Samsung Galaxy S II Review

Update: You can now read our Galaxy S III review!

Introduction:

We said that if you give the pre-production Samsung Galaxy S II to Forrest Gump, he might try to have a bite and say it’s because it felt like a bar of slim dark chocolate in his hand. Well, the top-shelf version we are holding now feels like that too. At the same time though its shell and inner workings have been ironed out just where it counts to shape the Android smartphone to beat this year.

Is it a worthy sequel to the Samsung Galaxy S, which was the Android phone to beat last year? After all,  the green robot got equipped with the most powerful chipset and the most innovative screen technology at the time… will history repeat itself?

Samsung has gone dual-core with the chipset now, made the thinnest smartphone outside of Japan, upped the screen size to 4.3”, the camera to 8MP with flash, and slapped the newest 4.0 version of its TouchWiz Android 2.3 Gingerbread skin.

The display technology has also been innovated on, to the tune of 50% increase in perceived pixel count, but will these all be enough for the Samsung Galaxy S II to reach its ten million units sold target goal in 2011? Breeze through our review to find out...

Design:

So how thin is the Samsung Galaxy S II; what does 0.33” (8.49mm) really mean? The answer is so much so, that there’s an air gap between your palm and the back of the phone, and you always end up trying to squeeze it with four fingers on one side to the base of your palm on the other, so as not to drop it.



You can compare the Samsung Galaxy S II with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

This is mainly due to the fact that the handset comes pretty wide, even for our larger than average hands - the Samsung Galaxy S II is actually one of the widest Android handsets, only giving way to some of HTC's high-ends.

We’d rather have the Sony Ericsson Xperia arc approach, to be honest – its screen is 4.2”, and it is almost as thin as the Galaxy S II, but is less wide, and fits very comfortably in the hand. SE’s “human curvature” design philosophy wins the ease of handling here, against the high-tech rectangular slab approach of Samsung’s labs.


That’s the only gripe we have with the design, but we guess that’s the price to pay for having a Super AMOLED Plus display. From what we know about the technology, Sammy was most likely forced to work the design around the display dimension template, not the other way around.
 
The other gripe we had with the design of the pre-production version – the back cover flexing inwards - has been largely dealt with in the retail phone. The battery cover is still paper-thin, but now the air gap between it and the battery inside, is almost non-existent, so no flexing when you push  the back in with your finger.

The 4.3” screen evokes one word – fantastic. Super AMOLED Plus delivers better perceived resolution than Super AMOLED on the Samsung Galaxy S, since it uses a standard matrix to form an image with 50% more subpixels than the PenTile arrangement, used in the Galaxy S. The resolution stays the same - 480x800 pixels - but due to the use of a normal RGB matrix, text appears crisper in books and websites than on the Galaxy S, which has interpolated resolution of 392x653 pixels.

The Super AMOLED Plus display is also brighter, consumes 18% less energy, and comes in a thinner package than the previous generation, which has probably been one of the precursors for the slim chassis of the Galaxy S II. Samsung is moving to a laser-based production method for its AMOLED displays this year, which will allow for Retina Display-like 300ppi+ pixel densities, so we are looking forward to such higher resolutions.


Thanks to the increased brightness, and the low-reflectance coating, the display reads very well outside, better than the previous generation. Besides, you can boost the screen intensity significantly when framing your shots in camera mode, or watching videos in the player. There is an additional mode for that in these apps, called “Outdoor visibility”, which comes in handy when it's sunny outside. The browser and video player also have their own brightness setting sliders.

Samsung uses  mDNIe+ - a mobile version of the image processing technology from its TV sets, to enhance the picture when watching media, similar to what Sony Ericsson does with the Mobile Bravia Engine on some of its new Android handsets.  The display section in the Settings app allows you to choose from three general background modes – Dynamic, Standard and Movie – just as on our Samsung HDTV at home. Dynamic deepens the blacks for a visible contrast boost, casting away some detail in the process, while Movie mode brings a more toned down, cinematic atmosphere to the image.

In addition to these general display modes, while running video the player settings let you manually decide on the color warmth, and also adjust an individual brightness level. For all these improvements, the Super AMOLED Plus still has that blueish tint, which means its color representation is on the colder side.Contrast and viewing angles are still as good as they come on a mobile display, thanks to the AMOLED technology. On auto setting the light sensor doesn’t cope with adjusting the brightness smoothly, but rather skips through stages, which can get annoying if you are reading something, but it looks like a software issue, which might be fixed with a firmware update.


