Tuesday, 19 June 2012

Nokia 808 Pureview will come to the States - Techradar.com

Nokia 808 Pureview will come to the States - Techradar.com

The Nokia 808 Pureview will make it to the US after all, as the Finnish manufacturer reveals its American intentions for the handset.

Nokia had originally said it had no plans to launch the 808 Pureview stateside, but last week we reported that the company was trying to "figure out a way" to bring the Pureview to North America.

And a way has been worked out, as the Finnish firm reports that due to consumer interest, it will be taking the handset across the Atlantic.

The 808 Pureview will be available SIM-free through Amazon for $699, and will work with SIM cards from T-Mobile and AT&T – although oddly it states the handset will only support 2G speeds on the T-Mobile network.

Super camera phone

The 808 Pureview was unveiled at MWC 2012 and shocked us when it turned out to be packing a ridiculous 41MP camera.

Nokia has overlooked the Windows Phone platform for the Pureview, opting to run Symbian Belle on the handset instead, which may well put some people off as Nokia is set to ditch this software in the near future.

There's no word on exactly when the Nokia 808 Pureview will be released in the US, but pre-orders for the handset will start on Amazon this week.

From Nokia Conversations via Nokia Blog



Samsung Galaxy S III Review: This Is The Phone You’ve Been Waiting For - TechCrunch

Short Version

The Samsung Galaxy S III is the Android phone of the moment and in many ways it lives up to the hype. Plenty of folks are excited to see this thing hit store shelves. Our take? They won’t be disappointed.

Stellar software features paired with a beautiful display and specs that can compete with anything else on the market makes the Galaxy S III nothing short of a total delight. Physically it’s not much of a looker – the plastic case feels a bit chintzy – but generally you’re looking at the best of the best.

Features:

  • 4.8-inch 720×1280 Super AMOLED display
  • Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich
  • Samsung’s TouchWiz overlay
  • S-Beam/NFC
  • 2GB of RAM
  • 1.5GHz dual-core processor
  • 8MP rear camera (1080p video capture)
  • 1.9MP front camera
  • 4G LTE at available carriers
  • MSRP: 16GB is $199 on-contract, 32GB is $249 on-contract

Pros:

  • Tons of cool software like S-Beam and Buddy Photo Share
  • Beautiful, large display
  • Solid battery life

Cons:

  • The plastic feels cheap and grabs prints
  • TouchWiz is heavy and ugly

Long Version

Hardware/Design:

As I briefly mentioned, the Galaxy S III is made almost entirely of plastic, save for the Gorilla glass coating its face. The design is meant to be inspired by nature, which seems silly considering all the plastic. There isn’t a straight line in sight, with rounded corners and tapered edges.

The plastic along the back has a brushed look to it, but it feels slick and grabs up prints. The blue version is worse than the white, though, with the white version simply clinging to dirt, dust and other unsightly particles while the blue just loves the smudge.

The phone is incredibly thin (.34-inches), considering the size of the display, and with a weight of 4.3 ounces it feels a little too light. You know — the cheap kind of light. Again, we come back to the plastic.

Now, I understand that building this phone out of metal or some other (more premium) materials would have made ease-of-use a bit more difficult. There are multiple radios in this guy, along with an NFC chip, and almost everything runs smoothly. With a metal frame, the same smooth ease-of-use would be far more difficult to achieve.

An elongated home button sits just below the display, with a volume rocker on the left edge, lock button on the right, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top left corner. The camera is square on the back of the phone with a speaker grill on the right and LED flash on the left. MicroUSB access is on the bottom.

Software:

The Samsung Galaxy S III is packed with software features. To start, the phone runs Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI slapped on top. I’m not a huge fan of TouchWiz in terms of aesthetic (I much prefer pure Android ICS), but at least the custom overlay comes with a few helpful tidbits like resizeable widgets and navigational shortcuts in contacts.

But that’s nothing compared to the things Samsung has done with NFC and WiDi (WiFi Direct).

