works well, salvaging detail from areas that would otherwise be over- or under-exposed, however the resulting images can never look as natural as ones taken in the regular fashion.
Samsung has included a face detection feature in its gallery app, however its performance is hilariously inconsistent. In two practically identical self-portraits, it recognized my face correctly once and ignored it the second time. Was that too much to handle? In another photo, the phone identified a person’s face accurately, but also put a potential face tag on an area of fencing. A very small, but appreciated, addition from Samsung is a direct link to delete an image while looking at one in portrait mode — for some reason that shortcut has been missing from the stock Android 4.0 interface and its absence has annoyed me. Until now.
The 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera supports the rear-facing shooter admirably, producing better than average image quality for its class. That doesn’t mean the pictures you get from it will be good, just passable — but more so than what you usually get from these afterthought cameras
Software
Android 4.0 may underpin every interaction you have with the Galaxy S III, but Samsung has diligently skinned almost everything about the operating system. The only break from the norm is that I don’t actually mind that fact. TouchWiz, particularly in this latest iteration, is the only Android OEM skin that I feel I can live with over the long term. As excellent a device as the HTC One X is, Sense 4 pretty much forces you to install Apex Launcher in order to restore some of Android’s sanity and visual consistency. This Nature UX-branded version of TouchWiz doesn’t invite such feelings of dread. I wouldn’t describe it as pretty nor particularly efficient — the space saved by moving the soft Android keys into the bottom bezel has been taken up by vast spaces between icons on the home screen — but plenty of its changes are actually for the better.SAMSUNG HAS CLUNG ON TO THE ANDROID MENU BUTTON, WHICH TURNS OUT TO BE A GOOD THING
The primary advantage here is a somewhat counterintuitive one. Samsung has broken with Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich not only in replacing the soft Android keys with its tried and trusted combination of capacitive and physical buttons, but also in its choice of functions. Instead of a dedicated multitasking key, the Galaxy S III retains a context-dependent menu button. Multitasking has been relegated to a long press of the home button. In regular use, I found this to be the most sensible way to arrange those keys, better than even Google’s own solution. Moving the multitasking thumbnails from left to right is also helpful to right-handed users, who can now reach them more easily.
Other improvements over stock Android 4.0 include a set of quick toggles in the slide-down notifications tray plus the aforementioned trash icon shortcut in the gallery app and quick access to granular volume control. The app launcher is refreshingly sparse, carrying no aesthetic baggage and giving you total control: you can hide unwanted apps, rearrange the grid to your liking, or switch to a list view. It does help that entering and exiting that menu is done with scintillating fluidity thanks to the excellent processor inside the Galaxy S III. That power is also harnessed on the lock screen, where the default unlocking animation is a water ripple — pretty much the only evidence I could find of Samsung’s supposed Nature UX, that really is a soulless branding exercise.
Some old TouchWiz favorites are still here, such as swiping a contact’s name one way to call and another way to message. You can do that on the contacts list or from within the messaging app. It’s not entirely consistent with Google’s effort in Android 4.0 to make lateral swipes the central method for dismissing items — as witnessed in the multitasking overview and notifications tray, both present on the Galaxy S III — but I find those shortcuts useful to have anyway. Getting to grips with them just might not be as quick and intuitive as a thoroughly coherent UI.
On the topic of intuitiveness, I’m sure there’s a way to alter the four quick-launch icons present on the lock screen, but after two full days with the Galaxy S III, I’ve still not managed to dig deep enough into the configuration menus to figure out how that’s done. That’s not helped by Samsung customizing the entire settings menu.
Underneath all the Samsung spit-polish, you’ll still find the core strengths of Android’s latest version, including the updated Gmail client, compatibility with Chrome for Android, detailed data and battery usage charts, and simply all-around better performance. The Calendar app has been eschewed in favor of Samsung’s own S Planner, which I consider a move in the wrong direction.
Two other aspects of the user experience are troublesome. Firstly, there are still bugs in the UI that have not been ironed out — when waking the phone, you’re sometimes greeted by a quick glimpse of the last home screen you were on before the lock screen appears, and at other times you have to wait for a weirdly long time for anything to show up. That detracts from the otherwise very quick navigation on offer from the Galaxy S III. The second pain point is that you can’t create folders by dragging icons atop one another — you have to pick up an app from the app launcher, drag it to a dedicated "Create folder" link and only then place that folder on your home screen. Don’t ask me why that is the way it is.
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