To recap the design overview we’d say that the etched edges of the 8MP camera area on the back are the only thing that sticks out of an otherwise bland plastic black chassis. The camera has an LED flash this time around, and the phone records any sounds accompanying the captured Full HD videos in stereo, thanks to the microphone duo, which also serves noise-cancellation duties. We have another distinctive feat at the bottom - the microUSB port doubles as an HDMI-out one. It is called a Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) port, but more about that later.


We don't mind the all-plastic design, however, since you come to appreciate this material whenever you are holding a phone beast with a 4.3” display, as it makes the Samsung Galaxy S II feel feathery – it weighs about the same as its first edition.

This, of course, is a subjective preference – some like more the unibody aluminum design of HTC’s hunks of a phone. After just a day or two spent with the device, it actually grew on us, and didn’t feel uncomfortable to hold, we just got used to it.

Interface and Functionality:

The new TouchWiz 4.0 doesn't radically change the UI concept, but there are a number of visual improvements, like a redrawn icon set  throughout the homescreens and menus, nice transitional animations, and predefined widget slots. Not serving much practical purpose, except the slots, which save space, but great eye-candy nonetheless.


The main menu is just page upon page of app icons, and can also be arranged alphabetically in a list view, and that's that. To be fair, we don’t mind the TouchWiz UI at all - it is not as elaborate as HTC Sense, but is pretty functional, and has some nice touches like the alarm app, with its plethora of personalization options.


With the the Galaxy S II, Samsung introduces some motion sensor-powered gestures, different than the usual flip-to-mute, which is present here as well. Some only serve the coolness factor, like tilt-to-zoom in the gallery or browser. However, you ought to have two fingers on the touchscreen for that, so we might as well just do pinch-to-zoom, and that's exactly what we usually did. The panning gesture flips through homescreens or menu pages by tilting the phone left/right when you want to place an item on them, but skips a few at once, and it's challenging to go back with precision.


There is another phone navigation option, which has received the focus of attention in many a Samsung Galaxy S II commercials – voice commands.

You can double-tap the top of the Samsung Galaxy S II to start a voice command session in the Voice talk app, which is useful if the phone is in a car cradle, for instance. Performance of the voice apps is hit-or-miss, though, despite the dual-core handset, but the software managed to recognize weird names in our contacts list, so you can use it for the occasional “Call Joe” shout when your hands are down the bucket with chicken fingers.


The interface is flying - lag is barely there, only when you flip through homescreens loaded with widgets, and the dual-core 1.2GHz Samsung Exynos chipset carries its duties with pride. That’s no doubt thanks to the 1GB RAM as well, of which about 835MB were user available on our unit, probably the largest amount we’ve seen on an Android phone. There are also 16GB of internal memory, and an additional memory card slot for more.


We ran some synthetic benchmark tests with the Samsung Galaxy S II, and scored the highest Quadrant result we’ve seen from a stock handset – 3732, along with significant achievements on the only test that takes into account the dual-core nature of the chipset – Smartbench 2011. Look at our comparison with the NVIDIA Tegra 2 on the LG Optimus 2X in the video below:



For now it doesn't really matter, since there is hardly anything to take advantage of a dual-core phone chipset in Android Market. The tangible benefits for now are Full HD 1080p video recording, and faster browsing, both of which we are examining in the next sections of the review.

Internet, Connectivity and Software:

The Android 2.3 Gingerbread browser on the Samsung Galaxy S II gets a good speed boost from the dual-core Exynos chipset. We observed the same thing with Tegra 2-based phones, since now the second core can keep rendering the page, while the first one executes one script or another, thus speeding up page loading times quite a bit, with all the JavaScript and Adobe Flash elements to boot, which is confirmed by our benchmark tests as well.

Synthetic benchmarking aside, browsing with our Galaxy S II felt very snappy and smooth. The browser here has taken a trick out of Apple's Safari book, as it stops rendering the page when you do pinch-to-zoom or double-tap, to ensure fluid execution, and resumes when you lift your fingers off.