For one, Samsung has introduced a new way to make some money, called TecTiles. TecTiles are essentially stamp-sized NFC stickers, and work with any of Samsung’s NFC-equipped phones, allowing users to program specific tiles to do various actions when tapped. So a TecTile on my night stand may set an alarm and lower the ringer volume (in preparation for sleepy time), while a TecTile on my front door may connect me to my home WiFi network. The service works well, and the only real complaint I have about TecTiles is the fact that they cost $14.99 per a pack of five.

Another NFC-friendly feature is Samsung’s S Beam. It works similarly to Android Beam but functions over a greater distance, letting users share content in seconds without a WiFi or cell signal. This includes the sharing of photos, videos, music, web pages, etc.

In my experience S Beam worked well and transferred content rather quickly between devices. The main concern is just how much use S Beam will get. Sure, the Galaxy S III will be a popular phone, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in a given group of friends is going to go buy one.

The GSIII also comes loaded with Samsung’s new GroupCast feature, which syncs Galaxy S III devices so you can share a PDF, PowerPoint, or photo gallery presentation. The feature seems like it would be helpful for workers in the field or out of the office, especially considering that Samsung is offering an enterprise-friendly version of the device. It even lets users make marks on the presentation, though I wouldn’t consider this a collaboration tool since the marks disappear relatively quickly and can’t be saved.

The phone features Samsung’s cloud-syncing/sharing service AllShare Play, letting users share content on any AllShare-connected devices like Galaxy tablets, DLNA-capable TVs, set-top boxes and Blu-Ray players, as well as Samsung’s Smart TVs and Windows PCs running the AllShare Play app. This lets users pull files that are stored on home devices and throw a movie from their Galaxy S III to the TV.

Along with these major features, the Galaxy S III also has some small touches that make it a much easier device to use. Things like motion controls (tilting the phone to zoom in on images, or panning the phone to move icons from one home screen to the next) seem a bit arbitrary, as it’s just as fast and seamless to tap to zoom or slide my finger across the screen to rearrange icons. However, features like the ability to lift the phone to your face while in a text message conversation to initiate a call makes sense. The phone also dims brightness when it’s set down, saving you battery, and gives a little extra alert when you’ve been away from your phone if you’ve missed a call or message.

The biggest disappointment in software (and let it be known, I’m seriously impressed with the feature set offered here) is S Voice. It’s essentially a Siri competitor, allowing you to make commands with your voice. To start, it’s not as smart as Siri when it comes to hearing natural language (“show me the nearest burger joint” confused the heck out of it). Second, it has less functionality than Siri. It’s a fine feature yet it just seems like a copy that isn’t done quite as well. (And trust me, that’s not to say that Siri works well by any means).

Pop Up Player, which lets you continue playing a video in a smaller window above some other task, is also a smart feature as multi-tasking becomes ever-important to us. Flipboard is pre-loaded on the device, as are plenty of carrier apps.

Camera:

The camera on the Galaxy S III is lightning fast, though I can’t say I’m totally blown away by picture quality. Compared to photos taken with my iPhone 4S, everything shot with the Galaxy S III seems washed out and drab. Luckily, there are plenty of different scene modes, focus settings, exposure, ISO, white balance, and various effects that should help you find your way to the image you want.

But perhaps to make up for the less-than-impressive picture quality, the Samsung Galaxy S III camera has a few software surprises that are sure to delight. There is burst shot, which takes up to 20 photos at a rate of 3 pics per second and best shot, which snaps eight images and automatically offers you the best one based on criteria like blinking, smiling, lighting, etc. The Galaxy S III will also let you take still images as you record 1080p video, and has an HDR mode.

More importantly, the GSIII camera has a shooting mode called Buddy Photo Share. It recognizes faces in images and lets you tag them with the contact’s name. From there, the phone will always recognize the difference between John Biggs and Matt Burns and let me share photos with them straight from their name-tag.

Share Shot is another important camera feature, as it allows you to share photos as you take them with up to five GSIII devices through WiFi Direct. So let’s say you’re at a birthday party with your friends and want to make sure everyone can enjoy the pictures later. Simply open up Share Shot and connect with the devices you want to share with. From there, every photo you take will appear in their galleries too until you choose a different shooting mode.

