The Nexus One was a ground breaking device, that will go down in Android’s history as the first 1ghz device to hit the scene. Some 15 months later many would argue that there still wasn’t a device on the market that makes them jealous… until perhaps now. For 3 or 4 years before the Nexus One, the best mobile CPU’s could manage was 600mhz, so we should perhaps be grateful it’s only taken just over a year for the next big leap in mobile CPU development, the dual core CPU.

Samsung weren’t the first on the dual core scene though, LG snuck in a month or so ahead of them with their 2X. Samsung bided their time, made some adjustments (originally it was to be dual 1ghz cores) and released what they hoped would be a killer device. As you would expect from Hemorrdroids on such a big release, we were at the front of the queue to find out if they’d been successful!

Jump to:
Hardware
Camera
Software
Battery
Conclusion

Samsung would appear to have a bit of a Marmite thing going on.  Some people think they’re cheap and plasticy, some people love their build quality and stylish designs.  I will declare now, I tend to side with the latter of these two types. I loved my Samsung Galaxy S and moved quickly back to Samsung when they released the Nexus S, to me the best Android device… until now.

Those of you that watched my unboxing on YouTube will know how blown away when I was as I took this particular Samsung from its plastic and cardboard womb.  I’m not the only one though, pretty much everyone I’ve passed it to has been amazed by the design and build of this beautiful phone.  At only 116g it almost seems impossible what great tech Samsung have squeezed in to this 8.5mm thick device.

Hardware

The screen is 4.3 inches and Samsungs new Super AMOLED+ 800 by 480 screen, which claims to have 50% more sub-pixels than their previous screens, all protected by sturdy gorilla glass.  As with all previous Samsung screens, it’s bright, vibrant and holds up well even in the brightest of sunlight.  Under the hood you’ll find a 1.2ghz dual core processor, back up by 1gig of RAM and in my case, 16gig of storage.  There is of course still a MicroSD slot which would mean you could go up to 48gig of storage very easily.  You’d be hard pushed to find better specs on any device right now and the results are fantastic, allowing me to flow through apps and screens with no sign of any lag or delays at all.

The speaker built in is another major selling point and another place the Samsung Galaxy SII now leads the way. I don’t use the speaker for listening to music, I almost always have a better option for that, but what I do use it for is listening to podcasts and the volume and clarity the SII provides for that is really quite surprising.  (See the video in Benchmarking, which includes a speaker test.)  The original SGS and Nexus S both had pretty good speakers, far better than HTC devices, but the Galaxy SII now puts both of these to shame.  How such loud speech comes from such a small device is really quite impressive.  I listen to podcasts while making my breakfast and getting ready for work and in the past there was no way I could hear the phone if I was boiling the kettle.  I can hear the SGSII just fine.  In fact, I can pretty much hear it even when I’m showering, something which has require a plug in speaker before.  Amazing!

Camera

The camera is an 8mp autofocus lens with an LED flash, which gives great looking results in a variety of conditions.  If you click here, you can see a few sample shots from a variety of different devices from over the last year.  They range from the Galaxy S, which looks a little washed out and generally a little foggy, to the Desire HD, which possibly is too saturated.  You might argue that the shot taken on the Galaxy SII is actually the best looking one…

You can see more sample shots taken by the Galaxy SII here.

As you would expect of a top end device these days, the SGSII has a front facing camera capable of 2MP shots. With Google Talk just having been released that will allow video chat, this will perhaps be slightly more relevant than it has been in the past.

Video

I’m still not totally sold on 1080p video from a mobile phone.  It makes me think about the megapixel race there used to be with compact digital cameras.  Just because a camera could take 10MP stills, didn’t mean they would look any good.  Iphone owners used to have a legitimate point when they said they didn’t care their 3G only took 3MP shots, they still looked a lot better than most 8MP camera phones.  In reality, most people only use mobile devices for putting content onto Facebook or Twitter and you really don’t need that size of image to show your mates what you had for breakfast.

Having said that, the quality of the SGSII’s 1080p is pretty good, having watched some of it on my 40″ Samsung Plasma TV.  Take a look at these three sample videos -

Something else that rather impressed me is you can pinch to zoom, while filming!  It’s a digital zoom, so it can be done when recording in HD, but take a look at this sample, filmes in 720×480, allowing 4x digital zoom while recording -

The camera software itself is nicely put together too.  In the corner is a Settings cog icon, which allows you access to all the camera settings, or menu will bring up an option to edit which settings are available down the left hand (or top) and the camera display.

Add to this the simple editing software I mentioned earlier and the Galaxy SII would seem to be a very good option for a Facebook addict.

If you’re wanting to show your handy work to visitors, the SGSII once again has a couple of things up it’s sleeve.  Not only can you plug a special HDMI cable into the USB out at the bottom of the device, but you can use DLNA to stream any footage you’ve just taken, direct to your DLNA capable TV!  Observe -

It couldn’t be any easier!

Software

As many manufacturers like to these days, Samsung have once again put their own interface over the Gingerbread 2.3.3 backbone of Android.  TouchWiz is probably one of the less popular interfaces, but Samsung have put a little extra effort into their latest incarnation.  Watch this short video of how it works -

As I mentioned in the video, I’d removed all the ‘Samsung Hub’ software, but I also forget to show you guys the screen capture built in by pressing ‘Power & Home’ simultaneously and also the basic video editing app, which allows you to patch multiple videos together and save them. Both of these features are welcome additions and could be very useful to some people.

Samsung have also included the fantastic voice recognition software of Vlingo in the Galaxy SII. Double tap the home key and it will automatically open. Say ‘Navigate to Watford’ and Google Navigation springs into action and off you go! The only down side for me, I usually use Double press Home to open Power Strip, and I can’t see a way of turning of voice commands.

Components such as contacts and calendar are not as flashy looking as their HTC Sense counterparts, but very functional non the less.  I particularly like the week view in the calender which makes it very easy to see when all you important events are happening.

I cannot tell you how easy Kies Air coupled with taking screenshot by pressing power and home makes posting screen shots!

Keyboard

As with the original SGS, the SGSII comes with Swype built in. While it’s a very clever system, swiping your thumb round the letters and it working out what word you want, I had actually grown to like the speed and accuracy of the standard Gingerbread keyboard. For thumb input alone, I don’t think Swype can be beaten, but it can get frustrating if you rush your message and it’s getting words wrong, or some of the smaller words can be very similar, like ‘put’ and ‘out’. Quite often you’ll be having these mixed up.

Still, if you take the time to learn the tricks of Swype, it really is a very fasy input method.  To get to use it, just hold you thumb in a text box, select ‘Input method’ from the pop up box and select Swype.

Benchmarking

If you haven’t already seen it, I’ve done a head to head, the Samsung Galaxy S against the Nexus S, take a look -

If we look at our usual two benchmarking apps, we can see the SGSII fairs very well against recent phones we’ve tested-

Linpack

• Galaxy SII – 46
• Nexus One (Froyo) – 42
• Desire HD – 39½
• Xperia Play – 38½
• Nexus S – 14
• Galaxy S (Speed Fix’d) – 9.9
• HTC Desire – 7
• Dell Streak – 4

Quadrant

• Galaxy SII – 3,000
• Galaxy S (with speed fix) – 2,200
• Nexus S (No textures) – 2,100
• Desire HD – 1860
• Xperia Play – 1526
• Nexus One (FroYo) – 1,300
• Galaxy S – 800
• HTC Desire – 520
• Milestone – 350

The Quadrant score is the best I’ve ever seen, out of the box.  Sure, I’ve seen some devices hacked and with custom kernels, but quite often the hack almost cheats Quadrant to get over 3,000, the SGSII does this out of the box!  Amazing!

I would also say, these aren’t just meaningless numbers in this case, I think you really can feel the OS running smooth the whole time.  With previous Android’s there would seem to be times it would pause for a second or so before doing whate

Battery

With a 1650mAh battery, the Galaxy SII stands a chance of showing decent battery life.  Many where concerned that a dual core device with such a huge screen would suck a battery dry before you can even log in to  Facebook.  After my first couple of days of use, I was worried they might be right.

I then cheated a little.  Root was achieved and I removed the Samsung Hub apps, which I suspected (especially Social Hub) where draining my battery by constantly checking for updates, and all of a sudden I was getting 20 hours easily on only a 3rd charge cycle.

Generally I don’t like to judge a battery until I’ve used it for 10 days, so at this point all I will say is me and countless others are finding battery life to be pretty good.  In ten days I’ll come back and edit in my findings.

**EDIT 5th June** I’m finding the battery life on the Galaxy SII to be fantastic.  Some people are reporting problems and claiming only 8 hours life, but I recently went from 8am to 11pm, a fairly normal day, mainly on 3G and was still above 50% when I went to bed!  On more than one occasion the phone has cruised past 24 hours with ease.

Hackability

It’s a good start that Samsung haven’t locked the bootloader on the Galaxy SII.  Already a rooted kernel has been produced which is applied quite simply with Odin, which owners of the original Galaxy S will already be familiar with.  I would hope it’s now only a matter of time until we see overclocked, undervolted kernels as well as whole ROM’s.

Keep your eyes on Hemorrdroids.net for updates in this respect.

Raju’s Thoughts

Samsung has managed to pack so much into such a slim and light weight device, the Galaxy SII demonstrates a great engineering feat. The Super AMOLED Plus screen looks amazing, and the phone is incredibly snappy, there is no doubt that this device is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Conclusion

In some ways I’am really not happy with the Samsung Galaxy SII – As I now feel bad for anyone I’ve recommended to buy any other phone in the last 6 months… this device really is that good!!  The design is ground breaking, it has a massive ‘wow factor’, people just can’t believe how light this thing is when they first hold it in their hands.

The screen is one of, if not the best I’ve seen, the speaker surpasses all others, TouchWiz isn’t even as bad as it used to be and the two cameras would take some beating!  Put a custom Launcher on and you’ve removed perhaps the weakest point of the phone.

Personally I find it hard to say anything bad about the Samsung Galaxy SII.  There are some folk that don’t like the light slimline design, fair enough, but if you liked the original SGS, you’ll love this updated version.

Check out the latest price for the Samsung Galaxy S II on all networks

More Galaxy SII reviews here.