***The Official Samsung Galaxy S III Thread***

Wait, my S3 has black spots?!



vader.jpg









:p
 
If they can only be seen on a black screen in the dark then don't worry about it. Mine have faded over time too so are less visible in the dark but if you hangers it you may well get one with more.
 
mrk said:
If they can only be seen on a black screen in the dark then don't worry about it. Mine have faded over time too so are less visible in the dark but if you hangers it you may well get one with more.
Click to expand...

Yeah I can't say I've ever noticed them in normal use so that's all good. I'm just curious on the reason they are present only on blacks though, surely that has to be some major. Manufacturing fault?
 
A lot of people have mentioned they seem to fade over time. It's a foible of AMOLED displays so not much you can do about it. I don't even notice mine as I am too busy looking at what I am doing on the screen than worrying about blobs that may or may not be there....
 
Tom_D said:
Yeah I can't say I've ever noticed them in normal use so that's all good. I'm just curious on the reason they are present only on blacks though, surely that has to be some major. Manufacturing fault?
Click to expand...

I dunno, maybe its currently near impossible to mass produce the absolutely perfect HD screen that on runs on millivolts?

Just a hunch, going from every smart phone ever launched.... How does seeing slight black blobs on a screen only when in pitch dark constitute a "major" manufacturing fault?
 
I was being nosy last night and looking at contracts for the S3 and prices etc. Since I last changed my phone (9 months ago) it seems it's now cheaper to buy the phone outright and take out a SIM only contract. The total cost of the cheapest contract over 18 months I could find was approx 750. While the phone and a tenner a month SIM come out at slightly less.
 
Was using a Sky Go app someone linked to in here, It's stopped working. It says it needs to update, takes me to play store and then says incompatible -.-

Sky take the ****!

Anyone know any other working sky go apps?
 
When you've got the phone locked with a password is there anyway to skip to the next track in the music player without unlocking it? On my old blackberry it could be done by holding down the volume controls which was perfect when it was in my pocket.
 
Okay, I've had mine for a few days now so early thoughts coming from the HTC One X. I did a similar sort of thing for the One X here (albeit over a slightly longer time period): Link

With the One X, I had a very easy job of picking faults with it. It has plenty and many of them are very annoying. I came away from it rather underwhelmed, it never really impressed me that much.

The Good:

  • The Design. If you had asked me about this when the phone came out, I wouldn't have had many nice things to say. Probably like many of you. It looked very boring, plain, and the two colour choices were questionable to say the least. Now, having used the phone for a bit I now 'understand' the design. It feels nice, it's comfortable to hold, and both of the colours actually look fairly nice. Mine is blue, but I like the white as well. I went for the blue purely because the black border around the edge of the screen is less obvious. In most conditions and from most angles it essentially looks black anyway. This was the biggest gripe I had with the phone and it's now ended up in the 'good' section of my post, not something I expected. Initially I really didn't like the fact that they put the camera/speaker and flash all at the top of the phone on the back. I now see why they did, when you're holding the phone normally, your hand/fingers are out of the way of all three of them. The power button on the side is miles better than on the top. The capacitive menu and back buttons were a smart move as well, HTC went down a stupid route and have now been forced to add in an option to change the function of the multi-tasking button to remove a horrible 3 dot menu, no issues like that here, Samsung have played it safe and it's easy to see why.

  • The Notification LED. This may seem like a minor point, but when the LED is this good, it's a pretty big deal. Samsung have done an exceptional job of the LED on this phone. It's as good - if not better - than the ones on the BlackBerry phones. It's RGB, extremely bright and easy to see from all angles. This is something that is far too underrated on mobile phones, they are phones after all. The LED's on the HTC One phones are rubbish compared to this. It also seems that the LED on the blue model is better as it's not hidden below the surface of the plastic.

  • The Screen. There probably aren't many people who like IPS LCD screens more than me. I think the HTC One X screen is absolutely excellent, but rather strangely I've found myself preferring the look of the SAMOLED HD even more. Obviously the black levels are the main difference, and they do make quite a noticeable difference with things like the black notification bar. Generally media is a lot nicer to view on the S3 screen. The 'nature' video that comes on the phone is a fine example of this. It's not quite as nice to watch on the One X. I have a Galaxy Nexus as well and the S3 screen is certainly an improvement on that. You can see the pentile matrix if you look for it, but it's almost a non-issue. Bizarrely, when viewing an identical image on both phones (S3 & X), the S3 screen seemed to show detail better... I don't know why that is. I'd say this is at least on par with the One X screen, perhaps better. The auto brightness is also a lot better out of the box, it's more aggressive, which is good in my book. It seems to be generally easier on the eyes as well, even at different brightness levels.

  • The Camera. Initially we all thought this was the same camera that was on the S2. It isn't. Quality-wise it's definitely better, not by an awful lot, but you can generally tell the difference. The shutter speed is brilliant, I thought the One X shutter was instant but this is even faster, it processes the pictures a lot faster as well. It's generally producing better results than the One X and the iPhone 4S. The camera functions seem just as good as the ones found on HTC Sense. It has more or less all of the same options and the software skin is just as nice. You can also adjust the shortcuts bar which is a bonus.

  • The HD Video Recording. This is, without a doubt, the best around. It's very smooth and offers excellent quality. It comfortably beats the iPhone 4S and beats the HTC One phones by a very, very noticeable margin. I really can't stress just how good it is, it's just glorious.

  • Battery Life. I don't want to say too much on this yet, but it seems very solid so far. Unplugged for 14 hours, it's currently sat at 70% after 1.5 hours screen time on auto brightness, and I've listened to music for an hour, browsed the web, looked at Flipboard; the usual. So early impressions are good. I've also filmed a few videos and taken plenty of pictures as well. Generally mixing this sort of usage on the One X or even the iPhone 4S would have your battery life well below that. The fact that the battery isn't fixed can only be seen as a fairly big bonus as well.

