The Samsung Galaxy S III "Real-user" Review: Part 1 - Initial impressions, Design/build quality, Screen and Benchmarks

One phone to rule them all?

The most anticipated Android handset in history: the Samsung Galaxy S III.

If I can confide in you, it's a little daunting sitting down to write a review for a device with such unprecedented interest surrounding it. A far cry from writing about a niche device like the Galaxy Note, that's for sure...

Anyway, you didn't come here to hear my musings on how difficult this is to write - make the jump to start immersing yourself in what will surely be the most complete and thorough review of the S III on the internet (or perhaps just the least succinct one).

[NOTE] If you've already made the leap and purchased an S III you might like to head to our guide for Rooting the S III so you can start making the most of your shiny new toy.

Before we get into the review proper I need to make a wee note about how the review will proceed, since there will be a distinct divide between people who've read my reviews before and those who haven't. You see I’d got a little way into writing this first piece when I realized that there are some things I wanted to speak to that I’ve already covered in prior reviews like the Galaxy Note review and my Clove Blog review of the Galaxy S II. That content tends to be either a little editorial in nature, or provides what I view as necessary preamble and context setting for the sections it pertains to. If you’ve read my earlier reviews however you will already have been subjected to my views on things like build quality Vs build materials, myths about SD cards, or my ‘I’m no audiophile’ disclaimer, and likely neither need (nor want) to revisit those things. In the S III review those segments will appear immediately under subheadings, and the text will be italicized – feel free to skip over it and get to the meat that follows if you’re a practised AndroidNZ reader.

Initial impressions and Design

Prising off the flexible rear cover reveals a capacious 2100mA battery,
micro SIM slot, and a card slot properly oriented to allow hotswap

If we’re going to talk about my actual first impressions, we need to take a step back to around two weeks ago, when I was lucky enough to get my hands on the vaporware version of the S III (that’s the delayed Pebble Blue one, if you’ve been living under a rock the last week or so). At the time I had this to say:

“Ah, what to say about the much maligned design of the Galaxy S3? For one thing, I don't think it's as bad as what people have made out. Most of the negativity surrounding it seems to me to be the inevitable fallout of unrealistic expectations. It's not going to win any beauty contests, and suffers in comparison to its nearest Android competitor the HTC One X, but neither is it frankly ugly.

Actually seeing it in person really brought home to me that the Pebble Blue colour is fairly subtle. In person it looked more like a very slightly amethyst tinged grey. Certainly nothing like the overblown purple colours you may have seen online, most of which came from the launch event where Samsung's better judgement about lighting colours seems to have lapsed causing accentuation of the tint.

It felt fine in the hand too, nice and slim, but unlike the it's predecessor the S2 it is uniformly slim and with much better ergonomics courtesy of curved edges. The "hyperglazed" polycarbonate didn't inspire the same confidence as the One X's polycarbonate unibody, unfortunately feeling slightly cheap and attracting finger prints aplenty, but it didn't detract too much from the whole. I expect like the Galaxy S2 that while the choice of build materials may be poor, the build quality will probably be just fine.

Not much going on here, the 3.5mm audio socket, and one of the
microphones for recording stereo sound in video

I didn't really have many complaints in terms of the hardware buttons, of which there are precious few. The power button is on the right hand side, commensurate with Samsung's design ethos for a few years now, and in my opinion a much better place than the top of a device this large. The volume rocker is on the "right" side of the device, that side being the correct place for a volume rocker for right-handed users (the One X volume rocker bothers me no end with the accidental button pushes). I do have to say that I couldn't get on very well with the home button, although I can't discount that there may just be a wee learning curve involved in getting used to it. Its narrowness and placement very near the bottom of the device, both ramifications of the near bezel-less design I am sure, made it difficult to hit easily with the thumb and its slight convex bulge seemed to hinder it's tactile feel rather than assist it. 

If I were to precis my first impression, it would be to say something like this: it wasn't so much "wow" as it was a sigh of Oh-that's-actually-pretty-decent relief.”

This time around with the S III of course I have the Marble White one, so if you’ll indulge me I’ll give you my second-first impressions now too.