Also, this display, at 4.3”, could use a bit more resolution. Despite ditching the PenTile matrix, when you have a page zoomed out, some fine details are lost, especially if it’s text, but if you have the habit of trying to discern text in that position, we don’t want to be your eye doctor anyway. If it’s a thing that takes away from your sleep at night, just wait for the dual-core HTC Sensation 4G, or get the Motorola ATRIX 4G, with their qHD screen resolution, or get the king of display resolution iPhone 4, if you are not the Android type. 

There is a very slight lag when scrolling, the screen starts following your finger a split second after movement, and you can't pan around the page, while you are doing pinch-to-zoom, like on the iPhone 4, or the new Sony Ericsson Android handsets. These are actually our only remarks towards the browser on the Samsung Galaxy S II, and they are not a necessity by any measure - the sheer pleasure of reading or watching a video on this screen gets to us every time we use it.

The Samsung Galaxy S II is loaded with connectivity options –  21Mbps 4G HSPA+, 3G, A-GPS, high-speed Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, MHL, FM Radio, you name it. The Bluetooth 3.0+HS and Wi-Fi Direct options are great to have, but you will see the improved transfer speeds only to compatible devices, so better get your girlfriend a Galaxy S II as well, if you want to be truly happy together.


Thankfully, the GPS fix issues that plagued the Galaxy S are corrected now - we managed to pinpoint our location for the usual 2-3 minutes on first boot, and afterwards it was picking up satellites much faster. Also, in some regions where the NFC infrastructure is more developed, the phone will ship with an NFC chip enabled, but we had the UK version, which doesn’t seem to have any NFC-connected app, or a hint this chip exists inside.

The Samsung Galaxy S II is one of the first mobile devices (the rest being of HTC's newest crop) to sport the new Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) port. The idea is to have one port for both microUSB duties, and HDMI-out for 1080p video. MHL-ready HDTVs and other gear will only start shipping this year, though, and only then you will be able to charge your phone, while mirroring its screen on the TV. There is an  MHL-to-HDMI adapter accessory for the Samsung Galaxy S II, if you want to take advantage of 1080p video output from the phone to your non-MHL HDTV, but it won't charge the phone at the same time. There is also another accessory, an USB-on-the-go adapter cable, that goes into the MHL port, and at the other end you can plug in things like an USB flash drive for streaming movies from there, or copying files to and from the Galaxy S II, without the need of a computer.

The options to access the phone's content have increased in the Galaxy S II, compared to the Galaxy S. Kies Air, that was released by Samsung earlier this year, now comes standard in TuchWiz 4.0, allowing you to access your phone from your computer, if you are on the same Wi-Fi network. Just type the IP address visible on the phone's screen in the browser, and you are presented with a tidy interface linking to all content on your phone – contacts, pictures, videos, text messages, and so on. You can copy files to and from the Galaxy S II this way, send a text message or email, and even play music and videos that are in the phone, on your computer.


The AllShare app for streaming multimedia to DLNA-enabled TVs or other gear works great, but skips some frames with Full HD videos, when we streamed them to our Windows 7 PC, and we had the same issue with the DLNA app on the LG Optimus 2X, so it’s not the phone. Probably if we were on a Wireless N connection, performance would be better. We tried streaming a movie with subtitles, but we were warned that the DLNA-enabled gear has to be of Samsung make for the subtitles to show.

We'd be remiss not to mention the four Hubs Samsung is supplying with the Galaxy S II. The Social Hub that integrates all your messaging and social networking updates we've met before, and we also have Music, Readers and Games Hubs.

They all have easy to navigate interfaces, and searching for music, books, games or magazines is a snap, while the options to show you what's hot in each category is pretty helpful. The Games Hub seems predominantly occupied by Gameloft titles in the Premium section, probably since those are not listed in Android Market. Most polished is the Readers Hub, which gives you access to millions of books, newspapers and magazines, with seven free magazine issues of your choosing, and a universe of free classic books.

Camera and Multimedia:

The camera interface, that serves the 8MP shooter with LED flash, has been rehashed with a more minimalistic and transparent menu,  and is now swiftly alternating between landscape and portrait mode. A helpful feature is the ability to manually place shortcut icons to the functions you use most in the five slots on the left of the screen.


There is one very notable difference in camera capabilities, of course, the 1080p video option. Both stills and video exhibit very good amounts of detail outdoor, accurate color representation, and sharp focus. The image colors even appear slightly bland, meaning that the pictures and video taken with the Samsung Galaxy S II will look much more luscious on the Super AMOLED Plus display, than on your computer's LCD monitor. Shot-to-shot times are very short if you turn the preview function off, thanks to the all but missing shutter lag.



The indoor photos came out quite detailed as well, the 8MP sensor's low light sensitivity is very good, and doesn’t drown the image in noise, or smear it with noise-suppression algorithms. The LED flash does well, if you are fairly close to the subject, and, given that the Samsung Galaxy S lacked one, it is a welcome addition to the photographic capabilities of the Galaxy S II. Not to mention the wide-angle lens – we thought the LG Optimus 2X catches a lot of frame, when we did the comparison with the iPhone 4, but the Samsung Galaxy S II manages to cram even more scenery in the image, sacrificing for some barrel distortion at the sides, which is a common issue with wide angle lenses.


The wide viewing angle of the lens helps a lot when using the Panorama or Action shot modes, which stitch together scenery with static or moving objects. The anti-shake mode actually makes a difference when your grip is less than steady, but don’t bother with the white balance settings, the results are more akin to applying an artificial effect like Sepia to the photo, than help your shot on a cloudy day, for example.


The Full HD 1080p video is one the best we've seen from a phone, largely due to the fluid 30fps it's captured with, and the good amount of detail. Granted, we've only seen retail 1080p samples from the LG Optimus 2X for now, which shoots with 24fps. The Samsung Galaxy S II records in .MP4 format, and you'll be able to record about an hour and a half of Full HD 1080p video to the user-available internal memory.

Samsung Galaxy S II Sample Video 1:




Samsung Galaxy S II Sample Video 2:




Samsung Galaxy S II Indoor Sample Video:



The Samsung Galaxy S II recordsstereo audio in the video clips, thanks to the dual mics. The sole speaker on the back is actually loud and clear above average, although we've heard better, like on Sony Ericsson’s Android handsets, for instance. There is a number of equalizer presets and sound effects in the music player, as well as mock 5.1 channel surround sound that does make some difference in headset mode.


Some audiophiles might be miffed that the Wolfson DAC in the Samsung Galaxy S, which produced some of the best sound heard from a mobile phone, has been replaced with a Yamaha audio processor in the Galaxy S II. We still don't know for sure what version of the Yamaha DAC we have in there, though. The phone supports the lossless FLAC audio format, just like the Galaxy S.

Video playback goes all the way to 1080p without stuttering in most formats. When you add the brilliant Super AMOLED Plus 4.3” display with dedicated movie mode, nothing beats watching video on the Samsung Galaxy S II in the mobile phone universe.

The phone has hardwired codecs, supporting the DivX/Xvid format. The Matroska .MKV container, in which a lot of the 1080p videos are wrapped, is no problemo as well - the Samsung Galaxy S II eats 1080p .MKV files for breakfast. Besides the general Movie mode, you can set screen brightness, and even color warmth from the video player itself. The outdoor visibility mode that is present in the camera interface finds a place here too, and scorches your retinas by bumping up the image intensity, if you need to watch a clip in bright sunlight.


As any self-respecting expensive smartphone these days, the Samsung Galaxy S II comes with its own photo and video editors for some on-the-fly reality improvement. The photo editor comes with tons of utilities, which will let you remove the hair from your nose on close-up shots, or apply cool laughing-mirror effects to your ex’s photos. You can even do warping in it, so no complaints, plenty of functions for an app that comes bundled with the phone.


The video editing app is called, ahem, Video maker, and lets you trim and split the clips on your device, apply various effects like Sharpen to them, or mix and match with pictures and music. It’s actually the same app that was released for the Samsung Galaxy S earlier this year, since the only video it recognized for editing automatically, was the HD 720p sample we shot for comparison purposes, you can't edit 1080p video.


And the last things we want to mention about the video capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S II is that you can use the digital zoom while recording HD 720p video, but not in Full HD 1080p mode, and it is activated by the volume rocker. Also, there is no manual, touch-to-focus option while filming, but the phone does a pretty good job at quickly adjusting continuous autofocus, when needed.

Samsung Galaxy S II Sample Video - 720p with digital zoom:




Samsung Galaxy S II Sample Video - continuous autofocus demo:

Performance and Conclusion:

The call quality of the Samsung Galaxy S II is pretty good – the earpiece won’t blow your mind away, but is still strong and pretty clear, something to be expected on such a high-end device. The noise-canceling microphones didn’t disappoint our listeners on the other side, weeding out parasitic noises.

We were worried that the 1.2GHz processor will have battery life issues. Samsung has done a good job optimizing the chipset, though. The display has an intelligent power-saving mode, automatically learning from your usage patterns, and the handset had a separate “Power saving mode” section in Settings, which lets you choose which power-sucking options to turn off automatically when not in use.

Even without the battery-preservation modes, the Samsung Galaxy S II is not a power-hog, and you will be getting the usual for high–end Android phones day of very intense usage, two with light usage and the occasional Full HD video recording and playback. Samsung hasn't posted official talk and standby times yet, but we did one unscientific test by just using the phone lightly over the weekend. We disconnected the fully charged handset from the cable at 23:05 on Saturday and went out, and the phone turned off due to lack of juice at 12:58 on Tuesday, roughly 62 hours.

In the meantime we logged 40 minutes of browsing over Wi-Fi, 20 minutes of gaming, uploaded 3GB worth of HD movies and music via Kies Air for 40 minutes, listened to music for 40 min., 30 of which were on speaker, used the GPS for 15 min., recorded 12 min. of Full HD video, and took 14 shots with flash at a party. We also talked for 32 minutes, tinkered in general like using the calculator or the photo editor for a total of 40 minutes, and watched HD movies for 1:35 hours, half an hour of which was streaming the movie via DLNA to a computer.

We only turned on Wi-Fi and GPS when we used them, the display was always on automatic brightness, which is hit or miss on the phone (Updated: Samsung fixed the ambient light sensor issue with a firmware update), and the phone was connected to a 3G network at all times. So, yes, you can indeed get 2 days and some with moderate usage out of the 1650mAh battery. The key seems to be good power management - we observed very low power consumption when on standby, the battery indicator barely moves then, since the phone seems to clock the chipset way down to 200MHz for that, and we very rarely saw bursts to the full GHz the silicon is capable of in any activity.

Probably the most important take from this review of the Samsung Galaxy S II is that it is, once again, future-proof. It has those highly-regarded and distinguishing features that won't make it obsolete in just a few months' time. The dual-core Exynos chipset chirps along capturing excellent Full HD video clips, whereas the 4.3” Super AMOLED Plus screen offers one of the best video playback experiences we've seen on a phone to date, with hardwired DivX/Xvid, and .MKV video formats support.

For enterprise users it is the first Android device to ship with encrypted hardware (perhaps real-time NAND Flash encryption), according to Samsung, which reduces the reliance on security software. We are yet to see if this will help the enterprise adoption of Samsung's flagship Android device, for which the company has also partnered with Cisco, Microsoft and Sybase.

If we didn't have 3D-capable handsets to consider, like the HTC EVO 3D for Sprint, or the LG Optimus 3D, we'd say that the Samsung Galaxy S II will be the Android handset to get so far. It is much thinner than the 3D beasts, though, and the Super AMOLED Plus display alone is a unique enough feature. The Galaxy S II will appeal most to people who prefer their large handsets in a slim and light package, an antipode of HTC’s muscular builds, and much easier to handle and toss around.

Samsung's Android peak for this season is future-proof not only with its powerful chipset and vivid display, but also with the top-notch connectivity options. You won't find 21Mbps 4G HSPA+, Bluetooth 3.0+HS, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, and MHL port combined in any other Android handset. That's probably because some of these standards are yet to become mainstream, which means that you may not get as much benefit with them right now, but you sure are future-proof. On the whole, we found the Samsung Galaxy S II to be more than a worthy sequel to the handset that set new standards for the high-end Android range, and everything we hoped for.

If you are looking for Androidalternatives, you can check out the latest and greatest from Android land in the T-Mobile G2x (Optimus 2X), Motorola ATRIX 4G or the HTC ThunderBolt. If you don't want the little green robot in your life, you can go iPhone 4, which has a high-resolution display, distinctive design and offers all of the wonders in the App Store. Or, if you would rather go the Windows Phone way, and still must have the Super AMOLED display, then you can opt for the Samsung Focus.

Software version of the reviewed unit: 2.6.35.7-I9100XWKD7-CL149590