Samsung Galaxy S3
Here are my thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy S3 after about a months worth of use.
The good bits:
- Hardware
- Android 4.0
- Looks
The bad bits:
- Touchwiz skin for Android
Thoughts:
I love the phone. It is powerful, really thin, great look to it and Android Ice Cream Sandwich is a brilliant evolution in the operating system. What gets my goat is the, frankly, poor quality skin on top of the stock Android system by Samsung called Touchwiz. It is inconsistent with itself which taints the experience of the phone. For example the calendar app isn’t called Calendar. It is called S Planner? Ok, that’s not too bad but when you open the app it is a UI mess and has a completely different colour scheme to the other default apps for no apparent reason. The result is that it is jarring to use the calendar.
Secondly I find that the home screen redraws itself occasionally. I don’t know if this is a bug or that I have too many widgets there but coming from an HTC Sense phone where this never happened it is quite strange. Sometime the redraws take a large amount of time which is incredibly strange given that the quad core processor is supposed to be one of the best currently available.
Overall I’m not too bothered since I know I will root this phone and apply a custom rom at some point. All my gripes about the phone are on the poor software that Samsung applied to the phone not the actual phone itself or the hardware. I will go for Cyanogenmod 10 when it is available.
There are some nice features of the Samsung provided software that I like. Chiefly it is the lock screen gestures which is a nice replacement to the lock screen apps that were possible with HTC Sense. The eye recognition feature that detects if you are still looking at the screen and prevents the screen from dimming or locking if you are is great (when it works).
As a quick comparison, I’ve had a chance to compare Touchwiz with HTC Sense 4 on the HTC One S and the difference is staggering. Clearly the best skin for Android, in my opinion, is HTC Sense. It is so rich and consistent that you forget you are using an Android phone and instead believe it is entirely an HTC Sense phone. Touchwiz on the other hand let’s you know you’re using Android and Touchwiz and the line between them is horrible.
Conclusion: 8/10 by default. 9/10 or a full 10 if you find a custom rom that makes the user experience consistent.