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On Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:10:32 +0000 Philip Hudson <phil.hudson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Time to upgrade my HTC Desire. What's a good upgrade path, anyone know? > > -- Okay, so this message ran long. Maybe ignore it if your not interested in the galaxy S3. So, I have an S3, and I would say I am more or less happy with it. Not very precise, I know. Put it this way, it is really pretty good, but I'm not overwhelmed. Following is some of my reasoning. Bear in mind, this is my first smartphone, so I have nothing really to compare it to. That said, general performance seems mostly snappy. Though, the phone is quite slow to wake from sleep, but I'm just griping. In terms of durability: while it seems quite flimsy, it appears to fare quite well in the stress tests that I have seen (CNET, YouTube vids, etc). Nonetheless, I bought an Impact21 shock band for it. It adds some series bulk but provides seemingly impressive impact protection (demos on YouTube). One con for me: I found the colours to be quite repugnant. That is, really quite ugly! I have settled for the "natural" "Screen Mode", as at least the colours aren't as heinously saturated, instead they are quiet washed out (which I find preferable, at a push). The display also does exhibit fairly severe colour banding on gradients. Though, I did some comparisons in various phone shops, and all current smartphone displays i tested appear to exhibit quite apparent colour banding on the same test images (Google image search "gradient"), including the Retina display. But, the S3 was at the worse end of it, in my tests, banding being very apparent. Yet, black and white display very impressively, and colours are nice and bold overall. Illumination consistency across the screen is perfect. The screen itself is very responsive and seems to have slightly bevelled edges, which makes swiping in from the sides very ergonomic (good for calling a dock app). Two obvious plusses are the micro sd slot and the replaceable battery. You could probably scrape a couple days of very light use out of the battery. Though, I am charging mine a couple of times a day, but I am using it allot and I don't tend to let it run it down too far beyond 50%. I actually like Toachwiz (the Ice Cream Sandwich/Jellybean variant), but the lack of the normally ever-present Android soft buttons (including the "recent list") is a bit of a pain. Having to hold down the home button for 2 WHOLE seconds to get the recent apps list gets long quick. Using Dock4Droid to call Virtual Key, which calls the app list, gets this down to around 1 second, which is okay. But, with the latest in doohickies, and with a quad core processor and 1gb ram, near instant "Alt-Tab" functionality doesn't seem like a tall order to me. But, hey, you get more screen real estate out of your massive frontage without the three soft buttons, so... Also, if you do get an s3, make sure to unlink SVoice from the home button, or it takes all of three seconds to drop to the launcher when pressed. Gets very long quick. The "Smart Screen" feature, where it attempts to not sleep the display while you are looking at it, is very hit and miss. I thought this would be a nifty feature, but it depends an awful lot on the lighting conditions. And you end up concentrating more on bulging your eyes and tilting the phone, to try and trigger it when the little icon pops up in the Android status bar, than there being any kind of practical convenience advantage. Incidentally, the same icon pops up just before the screen sleeps or does not sleep, so using the icon as any kind of indicator of whether to bulge your eyes or not is out the window. I have ended up just using the default Android screen-off settings, and setting it at 2 mins. Which is enough that it doesn't ever dim while looking at something and wont burn much battery if I set the phone down for a while without sleeping it first. The single speaker placed on the back of the phone is tinny and tiny, and very underwhelming. And the placement means that sound is muffled when you lay the phone down/hold it with your hands across the back. The camera seems pretty decent. It copes fairly well with glare and the pictures seem "sharp" enough. Nothing special though. Though, the S3's flash does make a great torch! Jellybean is running well. Things like long lists (especially with thumbnails) often aren't exactly buttery smooth when scrolled. But I don't have much experience of Android on other phones, and quite possibly other high end phones perform equally or worse under the same conditions. It takes a long while to charge, though it does have a big battery, and generally battery life is acceptable (for the class of device). The display is a substantial, and the main, power draw. I suppose this isn't surprising. The stock Samsung video player's floating video feature is quite neat. And, frankly, something I was surprised wasn't offered by most video players already. It allows you to have a floating, dragable video window on top of other tasks. Quite honestly, I was expecting this phone to rip a little more that it does (in terms of things like UI responsiveness, for example) considering its spec and that any mobile OS is not doubt heavily optimised for performance. I'm hoping this will improve with android iterations. Perhaps all the CPU's cores aren't yet being fully exploited by allot of processes. And, no doubt it's performance measures up favourably to the other phones of it's class. At least, it seems to rate well in most reviews, and if it's sales figures are anything to go by... I would say, go for the s3 if you want a slim and relatively powerful phone, with a big screen, fair battery life, and aren't to concerned about the on board speaker's capabilities, or lack of Android soft buttons, and don't have to have the absolute most faithful display on the market (or anything near it!). Oh, and you don't need your phone to be a replacement for an even half-way decent modern dedicated camera. Overall, the big screen is great for reading, emails, browsing, etc. And you will probably find most of what you are looking for in a new phone in the S3, and be pretty well pleased with it to boot. Hope you get something from this. Cheers. Mike. -- Egon Spengler <migel_wimtore@xxxxxxx> -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq