Samsung Galaxy S III unpacked

On Thursday, Samsung just announced their latest mobile phone, Galaxy S III, at a press event in London. It has been months since it was first announced and it is finally here. There has been quite a few improvements or modifications made on this particular device and it is pretty amazing.

Looking at the hardwares, the screen is about half an inch bigger than the Galaxy S II. It has a 4.8 inch Super AMOLED screen, which is a lot bigger than the the iPhone 4S 3.5 inch display. Not only is the screen bigger, the phone itself got thinner and lighter (8.6 mm thick and weighing 133 g). The screen is using PenTile Matrix and the resolution is 720 x 1280 pixels with 306 ppi pixel density. It also has Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A9 with Mali-400MP GPU. The camera on this phone has 8 MP and can take photos of 3264x2448 pixels. In the back of the phone, you'll find 2,100 mAh battery and a microSD and microSIM card slots. The phone's hardware features are outstanding but I gotta say the design of the phone is quite disappointing.

Now if we take a look at the software, you're going to see a lot of cool new features Samsung added to the Galaxy S III. It's running Ice Cream Sandwich version of Google's Android OS but Samsung built these features on top of it:

-"Smart Stay" This feature prevents the phone from dimming automatically as part of the power saving routine. It uses its front facing camera to detect whether someone is looking at the phone and determines whether to dim the phone or not. Now you won't have to go through the troubles of tapping your phone so it doesn't lock.

-"S Voice" It's just like 'Siri' on iPhone 4S. It's just a voice recognition and response technology. Some people still find this technology useless because you always have to confirm your commands. But let's say you're driving and you need to check your email or send a message to your friend; just say "Hi Galaxy" and it'll go into the S Voice mode. However, unlike Siri, S Voice does not talk back to you; it just shows up on the screen, meaning you have to actually look away from the road to see the response.

-This next feature seems pretty cool. While you're texting someone you may find yourself wanting to continue the conversation with that person on the phone. With the Galaxy S III, you can just put the phone by your ear while it's still on the text message screen and it'll call the person.

-"Smart alerts" This is also a pretty cool feature. If you ever leave your phone unattended for a little bit, like if you out for a jog or a quick trip to a mart, and while you're gone the phone rings, the smart alerts will tell you the phone rang when you come back and pick it up by vibrating. I know some people instantly check the phone or does not even leave it in the first place but I think there are a lot of people like me that might find this feature useful.

Overall, I can see that this latest product has a great potential and it has shown a great improvement from its predecessors. I'm really not feeling the design though, it looks like the phone was made in the year 2005. It's a really cool phone but it's not leading the market or anything, just appropriate for the current technology.