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| Samsung Galaxy SIII or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rectangles with Rounded Corners |
Well it's high time that I expanded my repertoire of posts to include one of the other subjects our blog covers. Technology, especially smartphones, has become as intertwined in our lives as drinking water. You can go a while without using one, but you'll be darned if you don't get really thirsty for some of that sweet sweet gadgetry after a while. And once you make the move from what the carriers are calling "basic phones" to smartphones (or as I like to think of them, exobrains), you'll have a hard time going back. My first true smartphone was the Motorola Droid X, which I acquired two years ago. Back when a phone that size was gargantuan. But I didn't mind. In fact, I prefer larger phones that are concussions waiting to happen should they ever become airborne. With my two year contract being up, I shopped around and was amused that most new smartphones are either as large, or larger than the Droid X. After researching specs, reviews, discussing the newest generations of phones possessed by friends and colleagues, toying with Verizon's in-store models, and consulting no less than three Ouija boards, I settled on the Samsung Galaxy SIII.
If you're like me, a smartphone is many things. A toy. A GPS. A newspaper. A way to answer personal email. A way to answer work email. A scheduler. An alarm clock. An mp3 player. A camera. A calculator. An answer to every question I will ever have. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, on rare occasions it's also a phone. They really are exobrains aren't they? An early prototype of our eventual cyborg evolution. Soon we will plug those bad boys into our bodies and we will never leave home without them again. If you've ever forgotten yours at home, I imagine there was a moment of panic involved and all day you felt the gravitational pull of your distant smartphone more than you felt the Earth's.
But I digress.
Obviously there are lots of sites out there that objectively compare products of the various smartphone manufacturers. Processor specs, camera specs, memory, speed tests, battery life, and a whole host of other things. These criteria are important, but they need to coalesce into a device that works for you and feels right when you are using it. Am I, as a mere human being, going to notice some of the finer differences in processor speeds? Will I choose one phone over another based on the fact that it has two HD cameras with the highest DPI? Never mind the fact that DPI is one of those misleading marketing terms thrown at you when it makes your product look better.
No, those types of things won't do. I like to review a product holistically, realistically, with overall form, fit, and function in mind. How does it appeal to the human senses. At the end of the day, does it do it's job and do it well? Even though I have already made my choice, perhaps this information will assist in making yours.
Touch
The body of the SIII itself is thin for a phone of its size. Just shy of 9mm. It makes up for it, however, in the length and width. It is on the verge of being too large for me to single-handedly hold while manipulating the touch screen with my thumb, as most people tend to do. The rest of the phone's body is slick. No, I mean literally slick. I went out and got the silicone protective cover so that I could one-hand it while preventing it from expressing it's strong attraction to the ground. The cover itself has done it's job well in the meantime. No slips and a handful of drops have been survived.
The button placement makes me scratch my head a little. While the buttons at the bottom face of the phone make sense like any other phone out there, the volume-up button and power/screen off button are situated directly across from each other. The natural squeeze one uses to push one of the buttons will also activate the other. I learned this the hard way at work until I started gripping the phone slightly differently in order to prevent this from happening. A little adaptation never hurt anyone.
The screen is probably as large as I could ever want one to be. Any larger and it would become a mandatory 2-handed phone to operate with accuracy. Even with a protective screen cover, the texture of the screen is still smooth and responsive. The SIII also has various gestures and actions that can be executed to do thing like take a screen shot (swipe with blade of your hand across screen), shoot to the top of your email (quickly tap the top of the phone 3 times), and jump straight to the camera from the lock screen (pinch screen and rotate phone 90 degrees). I'll admit, I don't use most of them, and Samsung is certainly following Apple's lead on this type of interaction, but the ones you do use are very...nifty.
Sight
The phone as a whole is pretty appealing to the eye. Thin, rectangular, and rounded as we've come to expect of all phones, unless you're Apple. In which case, God help you if you're a manufacturer producing phones that are rectangular with rounded corners.The screen is mighty fine in my opinion. Pretty quick and downright purty. Colors are super crisp and it's HDness makes many an app candy for your eyes. The two buttons that light up along with the screen next to the main button sort of made me feel like a secret agent, knowing that there were more buttons hiding on the phone. Not really, I was just kidding about that secret agent bit. Just saying that if James Bond used the Galaxy SIII to shoot lasers or remote detonate a fancy car, that would be the cat's pajamas.