The Marble White version is proving something of a revelation to me, coming to it as I did a decided non-fan of white devices. I only got it since, well, you know, it's the only kind you can get right now. I certainly never expected to like it more than the Pebble Blue one, but I do, so there it is. Frankly I'm having trouble identifying exactly what to chalk this up to. For one thing the rear casing shows up the copious fingerprints it attracts far less than the Pebble Blue, which looked grimy within minutes of me snatching it from my benefactors hands a couple of weeks ago. It's more than just that minor practical consideration though... I think it may be to do with the fact that it makes more of a statement in the Marble White, gives a bit of much needed lift to the rather pedestrian aesthetics of the S III's design? Whatever the case, I've made my peace with this particular white device.

[UPDATE] I actually had a very brief hands-on with the retail version of the Pebble Blue handset today. I can confirm other reports that the colour has changed rather substantially from the pre-retail unit I had seen. The rear casing is now essentially grey. In my time with it I saw no blue whatsoever, but AndroidNZ editor Nik has picked up a Pebble Blue one and says that in certain lights there is still a faint blue tinge at times. Being the conservative black-handset loving guy that I am, I'd now rate the Pebble Blue version more highly than the Marble White, but there isn't much in it either way for me personally.

The sole hardware key adorning the S III's left hand side - a volume
rocker

There were a few things I'd neglected to comment on in terms of the hardware tour in that earlier piece too, so I'll complete the picture now.

Firstly, Samsung has included a notification LED in one of their non-Nexus Galaxy-branded handsets for the first time. It occupies the upper left corner of the device and is easily visible (much better than the One X notification LED, which peeps out from behind the speaker grill that is drilled into the case and rather easily missed). It's multicoloured, and of course with applications like Lightflow you can exert very granular control over it's behaviour including per-app colour selections, pulse patterns and so forth. Having largely owned Samsung's prior Galaxy phones I confess to having never really cottoned on to notification LEDs before, but my recent time with the One X served to lift their usefulness in my estimation, so the inclusion here is very welcome.

I mentioned earlier that the device is uniformly thick, but that isn't entirely true. The camera lens does protrude the slightest bit. It's not an eye-sore like it is in the One X, but it does mean that the phone rests on the lens when lying flat, which may represent a liability to the longer term health of the lens if it scratches easily.

While we're discussing camera hardware, I should point out that Samsung have again eschewed a dedicated hardware camera button. It's absence has now become a very highly conserved aspect of the Samsung design ethic, and I don't expect this to change anytime soon with their Android handsets. I guess I have become increasingly accustomed to it really, because although I'd certainly rather it were there, it's absence no longer really raises hackles for me. Expectations are key I suppose. It will be interesting to see whether the voice activated capture function in S-Voice is any good, since this potentially helps minimise shaking at the time of capture (at the expense of looking like a tool out in public talking to your phone).

...and finally on the inside we now have a micro SIM slot, and a micro SD card slot oriented correctly so as to allow hot-swapping cards, should you so desire.


Build quality and ergonomics

Reminder: If you’ve read my reviews before scroll down to the next bit of non-italicized text, up until then I’m just going to be repeating my little spiel about the distinction between build materials and build quality for the uninitiated.

Whether it be in professional reviews, or merely the innumerable commentators who feel compelled to tell the world their opinion, the term “build quality” gets bandied about a lot. Unfortunately in many of those instances people are in fact referring to "build materials". The two terms tend to be thrown about like synonyms, but they're not. It is possible to have one without the other.

The oh-so-shiny rear casing, handily the white colour shows up
fingerprints far less than the Pebble Blue. Also, the speaker has
moved in the S III to occupy the top portion of the device

The Galaxy S II and HTC Sensation are two examples that spring to mind to make the point. 


The Galaxy S II build materials are disappointing plastics, but they’re durable. There are no moving parts or creaks, and as you’ll see if you care to look at some drop test videos on YouTube, it holds up to drops and knocks better than an iPhone 4S which is made from much nicer materials. 


