Samsung's aim tonight was to persuade everyone that this was the biggest Android handset launch of the year - overshadowing anything that happened back in March at Mobile World Congress – and it wasn’t taking any chances. The event may have been grandly titled Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012, but there was only one product coming out of the box. No tricksy Apple naming schemes here either, as the Samsung Galaxy S3 was duly unveiled within five minutes.
Samsung Electronics President JK Shin revealed the refreshingly predictable name
Supporting that unveiling was the cavernous main hall of Earls Court, a small orchestra, a truly gigantic cinema screen and Suzi Perry, previously of the Gadget Show. After all that, the admittedly impressive little handset could have seemed a little underwhelming, but it stood up well to the hyperbole.
It really was a very, very big screen
A GALAXY OF SPECS
There's a lot to say about the new Samsung Galaxy S3, but let's start with those all important specifications. While minute in comparison to Samsung's huge cinema screen at the event, the 4.8in display on the new S3 is a whopper, just edging out the 4.7in screen we saw recently on the rather excellent HTC One X. In practice of course there's little to nothing between the two displays in size. The next device up in Samsung's line is the Galaxy Note with its 5.3in screen, but the S3 feels far smaller than that goliath and is very pocket friendly.
Slim and curvy, but not groundbreakingly so
The S3 measures 137x71x8.6mm, compared to 134x70x8.9mm for the HTC One X, except for the extra couple of milimetres at the top there's nothing in it, and aesthetic details like the width of screen bezels are very similar too. There's nothing in it when it comes to weight either with only 3g seperating the heavier S3 from the HTC One X.
It's a compact handset considering the large display
The Samsung Galaxy S3's stand out attribute is its 4.8in super HD AMOLED screen. This OLED-based display has a headline resolution of 1,280x720 pixels, however it's not a Plus-branded display, so it we're assuming it doesn't have have red, green and blue subpixels for every pixel, reducing colour accuracy and so the actual resolution of the display.
This close-up shows the Pentile pixel structure of the display – click to enlarge
On the plus side, the high headline resolution does help offset many of these problems; plus it does have all the usual advantages of OLED over LCD, with deep blacks, vibrant colours and lower-than-usual power consumption. For a Pentile display it also looked remarkably clean and crisp when using it as you would normally – with none of the colour casts seen on lesser examples.
It's the lack of the word Plus that is key to that announcement
BEYOND THE STARS
Speaking of power consumption and battery life, the Samsung Galaxy S3 should be a winner. Peeling off the wafer thin rear cover (more on that shortly) revealed a whopping 2,100mAh removable and replaceable battery. We applaud the fact that you can get into the phone and switch out a faulty or worn-out battery yourself. Plus at 2,100mAh it's far bigger than the S2's 1,650mAh battery, or the HTC One X's 1,800mAh effort.
A whopping great battery, and a removable one at that, makes the S3's compact dimensions all the more impressive
As well as the display, the battery is powering a quad core chipset. The name and speed of this wasn't announced, but it's believed to be Samsung's own Exynos 4 Quad which should run at 1.4GHz. It will be interesting to see how this stands up to more common brands, such as Qualcomm and Nvidia, when it comes to application and graphics performance.
Add more memory if needed via the micro SD card slot
Also behind the rear cover is a micro SD card slot, so you can expand upon the 16, 32 or 64GB of internal storage. With SDXC cards you can add in theory up to 64GB of additional storage. As usual with modern handsets, it takes a micro SIM.
SNAPPING THE STARS
Samsung has upgraded the capabilities of its camera from the S2, if not the headline 8-megapixel figure. The main addition is a great burst mode, that can snap up to 20 photos at a rate of 3.3 snaps per second. Camera start up times have also been reduced to under 1 second from switching to the camera to first shot. It was hard to get any idea of image quality on the peculiarly lit show floor, but we'll bring you some head-to-head examples as soon as we can.
Burst mode and enhanced photo-sharing capabilities are the stand outs from the new camera
Taking good photos is only half the game with a smartphone camera though. The Galaxy S3 also has some powerful-looking functions for getting more out of your photos afterwards. Samsung have added facial recognition technology, similar looking to Google's own Picasa software (maybe something we'll see built-in to Android 5?). It learns to recognise individuals in your contacts list and offers to share photos with them automatically by MMS or Text (we're guessing that social networking options will follow soon).
The new front camera now shots in HD
The front camera has been beefed up as well, and can now shoot 720p video at 30fps, so you can use it for high-definition video chat – if you've got the bandwidth upstream to send it. Both the front and back cameras now benefit from back-illuminated sensors, and so should gain a big boost in low light conditions compared to their predecessors.
A PLASTIC GALAXY
The new Samsung Galaxy S3 is slender and curvaceous, but despite Samsung's talk of its Hyperglaze finish, you can't get away from the fact that this is a very plastic phone. While Apple has its glass-finish on the iPhone 4S, HTC has oxidised metal on the One S, and Nokia uses a polycarbonate lozenge shape on the Lumia 800, it's hard to get equally excited about the S3's finish.
The design and build of the S3 was its least impressive facet
Although we applaud the removable back panel and its practicality, the bendy, wafer-thin piece of plastic that you almost peel off the rear doesn't shout next-gen handset at us. We're sure that Samsung knows what it's doing, and the S3 will likely wear well, but it simply doesn't quite have the wow factor that some other recent handset have had. In short, we expected more.
A MULTITUDE OF FEATURES
As well as all the usual smartphone stuff, Samsung was at pains to point out all the additional unique features that you get with the Galaxy S3. Now we didn't get a good chance to try these in the rugby scrum of the demo stands, but some should be very intriguing if they work flawlessly.
A simple but god one that we did get to try was Smart Stay. With this, the front-facing camera prevents the screen from going into standby if someone if looking at the phone. This means you can linger over a particular passage in a webpage, book or email, without having to constantly remind the phone you don't want it to shut down.
Another clever idea is Direct Call, this automatically dials people when you raise the phone to your ear. For example, if you're half way through a text or email, and think it will be easier to call them, just raise the phone to your ear and it will dial that persons default number immediately.
Talk to your Galaxy S3 with S Voice
Samsung has also introduced its own Siri-style voice commands with S Voice. This accepts natural language commands in much the same way as the iPhone 4S. We couldn't get it work on the very noisy show floor, but the onstage demos looked pretty good. We look forward to comparing the two head-to-head soon.
LAUNCH FOR THE STARS
The Samsung Galaxy S3 will launch in the UK and Europe on the 29th of May in a 3G HSPA+ guise – with the US getting a 4G LTE model come June. No pricing was available at the event, but we imagine it will be around 35GBP a month on contract. We're really looking forward to getting to spend more time with the unique extra features, and to give that new Xynos chip some benchmarks.
Will the Galaxy S3 be as big as Samsung is suggesting?
The Samsung Galaxy S3 didn't blow us away in the end, it's not going to blow the competition out of the water based on our first impressions. However, its combination of a good screen, big battery and slim dimensions still mean it has got a very good chance of taking the number one spot.
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