I just thought I would put my thoughts together here. I've just received my small army of cases through the post so I'll post them up later on too
Samsung Galaxy S II mini review
Design & Construction
It’s plastic. It does not feel as expensive to hold as an iPhone 4, but does it need to? No.
Its very well built, feels solid, there is no creaking anywhere (looking at you, Desire HD), nothing feels cheap or really plasticky and everything is finished off very well. It certainly is a better phone to hold than the original Galaxy S and even despite its size, I’d go as far as to say it’s more ergonomically friendly than the smaller iPhone 4.
The aluminium HTC phones and Samsung Omnia 7 were also very nice, but they can be slippery and they don’t really feel any better quality than this does.
It is impressively thin and ridiculously light, you can barely tell it’s in your pocket unless you wear very tight skimpy jeans… I hope you don’t!
The power button being located on the side is great too; it makes much more sense than having it on the top, especially on a phone with a 4.3” screen.
No camera button is a shame.
Screen
The screen is fantastic. It isn’t revolutionary in that it’s fairly similar to the normal SAMOLED screen, but the extra sharpness really does show through sometimes, mostly when viewing small text. Small texts were often unreadable when zoomed out on a web page on the Galaxy S and Omnia 7, thankfully that is no longer the case here.
Aside from that it has all the usual LED benefits, solid blacks, superb (if a little over the top) colours, low power usage, etc.
It isn’t as sharp as the iPhone 4 screen though, the retina display still wins on that front.
TouchWiz & Android
This is considerably better than the TouchWiz that came on the original Galaxy S, however it’s still nothing too special, and certainly not as good as HTC Sense UI. Many parts of the Samsung skin look fairly tacky and a lot of the TouchWiz stuff has been badly thought out, it isn’t quite as intuitive as it could be.
That said, it’s still decent and you can very easily remove the main part of it using LauncherPro, etc.
The custom Samsung applications are a bit hit and miss, the social hub appears to be a huge drain on the battery and isn’t all that easy to turn off, but otherwise it’s not too bad.
The Android app store is unfortunately, still not up to the Apple standard. Yes, it’s getting better, but it still has quite a way to go yet. There are many high quality iPhone apps and games you simply will not find on the Android market. I’m not going to make a list, but trust me, it is quite a gap.
The above isn’t that much of a problem though when you consider the magnificent flash performance and web browser on the Galaxy S II. It simply does not slow down. I haven’t been able to get the phone to lag on any flash website. Until now, I’ve been able to crash all the Android phones I’ve used by hammering them with flash!
Phone performance
I’m not going to say a huge amount about this, but you simply cannot slow this phone down, it blitzes everything out there, including the iPhone 4 on its latest firmware’s, the buttery smoothness of iOS on the iPhone has died. This thing is a monster.
Camera & Video recording
Until now, only the Xperia arc has been able to really rival the camera on the iPhone 4. They are fairly similar and the arc camera probably edges it overall due to 8MP being better than 5MP when image quality is the same. However, it over saturates the shots naturally which can make things look a bit over the top.
The Galaxy S II camera is more or less a copy of the one on the arc, but without the over saturation, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it ‘way better’ than the iPhone 4 camera, but it is noticeably better, I’m very impressed with it. The detail when you zoom in is quite stunning at times.
There are plenty of software options for the camera and many of them are quite useful, I also like the customisable shortcut bar so you can put your most commonly used photography features on there.
1080p video recording makes one of its first appearances on next-gen phones here, is it worth it? Well, yes. Aside from a strange zoom effect that occurs when 1080p is active, the quality is really great and the framerate remains smooth with little stuttering. Moving objects aren’t its strongest point and if you find yourself not holding the phone still, it will ruin your video somewhat, but it’s generally very good and crisp.
You can drop the resolution down to 720p if you want zooming features too and this also looks great. Again, it’s the first HD video camera on a phone that clearly betters the iPhone 4, nothing has until now.
Telephone, GPS & Music features
I’m not really a big fan of the Samsung phone skin and contact lists, but they get the job done.
Call quality through the earpiece is very good and the microphone seems clear too. No issues there at all.
The loud speaker on the phone is VERY loud and clear, which is good as some speakers (Desire HD) are pretty shocking at best when it comes to volume and clarity. I’d say it’s probably slightly louder than the iPhone 4 speaker but not much. I much prefer the iOS contact list and phone interface, it feels a world apart.
The stock music player is average, but you want to replace it with PowerAmp as soon as you can!
Moving on to the GPS. It gets a lock very, very quickly. I’ve never seen a phone get a solid GPS lock in sub-2 seconds consistently until now.
Battery life
Finally, we get a big battery. Does it show? Yes.
My phone has been on for just under 26 hours and in that time I’ve had the screen on for an hour and a half, I have Facebook/Twitter on 2 hourly syncs and Gmail on push. The battery is on 70%. I’ve only done a few charge cycles and it is still improving, too.
That more or less means this has the best battery of all top tier smartphones, you can easily get 2 days (depending on settings) out of this, no problem. You’re probably in the habit of charging it every day anyway and you won’t run this flat in a day, no chance.
Conclusion
I’ve probably missed quite a lot of things out, but there are a lot of official reviews out now so I didn't want to spend ages going into detail, this is just a fairly brief rundown of what I think of the phone.
This is comfortably the best phone out right now, even the superior app store on the iPhone 4 doesn’t pull it level with this, it is a marvel of engineering when you consider how thin and light it really is.
I love it. Buy one.
you know i was going to make a similar post to all the complainers then realised I also rely on my phone to wake me in the morning (SGs2 not arrived yet - still on my desire which doesnt squeal when fully charged).
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I did forget to turn wifi off i suppose but shouldn't make too much difference.