In other words its build quality is good. Contrast this with the HTC Sensation, which is made from great materials with metal and high quality soft-touch plastics, but has a more suspect build quality with the 'sleeve' design causing creaks, dust accumulation under the screen, and volume rockers that break (of course not every Sensation is afflicted by these, but it's sporadic failure rate is higher than I've observed from other high-end handsets). 


Now obviously I want a handset with both, and I think for the kind of money we throw at these flagship handsets we really shouldn’t have to be compromising on one or the other, but if it does come down to choosing I'll take build quality, thank you very much.

With the lecture in our rear-view mirrors now, how does the S III fare?

Firstly, the build quality appears excellent. I say "appears" excellent, because the true test of build quality is durability over time, and while it looks good now only time will truly tell. Expect updates later if any issues arise over the several weeks of the review period. For now I can at least say that there are no gaps between different segments of the housing, no light leakage, and no flex or creaking if you apply firm torsion to the phone.

In terms of the build materials, well, you probably know this story already. It may suffice to say that the choice of materials used in the S III wasn't met as warmly as Samsung might have hoped. I think it's fair to say that most of us were hoping for some really premium materials from Samsung this time around, perhaps something along the lines of the wonderfully industrial school of design their Wave handsets have hailed from. The discovery that we'd just be getting a more special kind of plastic, "hyperglazed" polycarbonate to be precise, was rather a let down. There is more to the materials than just the housing though, and if we turn our attention to the screen there are some premium materials in evidence, specifically the Gorilla Glass 2 coating protecting the S III's screen, which is thinner than it's well regarded progenitor and yet promises just as much durability. On top of the durability factor, I've found the treatment of the outermost layer of screen is handily grime resistant, which is a welcome improvement over the older Galaxy handsets.

Ergonomics

I've gone on the record before to proclaim my love for plus-sized handsets, and six months of Note ownership hasn't dampened my enthusiasm for them one iota. That said, the De Quervain's tenosynovitis in my left hand has certainly brought home the onus on manufacturers to consciously address ergonomics in design. Strangely ergonomics have hitherto tended to get relatively little attention in reviews, but I expect as the demand and marketing push for large devices grows we'll see more and more attention devoted to this as time goes on. The Verge's S III review for example is proof positive of this, with its comparatively lavish emphasis on ergonomics in the design segment. We've always had a mind to cover this aspect here at AndroidNZ, and naturally the S III review is no exception.

The lone hardware control on the right side of the device, the well-placed
power button...

To my way of thinking ergonomics is one area where the S III design truly  excels. The curves, the weight, and how the weight is distributed all come together exceptionally well to make this large device comfortable to use, even over protracted periods of use. I think the sum of these factors comprises a significant part of why virtually everyone who gets their hands on an S III revises their opinion of it's design upward.

Notably despite their similar footprints and weight, the S III comes out significantly (and rather unexpectedly) ahead of the One X in this regard.

If you've been very concerned watching all these 4.3+ inch screened devices hitting the market, and thought "there's just no way I could handle a device that large!" I'd encourage you to get some hands-on with the S III, it may be the device to change your mind. In fact, given my bias toward large devices, I'd suggest if you have even trifling concerns about this you should try it on for size - it would be dishonest if I were to try and discount that there may be some reviewers tilt in play here.

The Screen

Screen technology has become one of the most hotly contested areas of hardware development for manufacturers over the course of the last year, with each manufacturer pushing their own home-grown display technology on consumers, replete with the usual 'best-in-class claims'.

I'd accidentally typed home-groan there at first, which is rather apt considering how I'm starting to feel about the excessive lengths manufacturers are going to in order to push this specification on us as a device differentiator. You see, with the notable exception of Motorola, every single manufacturer has a screen technology that is really good over all the metrics you'd care to think about. Sure, there are distinct differences between them, but at the end of the day they are all "good enough". For a long while drilling down into the differences between screen technologies was worthwhile for consumers - the differences were tangible enough to matter - but I don't believe this is the case any longer. The myriad different display types are now only serving to confuse consumers, bogging them down in a market of false differentiation.