All in all the GSIII camera has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, but if it’s simply a beautiful image you’re looking for, you may need to keep looking.

Comparison shot between the Samsung Galaxy S III (left) and the iPhone 4S (right):

Display:

You really can’t go wrong with this display. Samsung’s HD Super AMOLED screens are the best out there, and at 4.8 inches there’s plenty of super crisp content to enjoy. Blacks are deep, colors are bright, and there’s really no differentiation between pixels. In fact, the 4.8-inch display has 306 pixels per inch, making it one of the largest pixel-dense displays I’ve ever seen.

Past that, there’s the size of the display to consider. Nudging up against the 5-inch mark, the Galaxy S III display is much bigger than I’m comfortable with. But the key to slapping giant screen on a phone and keeping it comfortable is device and bezel thickness. The phone is already super thin, allowing even smaller hands to grip the device solidly.

But the bezels of the Galaxy S III is what really saves the day. They take up less than half a centimeter on each side, allowing a huge screen to fit on a relatively comfortable phone. The rounded corners and curved edges also help with grip and performing one-handed actions.

Performance:

HTC has been kicking ass lately when it comes to benchmark testing, but there’s a new sheriff in town. The Samsung Galaxy S III beats out every Android phone I’ve ever tested in all three tests we run. In Quadrant, which tests everything from CPU to memory to graphics, the Galaxy S III scored an impressive 4911. The HTC One S comes in second with 4371, while most other phones (including the Galaxy Note) stay well below the 3000 mark.

Where browsing is concerned, the Galaxy S III pulled in a score of 103,780 compared to the One S’s 100,662. Compared to most phones, however, the GSIII wins by a long shot as we usually see scores around the 60,000 mark.

And as a testament to both the phone and the power of AT&T’s 4G LTE network, I can safely say that this phone is fast. We saw an average of 9.6Mbps down and 8.39Mbps up, which is excellent. I have yet to see the Galaxy S III have any issues in terms of performance, which says a lot considering that this phone is going above and beyond in terms of both hardware and software. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that second GB of RAM.

Battery:

Here’s the deal with battery life. The Samsung Galaxy S III has a 2100mAh battery, which is fairly large compared to other phones on the market. Be that as it may, all the extra features that make the Galaxy S III amazing (like the NFC and WiFi Direct stuff) end up tugging pretty vigorously at the battery. Pair that with a 4G LTE radio and there’s bound to be some trouble.

That said, the Galaxy S III lasted a full five hours and fifteen minutes in our battery test. That’s pretty damn good, considering that the screen is never off during a constant Google Image search. In real-world scenarios, it should at least make it through dinner time, and depending on your usage, it might even hang with you through those late night parties.

To give you a little context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes. The HTC One S lasted just under five hours.

Another plus is that the battery is removable, so if you’re a serious power-user you can always purchase another battery and swap them out throughout the day.

Head-To-Head With The One X And iPhone 4S:

Conclusion

In the end, the Samsung Galaxy S III is the phone you’ve been waiting for. It’s generally well-built, it has an incredible display, solid battery life, plenty of interesting features and it just works well. That’s not something I find myself saying very often of Android phones.

When people ask me what phone they should buy, or if they should wait for this or that (and trust me, I get asked this a lot), I always say, “No, never wait. Just buy the best phone available today, and don’t worry about spending a little more than you’d want to because you’ll use it every day for about two years.”

But over the past few months, when phandroids come at me asking for phone recommendations, I’ve been telling them to wait. And you know what, I’m glad I did. Just like the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy S that came before it, this is the Android phone to beat.

It’s the phone you’ve been waiting for.




REVIEWED: Samsung's New Flagship Android Phone, The Galaxy S III - The Business Insider

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

Overall, I think Samsung makes the best Android phones. 

That's part of the reason why it sells more than anyone else. 

It's also why when Samsung launches its new flagship "Galaxy" phone every year, it's a very big deal. 