  • Audio Quality & Speaker. Wolfson need no introduction here and the audio quality seems very good. I wouldn't say that it 'wowed' me but it certainly sounds as good as anything else that I've heard. I'm not someone who is really fussy over audio quality though, but the audiophiles seem to like it too. The rear speaker is as loud as they come as well, I haven't heard one that's louder.

  • Connectivity/Signal Strength. Again, performance is impressive here. It seems to pick up as good a signal as the Nokia N8 and E7 in most places. I use them as a benchmark as Nokia tend to have bulletproof antennas. It's more or less as good as anything else you'll find. It has NFC and all the good stuff that you'd expect. GLONASS is nice too, the GPS locks faster than anything else I've seen and maintains connections to more satellites also.

  • Performance. The performance of the HTC One X is pretty disappointing. It's certainly capable, but lag and jitter in places ruins the experience. You simply should not expect that sort of thing on a quad-core phone. The HTC One S is better in this respect. Thankfully, there are no such problems on the Galaxy S III. It simply flies along at blistering speed and you can't slow it down no matter how hard you try. Want to watch a HD video in a window while playing ShadowGun? Sure, it eats it for breakfast. Effortless power and you really can feel it. Everything seems well optimised too.

  • TouchWiz (Yes, TouchWiz). I've never been a fan of TouchWiz. That is until now. Keeping it fairly brief, Samsung have made everything look a lot nicer. Okay, you can change everything on Android and all that stuff, but you shouldn't have to do so. Just look at the stock dialler on the Galaxy S2, it looks awful. Functionally it may be fine, but we all like some eye candy. This is one of the best examples of where they've addressed these issues of poor design, the dialler now looks aesthetically pleasing. The lockscreen with the water effect is very cool and I like that. S-Voice works quite nicely, it's not quite as good as Siri but it does the job if you need to use it to send a message in the car for example. The launcher looks nice too, and is impossible to slow down. The one main issue is that you can't drag and drop icons over one another to create folders, an odd omission but it's not much trouble to add a folder if you want one (tap the menu button). The messaging app looks nice and is functional, and the settings menus are the same. Samsung have done a good job with the Motion features as well, Smart Alert is useful for example, as is Direct Call. Smart Stay is something I was going to turn off, but I've left it on; I found that even in dim conditions it actually works really well. There's also the stock toggle buttons in the notifications pull down bar, which now has a brightness slider as well. HTC decided to leave all of this out, which was utter stupidity on their part.

  • Storage. 16GB + 64GB MicroSD (for £50~) = 80GB total. Can't do much better than that unless you get a 32/64GB model, and they seem to be in short supply with the latter not existing yet.

  • ROMs & Modding. Need to flash a stock ROM? Odin, 2 minutes, job done (and no flash counter either). Can't grumble at that. The modding scene for this will no doubt end up being the best as well.

The Bad:

  • (I'm grasping at straws a bit here in a poor attempt to appear as impartial as I can, but it's very hard because the phone is that good :o :p)

  • The battery cover takes a bit of force to get off. It's flexible so you can't break it, but it can hurt your nail (ooh, handbags).

  • The home button isn't quite as reassuring as it could be, if you push down the edges there is a bit of give; this may however be intentional.

  • The home button is also a funny colour on the blue model, which isn't particularly great, but you don't notice it most of the time, or you just can't see it in dimmer conditions.

  • If you turn the brightness down, stand in a dark room and load up a totally black image, you can see black splodges on the screen. This is something that you will never see unless you do this deliberately, but still.

Final Thoughts:

Samsung have played it safe here, and it's paid off. They haven't done anything too fancy, but they have improved on every area of the Galaxy S II. It's hard to imagine how a phone could be much better than this, given the current technology available. It ticks all of the important boxes. Yes, some things such as the design are always going to be personal preference, and I'm sure we'd all rather have stock Android over TouchWiz, but such things aren't really difficult to live with when you look at all the positives that come with it. If you're spending this kind of money on a phone, there's really only one phone to look at. Okay, you might hate the design, but you should just suck that up and use the Rock case to alleviate it.

The HTC One X is far from a bad alternative, but when a phone gets more wrong than it gets right, it's tough to be impressed. There's no such issue with the Galaxy S III.

While playing with the phone, you encounter that euphoric feeling that you get when you're playing with the de facto Android phone for that particular year. It was the HTC Desire first, then the Galaxy S II, and now, it's the Galaxy S III.
 
Good review

I've had mine for a few weeks now, coming from a Nokia 5800.

S3 blows me away and just gets better and better as I find new stuff out, downloaded the Team Speak App last night, loads faster on my phone than it does on my PC, just can't get over how good the phone and Android is.

I'm well chuffed
 
Nice write up robbo :)


I thought you were extremely impressed with the X when you got yours though? :eek: You were ranting and raving about how good it was to have a 4s screen but a larger version etc. :p
 
Nexus18 said:
Nice write up robbo :)

I thought you were extremely impressed with the X when you got yours though? :eek: You were ranting and raving about how good it was to have a 4s screen but a larger version etc. :p
Click to expand...

It was good (and it is good), but it just ended up annoying me. Like I said, the screen is great for example, but it gets too much wrong in other places.
 
Good review Robbo. :)

The hardware is excellent and it is a very good package. It now needs an injection of Jelly Bean. As I'm spoilt, boredom has already crept in so at least JB on the GN will keep me happy for a while. Then I'll be back until we see what appears in November.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom