Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II

The likes of Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II make it easy to get carried away. But wait a minute. There’s nothing quite like the Galaxy II. The brightest stars on the smartphone scene have graced our homepage, but this one is trying to eclipse them all. The Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II is in no mood to share – the spoils or the spotlight. With a spec sheet like that, it’s a beast of a droid. Even in today’s viciously competitive market, the Galaxy S II has so many firsts to be proud of. Samsung’s very own Exynos chipset, the unmatched Super AMOLED Plus screen and the ultra-slim body only begin to tell the story. Key features

* Quad-band GSM and quad-band 3G support * 21 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA support * 4.3" 16M-color Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen of WVGA (480 x 800 pixel) resolution * Android OS v2.3.3 with TouchWiz 4 launcher * 1.2 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU, Mali-400MP GPU, Exynos chipset, 1GB of RAM * 8 MP wide-angle lens autofocus camera with LED flash, face, smile and blink detection * 1080p HD video recording at 30fps * Dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 b, g and n support * GPS with A-GPS connectivity; Digital compass * 16/32GB internal storage, microSD slot * Accelerometer, gyroscope and proximity sensor * Standard 3.5 mm audio jack * Charging MHL microUSB port with USB host and TV-out (1080p) support * Stereo Bluetooth v3.0 * FM radio with RDS * Great audio quality * Extremely slim waistline at only 8.5mm and low weight (116g) * 2MP secondary video-call camera * Full Flash support and GPU-acceleration for the web browser permit 1080p flash video playback * NFC support (optional, not without a software update) * Document editor * File manager comes preinstalled * The richest video format support we have seen Design and display

With a hint of a chin at the back, and a hardware menu key flanked by a couple of touch-sensitive buttons the Galaxy S II does bear resemblance to its predecessor. However the slimmer bezel around an even more impressive screen does take looks a level up.

The weight is also kept impressively low – at the mere 116g, the Galaxy S II is 3 grams lighter than the original Galaxy S. The back has also been improved with the glossy blue-dotted plastic replaced by the finely textured surface we’ve come to know from the Samsung S5830 Galaxy Ace. This particular finish is practically immune to fingerprints and quite pleasant – and secure – to hold.

Some metal on the body might’ve suited the flagship but, since it would’ve upped the weight, we are willing to live with the second best option.

Besides, no matter what finish the design team would have come up with, all eyes would always be focused on the 4.3” Super AMOLED Plus screen anyway. It retains the WVGA resolution of its predecessor, but uses a conventional matrix with three-subpixels per pixel instead of the PenTile matrix of the first-gen Super AMOLED displays.

PenTile screens were often criticized for lacking in sharpness, due to the lower number of total subpixels, but the truth is that the change is hard to notice. Of course, if you look close enough you’d be able to tell the two apart, but in everyday usage the difference is subtle at best. Another criticism against the first Super AMOLED screens was color saturation. There didn’t seem to be a general consensus on that matter – some loved it while others thought it was too much. Well, Samsung obviously paid attention and did the best that could be done in the situation – they gave users a choice.

The Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II has a new screen setting called Background Effect. It lets you adjust saturation with three available modes: dynamic, standard and movie in descending order of color intensity.

The final key asset of the Super AMOLED Plus display is its power efficiency. Being able to turn individual pixels off, those screens don’t need all the backlighting all the time and thus consume less energy, especially when darker themes are used.

All in all, Super AMOLED Plus screens and mobile phones are really meant for each other. It’s a perfect match that reveals all the strengths (unrivaled image quality, perfect viewing angles, energy efficiency and great sunlight legibility), without suffering the traditional OLED weaknesses (higher production costs for larger units and shorter life).

We really can’t see any other screen on the market that could come close to the brilliance of the Galaxy S II unit, save for Samsung’s own Infuse 4G, which packs an even larger (4.5”) Super AMOLED Plus screen. Much to our surprise the SIM card was hot-swappable. Sure, the Galaxy S II will politely ask you to restart when you take out the active SIM, but if you ignore that, insert another card and then restart the radio by turning airplane mode on and back off you will still have fully functional telephony with the new card. Different carriers are no problem either.

The 1650 mAh battery is quoted at 18 hours and 20 minutes of talk time and up to 710 hours of stand-by in 2G networks. In 3G, it’s 8 hours 40 minutes of calls and 610 hours of standby. Of course numbers so high can only be achieved in a lab environment. They have little to tell us except that Samsung has probably tweaked the power consumption of the cellular radio. Unfortunately that is by far not the most power-hungry part of the device.

In a real life scenario, it gave us over two days of moderate to heavy use (about an hour of browsing, some photos, several calls and half an hour of using the other phone features daily). Image and video editors

You also get an image editor and a video editor preinstalled. The image editor handles the basics like image rotation, cropping (no resize though) and adjusting brightness/saturation/contrast. You can also make selections (using a smart tool similar to the Quick selection tool in Photoshop). It’s not nearly as accurate as the Photoshop tool though.

You can apply effects too but the one feature that caught our eye was Context fill – similar to Photoshop’s Context-aware fill tool but, again, not nearly as accurate. Impressive video player

The video player offers a simple list-based interface. It displays all video files stored on the phone and you can sort them by name, date, type or size. The video player also remembers the last viewed position of the video, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. There’s 5.1 channel virtualization and subtitle support. You can change font size and adjust subtitles sync (move them back or forward a few seconds) but there’s no option to manually load subtitles, they have to have the same filename as the video file to load.

Very good audio output

The Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II might have lost a mm around the waist, but it certainly hasn't lost its voice. The performance of the smartphone in our audio quality test is pretty good overall and it's really impressive in the active external amplifier part.

So when the Galaxy S I9100 has no resistance applied to its line-out it got excellent scores all over. There are really no weak points to its performance here and since its pretty loud too we are left with no other option but to give it an excellent mark.