This year, we have the Galaxy S III, the third-generation of Samsung's popular Android line. Like its predecessors, the Galaxy S III sets the standard for what an Android phone can and should do. Everyone else seems to be playing catch up.

The Galaxy S III launches this month on all four carriers. I've been testing one for a few days now, and I really, really like it. Keep reading for the full review.

You can also click here for photos, specs, and more on the Galaxy S III >

Design

After years of releasing one blocky Android clone after another, it's refreshing to see Samsung pay more attention to design this time around. 

The Galaxy S III's design is dominated by its 4.8-inch display. That may sound too big compared to the iPhone's 3.5-inch screen, but Samsung was able to keep the phone's bezel super thin so its body is still a reasonable, pocketable size.

It feels like the screen is floating in your hand when you're holding the Galaxy S III. And like all Samsung displays, the photos, text, video, and graphics look super crisp and bright. It's tough going back to a phone with a tiny screen after using the Galaxy S III. It's that good.

Other than that, the overall design is sleek and smooth. You won't find a straight edge on the Galaxy S III, which makes it a delight to hold.

And best of all, Samsung finally broke with tradition and released the Galaxy S III with the same design on all carriers. (In past Galaxy phone releases, each carrier sold a variation of the base model with different screen sizes and other hardware.) 

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

Now for the downside: I'm disappointed that Samsung still covers its high-end phones in plastic. You can tell the phone's designers tried to mask the cheap materials by giving the phone a glossy finish, but as soon as you grip the Galaxy S III you know it's not built with the same quality and care as the iPhone or even the BlackBerry Bold.

Using It

The Galaxy S III is Samsung's first smartphone to launch with the latest version of Android, "Ice Cream Sandwich," out of the box. That makes it the only Samsung phone you can buy right now with the best features Google's mobile operating has to offer. 

But Samsung made some additions of its own to Android. The Galaxy S III has a bunch of special Samsung-only services, but I'm going to go over the most important ones.

First up is S-Voice, a voice-controlled assistant that is a blatant ripoff of Apple's Siri on the iPhone 4S. Except it's worse than Siri. And that's saying a lot, since I already think Siri is pretty bad.

With a double tap of the Galaxy S III's home button, the S-Voice app launches. The interface is nearly identical to Siri's. You can ask it for the weather, to send a text, find nearby restaurants, launch apps, and a bunch of other tasks. These actions appear in little speech bubbles, and you can handle most actions without opening another app. (For some reason, S-Voice doesn't let you compose emails.) More detailed questions will either pull up a Wolfram Alpha search or direct you to a Google.

Like Siri, S-Voice only works if you're connected to the web. But I still ran into a few problems where S-Voice couldn't contact Samsung's servers to complete my requests. If Samsung's servers are down, you're out of luck, no matter how strong your connection is.

S-Voice isn't as smart as Siri either. Whereas Siri can usually understand context and make a good guess at the answer you're looking for, S-Voice needs you to be very clear and tell it exactly what you want. I did several side-by-side tests asking Siri and S-Voice to perform the same tasks or answer the same questions. Overall, Siri understood me better and got stuff done more quickly than S-Voice. But neither app is a perfect solution. At the end of the day, you're still better off being your own assistant.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

Next, Samsung added a bunch of nifty content-sharing options to the Galaxy S III. The phone has a near field communications (NFC) chip that lets it talk to other nearby phones. Samsung uses this technology to power something called S Share. S Share lets you tap your phone against another so you can swap videos, photos, music files, and just about anything else over Wi-Fi. Transfers are incredibly fast, and I was able to swap a minute-long video to another Galaxy S III in just a few seconds.

There are other sharing options too. For example, you can pair your Galaxy S III with several others and opt to share photos taken with your camera. If a friend snaps a photo on his Galaxy S III, it'll beam to everyone else's he paired with over Wi-Fi. The drawback is that this process can take awhile depending on the photo size and the number of people sharing at once. It also only works on the Galaxy S III, but Samsung says the feature will appear in future smartphones and tablets.

Speaking of the camera, it's packed with a ton of cool features too. Unlike the iPhone, you won't have to pay for a separate app to take better photos. The built-in camera app has everything you need. One of my favorite features is called Burst Shot, which lets you hold down the shutter button and take several photos in rapid succession. The phone then automatically selects the best photo of the bunch. (You can also manually select your favorite photo if you want.) 

Photo quality is pretty good too:

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

Performance

The Galaxy S III will be available on all four major carriers (plus U.S. Cellular), but each network has its own quirks. I tested the AT&T model, which runs on the carrier's 4G LTE network, the fastest wireless standard available. The Verizon model also has LTE. Sprint's model will have LTE, but the carrier's network isn't live yet. Finally, T-Mobile's 4G network is plenty fast, and even rivals LTE speeds in certain cities.

Bottom line: Although speeds can vary wildly, just know that the Galaxy S III will give you fastest connection possible in your area and on your carrier. You'll be happy.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider

Battery life, at least on the AT&T model, was atrocious. I barely made it through a day of normal use. One day, I didn't have much time to look at my Galaxy S III, so it was in standby almost the entire time I was at work. When I checked it before going home, I was already at 50% battery life. I was down to 30% by 9 p.m. The back of the phone also gets super warm, even if you're just checking your email or browsing the web. 

It appears that giant, power-hungry screen and super fast LTE come at a price. Not good.

But overall, the Galaxy S III has the hardware to back up its impressive software features. It's powered by a dual-core processor, which is a bit slower than the special quad-core processor the international version of the phone has. But it does the job. The GSIII never choked on me, even when I was streaming HD video or playing games.

Should You Buy It?

I hate saying this every time I test a new Android phone, but the Galaxy S III really is the best one you can buy today. (The HTC One X is still a very close second. It's going to be a tough decision if you're an AT&T customer.)

Prices vary a bit from carrier to carrier, but just about everyone is selling the Galaxy S III at a $200 starting price with a two-year contract. It goes on sale starting this week, but the launch date varies on each carrier. You'll have to check with your provider for more details.



Nokia PureView 808 Coming to U.S. for $699, Amazon Preorder Begin this Week - mobilenapps.com
Nokia PureView 808 Coming to U.S. for $699, Amazon Preorder Begin This Week(Photo: Nokia | Mobile & Apps)

Introduced at Mobile World Congress, Nokia PureView 808 is the best camera phone that money can buy. It has received a lot of positive review for its 41-megapixel rear snapper. The smartphone is currently available in European and Asian market. However, the U.S. release of this phone was being doubted. And though Nokia might never release this smartphone through a cellular network carrier in U.S., the company has confirmed that it will sell the unlocked version of PureView 808 through Amazon U.S.

The Finnish mobile major announced on its Conversations blog on Tuesday that it will offer the smartphone in the U.S. through Amazon. The retailer will be selling the unlocked version of the smartphone for $699 with preorders scheduled to begin later this week. The PureView 808 supports GSM networks only. So, it will not work on Verizon Wireless or other CDMA networks. Nokia has confirmed that the smartphone will be functional over AT&T and T-Mobile network.

Like Us on Facebook :

Packing 41-megapixel Carl Zeiss optic sensor, PureView 808 is better in photography than most of digital cameras available in the market. The maximum effective resolution in PureView 808 is 38 megapixels. Utilizing Creative Shooting mode, it can capture photos at a resolution of 7728 X 5354 pixels in 16:9 format or 7152 X 5368 pixels in 4:3 formats. However, Nokia recommends 5-megapixel settings for capturing a perfect noiseless image.

At 5-megapixel capture resolution, PureView 808 utilizes the concept of oversampling to pack up to 7 pixels in one single pixel to capture a completely noiseless photo. By zooming-in the image up to 3 times, there is no loss in quality of image without any artificial pixels produced. The smartphone also records 1080p videos at 30fps with 4X loseless zoom. Crisp clear audio recording takes place even at a high level of 140 db.

The rest of the features include 4-inch AMOLED display with 360 X 640 pixels resolution, Gorilla Glass protection, 1.3GHz ARM processor, 512MB RAM and 16GB internal storage with microSD card support up to 32GB. The PureView 808 runs Nokia Belle OS. The regular connectivity features like Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth, microUSB and GPS are all there.

User can also sign-up for e-mail notification regarding the availability of smartphone in the U.S.



Samsung Galaxy S III: Not So Human After All [REVIEW] - Mashable

samsung-galaxy-s-iii-640

There are Android phones, there are Android superphones, and then there’s the Samsung Galaxy S III. Samsung’s Galaxy phones are no longer just hot new mobile devices — they’ve become a force of nature. Just like the iPhone, users can expect a new Samsung Galaxy every year, and then must decide whether or not to upgrade.

The first Galaxy S arrived in 2010. Prior to it, the “hero” Android device was the Motorola Droid, but the Galaxy set a new standard with its bright screen, slim form and wide availability. The Samsung Galaxy S II came the following year, taking the line a step further with a better processor, improved camera and extremely thin design. Thanks to the S II, Samsung became the top Android phone maker in the world.

With the S III, powered by the latest Android software, version 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” Samsung hopes to keep its winning streak going. It’s doing a lot more than just hoping, however, stuffing a goodie bag of new “human” features (a catchphrase of Samsung’s) into the phone that are so far only available on this device. Samsung appears to have awakened to how influential its Galaxy phones are: The Galaxy S III won’t just be the flagship of its mobile division — it’ll be the company’s top product, period.

There are a number of things the Galaxy S III does that no other phone can do — yet. For starters, the front-facing camera will track your eyes and keep the screen from timing out if you’re still looking at it. You can also wake up the phone using just your voice. There’s also a “groupcasting” feature for sharing pics and presentations with other phones — as long as those phones are also Samsung Galaxy S IIIs.

Those are just a few of the features exclusive to this phone, and it’s mainly because of the hardware, which packs many cutting-edge features into a surprisingly lightweight design. Although the 4.8-inch screen on the Galaxy S III is much bigger than the iPhone 4S’s 3.5-incher, the S III is both slimmer and lighter. That’s thanks in part to the plastic back, which may feel slightly cheaper than glass or metal but helps keep the weight way down.

First Impressions

Turning on the Galaxy S III for the first time, I saw no fewer than than five branding screens — three for Samsung, one for the Galaxy S III itself and one for AT&T. Mercifully, bootup is fairly fast, about 30 seconds (by comparison, my iPhone 4S takes about 36 seconds to get going). The phone prompts you to restore your Google/Android account if you have one, quickly downloading your apps and setting up Gmail.

Even though the phone has a big screen, it feels friendly to the hand. It’s just short of being too big, which is what I’d consider the Samsung Galaxy Note. Samsung likes to point out that the phone is almost nothing but curves — there’s barely a straight edge anywhere. While that sounds weird, it’s actually very comfortable to hold and I always felt I had a solid grip on it.

The Samsung Galaxy S III’s HD Super AMOLED screen has 1,280 x 720 pixels and uses a tech called PenTile, which actually has fewer sub-pixels than regular LCDs. While some have criticized the display for that reason, most users won’t be able to tell the difference. However, if you put it side by side with, say, one of Apple’s retina displays, you’ll likely find the GSIII slightly fuzzier. But the brightness is impressive, and will likely win over more customers than any PenTile deficiencies will drive away.

As an object, though, this phone is closer to the iPhone than any other Android phone I’ve seen, mainly because it has a physical home button beneath the screen. Most Android phones I’ve used typically have have a row of touch buttons along the bottom, partly as a way to differentiate from iPhones. The appearance of a home button is kind of a bold move considering the patent skirmishes between Apple and Samsung (time will tell if it means anything in that conflict.)

Camera Capabilities

After setup, I went straight for the camera. Today, a phone’s camera matters more than almost any other feature or app, for obvious reasons. I absolutely love the camera in HTC’s One phones, since it includes a burst mode and instant saving to the cloud. I was excited to see how the Galaxy S III — which has similar features — would compare.