There are reasons that manufacturers want to do this of course. Vlad Savov, of "The Verge" fame, made the point rather nicely here: "The one thing device manufacturers fear more than anything else is the commoditization of their product. If you, the buyer, start to perceive all competitors within a given market as equivalent and therefore interchangeable, the battle between them is reduced to a price war. Nobody fancies a price war because of two simple reasons: it squeezes profit margins for everyone involved and has a Darwinian tendency to leave stragglers in its wake."

If I'm completely honest I'd rather not wade into the morass that is discussing display differences at all, but alas writing an S III review doesn't really afford me that luxury.

The blue tinged whites are much in evidence again on the S III

Soooo, the tale of the tape looks like this for the Galaxy S III:

• Super AMOLED HD 
• 4.8inches
• 1280x720 pixel resolution (equating to a pixel density ~306PPI)
• A pentile subpixel matrix that differs from those in the Note and Nexus by virtue of having a smaller red subpixel

It has all the usual display characteristics we've come to expect from Super AMOLED displays - infinite blacks, amazing contrast ratio, near perfect viewing angles, and saturated colours. I'd previously labelled the AMOLED colours of the Note "super-saturated", but they're a little more muted here, possibly as a result of the alteration in subpixel matrix this time around. The enhanced contrast of AMOLED screens isn't to everyone's tastes however, but fortunately like it's Galaxy forebears there are options available in "Settings --> Display --> Screen mode" to drab things up if that's your preference.

It also sports the usual faults of AMOLED screens - whites are presented on the very cool side and there is a noticeable blue tinge when compared side-by-side with truer whites, on large swatches of colours, particularly greys and at low brightnesses, you can see some very fine vertical stripe artifact, and if you really dim the screen down and view a solid grey or black screen in a dark room you'll see uneven dark patches here and there. If those have bothered you before you should get 'eyes-on' with the S III and see for yourself whether they still bother you at this pixel density. For myself I can say that in more than three years of AMOLED phone ownership that these have never bothered me one iota. Your mileage may vary.

A good showing for an LCD screen outdoors in direct light

If there was one particular criticism I'd make in relation to the screen it's that auto-brightness management errs on being too dim generally (I presume deliberately on the basis of preserving battery). This problem is compounded by Samsung removing a feature present on previous Galaxy phones; the ability to manually adjust brightness on the fly by long-pressing the status bar and dragging your finger left and right to dim or brighten the screen. For my use that lack rankles a rather great deal, but I realise others may be nonplussed. In lieu of that I'll no doubt use Widgetsoid to place a brightness toggle in the notification pull down, along with some other toggles like a flashlight that are useful to have in a persistent UI area, but I'd be lying if I said I'd rather not have the granular brightness control that was on offer in earlier iterations of TouchWiz.

Now, to that thorny question, the one I've already indicated I have relatively little relish for: how it compares to other handset displays. Since I have little patience for the topic I'm not going to mince words.

Is it the best screen ever to grace a mobile to date? No. That crown still belongs to the HTC One X, with it's SLCD-2 panel.

Lets break that statement down a little further though.

In favour of the One X?

• Superior colour representation, more accurate and yet still very pleasantly contrasty
• Whites are much better
• Sharpness is better due to the utilisation of a true-stripe, rather than pentile, panel
• In direct sunlight that SLCD-2 offers a slight advantage

For the S III?

• Blacks are better (I've not yet had time to check whether there is black crush or other artifacts in video, that will come later in the review)
• Viewing angles are marginally improved

As you can see there sunlight legibility is quite evenly matched.

Does any of that matter to the point where you should choose one over the other, on the basis of display type as a differentiating factor alone? Not in my view. Obviously Samsung and HTC would beg to differ, but I'm with Vlad here.

As I'm making a case for false differentiators here, let's look at the pros and cons lists above a little more closely shall we?

• Whites in the S III won't bother the vast majority of users providing a One X isn't sitting right beside their S III...
• ...similarly blacks in the One X won't bother users unless an AMOLED screen is sitting right beside their handset. 
• In regular use the pentile display of the S III won't cause real issues because of the high pixel density. 
• The S III viewing angle advantage is irrelevant - nobody actually uses their phone at angles that acute so it's an utterly fallacy to hold that up as a differentiator...
• ...ditto the SLCD-2 advantage in direct sunlight, which is slight enough to be negligible for all but the most ardent outdoors enthusiasts.

