Samsung Galaxy S3 Review

Connectivity

The new Galaxy is a quad-band GSM handset with quad-band 3G support and has Wi-Fi with hotspot capabilities and Wi-Fi Direct, GPS with A-GPS support and GLONASS, USB OTG, DLNA, external storage upto 64GB, Bluetooth 4.0, TV out via MHL and NFC, which covers all your connectivity options. Call reception has been handled pretty well and in our test call, the reciepent could hear our voice crystal clear. The speaker is loud enough to help you out, if you’ve got a lot of background noise. The stock keyboard is good enough to get the job done and the host of third party keyboards, along with the large screen ensure that typing in portrait mode is done without any typos.

Plenty of connectivity and gesture controls

Browsing through image heavy websites didn’t pose problems of any kinds, as panning and zooming was smooth and lag free. Needless to mention, the stock browser supports flash. Social networking integration has been handled extremely well and Samsung’s social tagging feature did recognize and instantly tag our subject. Our outdoor tests proved that GPS locking was prompt and quick. Overall, the Galaxy S III is equipped with everything you’d need to communicate efficiently with your outside world.

Misc. features

Samsung may have gone a bit overboard with their new ‘S’ moniker for all their gesture-based features but hey, if Apple can do it, then why not Samsung. First and foremost is S Voice, a Siri-like voice assistant with the only difference being, S Voice will actually obey your command and it gets it right almost every time. This was much better than what Siri was capable of, at least with Indian accents. However, we’re dedicating another article to that for a fair comparison. As mentioned earlier, Social tag lets you quickly tag people in your photos, provided they are in your phonebook. The software also learns faces and after tagging Karan in two photos, the third time it automatically presented a small bubble under the photo asking if that’s the same subject it tagged earlier. Once confirmed, you can send the photo in an e-mail to the person or persons in the photo.

'S' features are fun but not essential

Direct call is another neat feature that lets you instantly call someone, while typing a message by just placing the phone to your ear. Smart stay uses the front camera, along with the sensors to keep the screen on for as long as you're looking at it. This didn’t really seem to work all that well, as the screen would dim after looking away and back again at the phone. We will be investigating this over the course of the next few weeks, but for now, it’s not something ‘I-must-have’ on my next phone. Smart alert is something, which simply notifies you through a light vibration, if you pick up your phone after a while and have pending messages or missed calls.

Almost-boderless screen is quite an achievement

Other gesture-based features, include muting music and alarm by placing your hand over the screen, taking a screenshot by gracing your palm over the screen, tilt-to-zoom in the gallery. Samsung has also added their own suite of apps, like S Memo, S Suggest, All Share Play for DLNA, Chat On, along with the default list of Google apps.