I wasn’t disappointed. The Galaxy S III’s camera has a very capable burst mode, capturing three pics per second (for up to 20 pics), which was just enough to get a couple of great shots of my two-year-old son throwing a Frisbee in a perfect action stance. You can also enable a “best shot” mode, which automatically picks the best of the burst, deleting the rest, but its judgment is often not great (thankfully, you can override its choice).

One of the great features of the Galaxy S III is auto-tagging of photos. After you snap a pic of someone, a yellow box appears around any faces, prompting you to tag away. Then the next time you shoot any of those people, the face-recognition software goes to work, suggesting tags for faces it recognizes.

The feature is, quite frankly, an awesome idea, but it’s rendered moot because it doesn’t work in the one place you really want it to: Facebook. The tags don’t translate to the network, although Samsung says it’s working on the issue and a software update should fix this eventually. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for convenience of getting the people you tag suggested when you select to share via email.

Saving photos to the cloud is pretty simple these days and the S III points you toward three very capable options: Dropbox, which recently made automatic uploads even easier on phones, Google+, which is just as easy and unlimited (although picture resolution has a ceiling of five megapixels, with anything higher down-rezzed), and Samsung’s own AllShare service, which uses the SugarSync app for storage.

Dropbox would be my preferred path, but it’s annoying that you can’t change the folder your pics are uploaded to or how your photos are listed. I have hundreds of photos in my Camera Uploads folder and once a pic is uploaded it becomes a needle-in-a-haystack situation to find it. Google+ is a much more elegant solution, but sharing is limited to that network. And SugarSync’s ability to organize photos appears to be the digital equivalent of tossing a bunch of pics in a shoebox and shaking hard.

Finally, I would prefer a dedicated shutter button — even a virtual one — to instantly switch to the camera even when the phone’s locked. As it is, you’ll need to get by your lock screen to launch the camera before you can start snapping — not good when you need to be nimble.

Galactic Features

“Unique” is an often overused and misused word, but it’s no exaggeration to say the Samsung Galaxy S III has some features that qualify for the label. One that I was very excited to try out is its voice wake-up function, where you can bring the phone out of the lock screen just by speaking to it.

In reality, it’s not as awesome as Samsung makes it out to be. Once enabled, the feature lets you awaken the Samsung by saying “Hi, Galaxy,” or a custom phrase. I thought it might let you wake it up from sleep mode, but it only starts listening once you push the home or power button. And then it only works when you haven’t locked your screen with a PIN code. Lame. It feels like no one really thought through the usefulness of the feature and how it might affect security.

Potentially more useful is Smart Stay, which uses the front-facing camera on the phone to check if your eyes are looking at the screen. If they are, it’ll hold off on timing out the screen.

Again, great idea — in theory. But it never worked for me. After enabling the feature, I tried reading in the web browser, using various apps and even the home screen, but the display would always time out no matter how hard I stared. Removing my glasses helped a little, but not much (and it had the side effect of rendering reading impossible).

At first I thought it was a software bug, but the Smart Stay “eye” icon was right there, indicating the feature was enabled. Hopefully a software update will eventually make the feature useful, but right now it’s not ready for prime time — you’re better off disabling it and just increasing the timeout duration.

There’s also S Voice, Samsung’s Siri clone. Like Siri, you can ask it basic questions like the weather or if sushi places are nearby. After using it for a few minutes, it became clear to me why Samsung chose to downplay the feature. If you veer at all away from the most basic functions, you can expect to hear “Network error. Please try again,” over and over. At least Siri, as limited as she is, is much less cold.

Wireless Wonders

The Samsung Galaxy S III delivers much better on its promises when applying its myriad wireless abilities. With Wi-Fi Direct and near-field communication (NFC) on board — and a 1.4GHz quad-core processor to help push things along — the GSIII can perform tricks most other phones can’t.

The best example is S Beam. With NFC and S Beam enabled on your phone and your friend’s, all you need to do is hold both phones up to each other to transfer files. Well, hold them up and tap the screen. NFC establishes the connection and Wi-Fi handles the rest. Transfer photos, videos, pdfs — whatever you want. One catch: Both phones have to be Samsung Galaxy S IIIs.

That catch actually comes up again and again. The camera actually has an extremely cool function called Share Shot. Enable it, and your Galaxy S III will automatically share all the photos you take with phones on the same Wi-Fi network — creating kind of a group photo pool, great for parties. But of course all those phones need to be GSIIIs.

Less useful is the Group Cast function, which lets you broadcast a slideshow or presentation to other phones on the same Wi-Fi network. It’s sort of like sharing, except you can draw on the photos or slides, and everybody receiving the broadcast will see your scribbles in real time. The execution is clumsy, done through Samsung’s AllShare app, and it amounts to little more than a party trick. But, again, everybody has to have a Galaxy S III.

Finally, there are those fun TecTiles, which let you create little NFC time bombs, just waiting for a phone to hover over them to reveal your secret message or special prompt (full details here). These actually have some great creative potential, and for once, other phones can apply — phones with NFC, anyway.

Connections and Misfires

Let’s talk connectivity. The Verizon, AT&T and Sprint versions of the Galaxy S III all boast high-speed LTE connections, though in the case of Sprint the network hasn’t yet been turned on. For T-Mobile, you get its very respectable HSPA+ 42 network.

In practice, that means the other three carriers will give you a faster connection than the T-Mobile version. Here at the Mashable offices, we got up to 30 megabits per second downstream on our AT&T GSIII, though speed dropped to about 13 Mbps when we weren’t standing by a window. For the T-Mobile version, speeds varied between 4-14 Mbps, though windows didn’t seem to matter as much.

One thing you’ll notice after using the Galaxy S III for a while — this sucker gets warm. Chalk it up to all the radios and that robust processor, but a phone hasn’t surprised me with this level of heat since the original iPhone.

All that hardware working overtime also takes a toll on the battery. In the few short days I was using the GSIII, I was continually plugging it in for extra juice, though I did leave many of the non-essential features — like NFC, Wi-Fi Direct and the voice wake-up — enabled.

Samsung, however, provides a Power Saving mode that actually doesn’t disable any features and instead saves watts by subtly adjusting colors, frame rates and brightness while also limiting the maximum CPU speed. I barely noticed the changes and would recommend leaving it enabled when not using any “higher” functions, such as when playing games.

I have other quibbles with the Galaxy S III: First, the default alert noise (the “whistle”) is probably the most irritating tone I’ve ever heard from a phone (easily changed, but still). The plethora of Samsung-branded bloatware and widgets you get out of the box feel pushy and annoying. And the method of taking a screenshot — sliding your palm across the screen — is terrible.

But I’ve got to give Samsung props for replicating one of my favorite features of iOS — being able to tap the top of the screen to scroll to the very top of a list. On the GSIII, you instead double-tap the top of the phone itself (the accelerometer detects the movement). It only works in Mail, but it’s a start.

The Power of III

In its campaign for the Galaxy S III, Samsung says it’s a phone “designed for humans.” Putting aside the absurd obviousness of that statement for a minute, Samsung wants to believe this powerful phone will be instantly intuitive to users, ready to bring them whatever they desire, with features that just “get” them. In Samsung’s vision, the GSIII is Iron Man’s Jarvis in the palm your hand.

That’s not the Samsung Galaxy S III I met, but instead it was something potentially more interesting. Although the phone’s more novel functions aren’t that polished — at least it has them. Wireless technologies like NFC, Wi-Fi Direct and LTE are the future of mobile, and you get the sense Samsung is just scratching the surface; software updates and apps could dig much deeper. Also, guess which phone doesn’t have any of those techs (hint: it rhymes with “my phone”)?

So instead of Jarvis, we instead get Wall-E: A sometimes clumsy mechanical pal who means well and works hard, but doesn’t always get things right. However, even though he doesn’t have all the answers, he’s got the gear and the moxie to survive in an uncertain future. Unlike Wall-E, though, with the Samsung Galaxy S III in your hand, you won’t be getting left behind.


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)