Samsung announces the Galaxy S III Android smartphone

At a press event in London today, Samsung announced what we have been talking about for six months now, the Galaxy S III 4.8-inch Android smartphone. Just like the predecessor Galaxy S II, the Galaxy S III will be the smartphone model which we will use as a base for comparison for the next year.

As you can see from the comparison image below, the Galaxy is quite larger than the Galaxy S III. The smartphone has a more curved design which differentiates it from all the older Galaxy S models. There is no doubt that the large display looks attractive, but we are not sure if a 4.8 inch display is for everyone. Something that could prevent consumers with small hands from buying the Galaxy S III. On the other hand, the larger 5.3-inch Galaxy Note has sold in 2 million in South Korea alone since the launch 5 months ago. According to Samsung, the Galaxy S III bezel is reduced to a minimum, so it might be acceptable after all for those with small hands.

It is the first time we have seen a Super AMOLED display on a 4.8 inch display. The resolution is HD 720 x 1280 which has become a standard by high-end Android devices. Apple is still at 640 x 960 pixels and all Windows Phone 7 smartphones has a fixed resolution of 480 x 800, and we can promise you that you do not want to go down in resolution when you have used a HD smartphone for a while.

Samsung has kept the camera megapixels down at 8. That is perfectly acceptable for us as long as image quality has improved. We noticed that Samsung has added a few new camera features in addition to the welcomed Zero Lag shutter delay. Burst shot will capture 20 continuous photos and the Best photo will select the best of eight photos for the user. We also noticed HDR listed in the specifications, but are not sure if this is a real-time feature applied during capture, or something applied to the image by an app in a post-processing action.

The Galaxy S III has a powerful 2100 mAh battery and while Samsung did not reveal any figures, they said that the talk time and standby time is above average for touch smartphones. This remains to be tested by independent reviewers, but a 2100 mAh standby time should be above average as this is measured while the display is turned off. What we are most interested in is how the Galaxy S III will perform during daily usage. 1-day usage is a minimum requirement for a brand new smartphone model, but it remains to see if we can experience up to two days of normal usage.

Samsung has included S Voice which is a Siri-light functionality. The phone will recognise many full sentence commands such as "what is the weather forecast for London this week". Other voice commands are: "snooze alarm", "volume up/down", "send text message", "capture photo" and more. This is all part of what Samsung calls Natural Interaction. An example of such behaviour is when a user start to write a text message, but decide to call the recipient instead, he just need to lift the smartphone to the ear and a function called "Direct call" will dial the number instead.

Galaxy S III also introduces a nice feature called Pop up play that allows the user to view video in a small frame so that the user can do other tasks such as reading incoming messages at the same time.

Samsung Galaxy S III highlights

• Size: 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm
• 133 gram
• Networks: GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900, HSPA+ 850/900/1900/2100 and 4G which is dependent on market
• 4.8 inch Super AMOLED touch display, 720 x 1280 pixels resolution (305 PPI)
• 8 megapixels camera, auto focus, burst shot, best photo, still capture while video recording, HDR
• 1.9 megapixels front camera, HD video capture with Zero Shutter lag, BIS
• 1080p video capture
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n with Wi-Fi Channel Bonding which doubles the Wi-Fi bandwidth.
• Bluetooth 4.0
• GPS and GLONASS
• NFC
• 1.4 GHz Quad-core processor
• Wireless charging
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
• Sensors: Accelerometer, RGB light, digital compass, proximity, gyro and barometer
• Storage: 16GB, 32GB or 64GB. (64 GB available soon). Expandable with microSD card
• Batter: 2100 mAh
• Pop up play
• Smart stay, Social tag, Group tag, Face zoom, Face slide show
• Hyperglaze cover