The dual cameras are a nice addition that I'm sure will sweep through the market. The days of self-shots that are off-center are over! Your narcissism will be pleased. I haven't tried any apps that allow you do communicate with people using the front-facing camera, but that's because NO ONE USES THEM THAT WAY. At least no one within my circle of nerds and non-nerds. Apple and Android owners alike. Maybe it's cause we don't have pissing contests with our gadgets, like the phone manufacturers and service providers would have us believe. Maybe it's the fact that I'm unwilling to pay for extra data when a computer and webcam will do just as well, if not better. Call me pragmatic.
Sound
The speakers of the phone are probably as loud and clear as any other phone I've used. When actually using the phone as a phone, this is pretty important to me. When I can still hear someone on the other end when there's noise in the background. It also doesn't give me the impression that I'm listening to a Youtube video through a tin can which is all I care about. Headphones and auxiliary cables also function just as well on this phone as any other I've used for music/videos/games in and out of the car.
On a related note, the microphones on the SIII seem to be more sensitive than my last phone. Someone on the other end of a call can usually tell if I'm in a moving vehicle when not using a blue-tooth headset. The speaker phone has come in handy when talking to family with my wife and I sitting next to each other. And we haven't felt the need to constantly shift possession of the phone so that we both come in clear for the other caller.
Smell
OK, I know. When it comes to smartphones, smell is usually not among the criterion which guides your decision making. But have you ever really smelled your phone? Not even once? Go ahead and smell it. Go on. I'll wait up.
If you actually smelled your phone, shame on me. You probably didn't smell anything, and I hope you jolly well didn't. If you did, in fact, smell anything, you should review your daily hygiene habits and/or stop storing your phone in the toilet.
Taste
Now that you've sniffed your phone, go ahead and lick it to experience your phone using all 5 facets that make up the human experience. Don't drool on it too much and have a napkin handy.
If you actually licked your phone, shame on you this time. I sure as hell didn't lick mine, weirdo.
Aggravations
As with any phone, there are always some bugs, either with hardware or software. Here are the one's I have run into over the past few months. Decide for yourself if they would make or break your experience with any smartphone.
As far as hardware goes, there actually aren't any major gripes. The cameras work well, which I am always concerned about over the long term. The screen hasn't scratched or cracked despite taking a few tumbles. The biggest aggravation was that the shape and smoothness of the back of the phone really makes it tricky to hold at an angle with even a moderately loose grip. If you like one-handing your phone all the time, a protective cover with friction is a must.
Software, however, has been the source of one large rage-inducing bug. It happened after about a month and I'm about to go back to Verizon to get their take on it since I couldn't fix it with suggestions from the forums. Basically, Samsung's skin/interface called TouchWizard stops working and prevents you from doing anything on the home screen except drag down the notification tab. I've learned that I can hold the main button to bring up "recently used apps" to continue using my phone normally, provided I rifle through a few critical apps whenever I boot up the phone. I've been told that the ultimate fix is to bring it in to Verizon, and that newer units do not have the issue. But I'm Irish and stubborn. And a tad bit masochistic. So, I've developed a ridiculous and unnecessary routine to keep my phone usable despite this huge kick in the UI nuts.
Final Word
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy SIII was not a disappointment. I'm not kidding when I researched and got testimonials from people I knew and whose opinions I trusted before choosing. Despite the grace period I had to bring back the phone, I tend to own my decisions thoroughly. It does do everything I want in a smartphone and it truly is quick with the 4G LTE data connection. The other little nuggets that have been marketed like the S Beam and Android Beam come in handy on the rare occasion. But when you do use those capabilities, you'll never want to go back to the alternative. Is this an iPhone killer (related)? Probably not. But it's a worthy foe if you like what Android has to offer as opposed to the walled garden of Apple.
Sláinte
-WF
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