Ultimately when you break it down like that I think it becomes apparent that there really isn't anything in it, it's just a distraction from more noteworthy things that differentiate the two handsets.

Anyways... All in all the S III display is truly excellent, and I don't really see much cause for complaint from consumers (barring the distinct minority with hyper-acute near-vision who may be bothered by the effects of the pentile display, even despite the high PPI on show here - if you count yourself in that group you should evaluate the screen yourself). It doesn't assume the mantle of best-in-class like it's predecessors, but if you don't allow yourself to get caught up in marketing division propaganda I'd be surprised if you weren't delighted with it. 

Of course if you disagree, and you absolutely must have the best screen available, feel free to purchase a One X and engage liberally in the thousands of useless "which is the best screen" pissing contests taking place all over the internet right now. Ain't choice grand?

Little difference in viewing angles, but lets face it, nobody uses their phone at an
angle like this.

Speed and synthetic benchmarks

Hopefully everyone reading this is up to speed on benchmarks; they are less important than how the phone performs in actual use, and additionally some of them actually aren't even particularly good (Quadrant, I'm looking at you). Despite their relative lack of real-world usefulness you all love them anyways, and so help us, so do we.

If anything the real usefulness of benchmarks for me is not as a measure of handset performance, but rather a measure of the quality of a reviewers technical knowledge of Android. The second you see a score from Nenamark 1, Benchmark Pi, or an onscreen GLBench result you know the reviewer doesn't have a good grip on what they're talking about when it comes to technical aspects and you can pretty much filter their opinion accordingly. 

What I'm going to do here is run the S III through a number of benchmarks, and then give my early impressions for how the device is in terms of responsiveness; the benchmarks in context as it were.

So, here are the benchmarks, and a few words on how we rate their usefulness:

Quadrant

Shock! Horror! I am not going give you a Quadrant score for the S III. Quadrant just doesn't give results that are generalisable to real-world use, so I'm making good on my promise in the Note review that we'd stop reporting on it. If you feel you really must know the irrelevant Quadrant score there are plenty of reviews out there that will give them to you.

CF-Bench

Here is the first of the benchmarks we have some regard for here at AndroidNZ - Chainfire bench. CF-Bench for me probably has the biggest bearing on actual use, and for that reason alone stands above most others. The S III outperforms all other comers here, although it's worth pointing out that as these overarching  benchmarks include graphics measurements the S III is automatically favoured on account of it's best-in-class GPU (which we'll come to in due course). I suspect if you were to strip the GPU out of the equation we'd see the S4 Krait flex it's 28nm-pythons and pip the S III at the post.

Antutu

Another general benchmark. Antutu, like CF-Bench above, is one of the few "all-purpose" benchmarks that we really rate here at AndroidNZ. The SIII scores very well here, although results are variable - my own result around the 10K mark is on the lower side for S III benchmarks which I see trending towards ~12K overall in Antutu's results leader board. As per the spiel on disclaimers this just serves as a reminder that one shouldn't get too hung up on benchmark results.

Smartbench 2012

The last general benchmark we run handsets through here, Smartbench 2012 shows stellar results for the S III, including fairly a fairly sizeable advantage over Tegra 3 powered devices (again bear in mind that the GPU will account for much of that difference).

Vellamo

Vellamo is a browser benchmark software made by Qualcomm. It encompasses a variety of tests including standards like Sunspider, aggregating them to produce a single score. The S III scores extremely well here, although it falls short of S4 Krait devices like the HTC One XL which score around the 2400 mark. Don't get too hung up on that though, the S III is still a superb handset for browsing, and Vellamo isn't the only browser benchmark in town...

Browsermark

...speaking of different browsing benchmarks, we come now to Browsermark. Browsermark actually runs itself in the browser directly, and as such is available to nearly any platform - great for cross-platform arguments over the water cooler about whose phone is better (not that we condone that sort of thing, much less using synthetic benchmarks to do it). Here is where we see Samsung's software optimisations for browsing come into play. Big time. The S III scores ludicrously well on this test with a score around the 160-170,000 mark. For reference the One X and iPhone score at ~95 and 90 respectively. 

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

As of right now this is the only credible graphics benchmark available on Android, and you can blame the S III for that. The revised Mali-400 on the S III is such as beastly performer that at present only offscreen tests can fully flesh out the limits of its performance. Looking at the two tests below we see the S III leading smartphone results for the offscreen Egypt test, beating even the iPhone 4S GPU into submission, and leaving the Tegra 3 chugging on its exhaust fumes far in the rear with its result of ~64fps.

Nenamark 2

An onscreen graphics benchmark. Nenamark 2 has until now been a reasonable onscreen graphics benchmark, being one of the few that could actually push phones hard enough to overpower their GPUs and demonstrate results less than V-Sync limitations. Having said that we can see that the S III's result does reflect the V-Sync cap, so Nenamark 2 is unable to uncover the full potential of the GPU. It still allows some limited comparison however, since none of the other GPUs presently available in Android devices hit their V-Sync value in Nenamark 2 tests. Looking at those results we again see the clear superiority of the S III's Mali over the Tegra 3 and Adreno 225 GPUs, which max out at 47.5 and 55.9 respectively. The problem here is there is no way to know the magnitude of the difference between the S III and those other handsets. Hopefully we'll see Nenamark 3 along shortly to address this with an even sterner onscreen test, if not Nenamark will be heading the way of the dodo at AndroidNZ just like Quadrant before it. 

Actual use

There is little doubt by now that the S III is the current leader for benchmark bragging rights, but the million dollar question remains: how does it perform in actual use?!

Twitter followers may have noticed after my hands-on a couple of weeks ago I declared that after the release of the S III people would no longer talk about "iPhone smooth", they would instead be talking about "S III smooth". Was I overstating the case? After a few days use, and with the phone fully loaded with apps and media, I can safely say that I was not. This is the smoothest phone I've ever handled, bar none. The One X? Not even a starter. The iPhone 4S? Not in the same league. Now before critics point out that I'm not an actually an iPhone user, I have a confession to make - I've owned an iPhone 4S for several weeks now and been using it daily alongside my One X (see how much you miss if you're not following me on Twitter?).

There really isn't any need to labour the point here, if smoothness and fluidity of general operation is hugely important to you then the S III is the phone for you. Period.

Summary 

In order to satisfy the ever-decreasing attention span of the human species, let's wrap this up into some neat n tidy bullet points:

• While the S III design has drawn more than it's share of criticism, it isn't actually dreadful in person and in concert with the build quality and ergonomics turns out to be more than the sum of it's parts
• Ergonomically speaking the S III is extremely good, with a nice weight distribution and curves that sit well in the hand and should make for comfort in longer sessions with the phone
• The screen is not the best around, that title still belongs to the HTC One X, but that said the screen is still truly excellent and should disappoint few buyers
• Synthetic benchmarks are best-in-class, and more importantly...
• ...in actual use the S III proves itself the most fluid smartphone yet produced, exceeding even the vaunted (and truth be told, hyperbolic) reputation of the iPhone for smoothness

Obviously there is still a lot of ground to cover in this review, rest assured we'll be along in a few days with the second instalment of the review looking at media aspects of the S III - audio quality, music and video playback, gaming, and the browser. Stay tuned for more!

Oh, and if I missed out your favourite benchmark that-you-just-simply-must-have-or-you-will-die, please drop me a line in the comments section below. Similarly, if I neglected to cover something you feel you really need to know in order to make a decision about purchasing the S III, let me know just how remiss I've been in your commentary (of course if you just want to say nice things about the first part of the review please do feel free to help yourself also). Finally, if you've enjoyed reading this and think our review deserves a wider audience, we'd really appreciate it if you'd think about sharing our review out to your social media channels.

(and don't forget the first rule of AndroidNZ: don't ask about battery life this early on, it's not as if anyone can say anything truly meaningful about that after only two days)