Difference Between Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3

For the leading vendors in the world, there is always a flagship product that is known by every Tom and Dick in the industry. A product of that caliber needs careful planning on all stages of its life cycle. The most important thing is to make sure that the product has no visible flaws. It is needless to say that the product will only address a niche market since products that intend to satisfy needs of a unified market means a bad product. There is but a perfect example of this in the marketing theory, where a company has built a hybrid of lorry and van with a bonnet and pink in color to satisfy the needs of father, mother, son and the daughter of the family which turned out to be a total failure. Thus, following that, vendors make sure that their product is concentrated for a niche market. When we come to the smartphone market, the leading vendors are Samsung, LG, Sony and Apple. They all have their flagship products, and the product we are to talk about today is the flagship family of Samsung. The Galaxy family has earned the majority of credit endowed upon Samsung in their success of smartphones. They started with Galaxy S and continued the legend with Galaxy S II and now they have announced Galaxy S III.

Today at London in their ‘Mobile Unpacked’ event, Samsung uncovered the legendary addition to the family and our first reaction was to explore the differences it has compared to its predecessor. Thus, this comparison will be with Samsung Galaxy S II in order to identify the apparent differences, as well as not-so-apparent differences between the two kings.

Samsung Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III)

After a long wait, initial impressions of Galaxy S III haven’t disappointed us at all. The much anticipated smartphone comes in two color combinations, Pebble Blue and Marble White. The cover is made with a glossy plastic that Samsung called as Hyperglaze, and I have to tell you, it feels so good in your hands. It retains a striking similarity to Galaxy Nexus rather than Galaxy S II having curvier edges and no hump at the back. It is 136.6 x 70.6mm in dimensions and has a thickness of 8.6mm with a weight of 133g. As you can see, Samsung has managed to produce this monster of a smartphone with a very reasonable size and weight. It comes with a 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that features a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi. There’s apparently, no surprise here, but Samsung has incorporated PenTile matrix instead of using RGB matrix for their touchscreen. The image reproduction quality of the screen is beyond expectation, and the reflex of the screen is also rather low.

The power of any smartphone lies in its processor and Samsung Galaxy S III comes with a 32nm 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9 processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset as predicted. It also accompanies this with 1GB of RAM and Android OS v4.0.4 IceCreamSandwich. Needless to say, this is a very solid combination of specs. The initial benchmarks of this device suggest that it’s going to top the market in every aspect possible. A significant performance boost in the Graphics Processing Unit is also ensured by the Mali 400MP GPU. It comes with 16 / 32 and 64GB storage variations with the option of using a microSD card to expand the storage up to 64GB. This versatility has landed Samsung Galaxy S III with a huge advantage because that was one of the prominent disadvantages in Galaxy Nexus. As predicted, the network connectivity is reinforced with 4G LTE connectivity that varies regionally. Galaxy S III also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity and the built in DLNA ensure that you can share your multimedia contents in your big screen easily. S III can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot enabling you to share the monster 4G connection with your less fortunate friends. The camera seems to be the same available in Galaxy S II, which is 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash. Samsung has incorporated simultaneous HD video and image recording to this beast along with geo tagging, touch focus, face detection and image & video stabilization. The video recording is at 1080p @ 30 frames per second while having the ability to video conference using the front facing camera of 1.9MP. Besides these conventional features, there are a whole lot of usability features that we can eagerly await.

Samsung is boasting a direct competitor of iOS Siri, the popular Personal Assistant that accepts voice commands named S Voice. The model exhibited didn’t have a sound model of this new addition, but Samsung guaranteed that it would be there when the smartphone is released. The strength of S Voice is the ability to recognize languages other than English, like Italian, German, French and Korean. There are a lot of gestures that can land you in different applications, as well. For instance, if you tap and hold the screen while you rotate the phone, you can go directly in to the camera mode. S III will also call whoever the contact you were browsing when you raise the handset to your ear, which is a good usability aspect. Samsung Smart Stay is designed to identify whether you’re using the phone and switch the screen off if you’re not. It uses the front camera with facial detection in order to achieve this task. Similarly, Smart Alert feature will make your smartphone vibrate when you pick it up if you have any missed calls of other notifications. Finally, Pop Up Play is a feature that would best explain the performance boost S III has. Now you can work with any application you like and have a video playing on top of that application on its own window. The window size can be adjusted while the feature worked flawlessly with the tests we ran.

A smartphone of this caliber needs a lot of juice, and that is provided by the 2100mAh batter resting at the back of this handset. It also has a barometer and a TV out while you have to be careful about the SIM because S III only supports the use of micro SIM cards.

Samsung Galaxy S2 (Galaxy S II)

Samsung is the leading smartphone vendor in the world, and they have actually gained much of their popularity though the Galaxy family. It’s not just because Samsung Galaxy is superior in quality and uses cutting edge technology, but it’s because Samsung is also concerned about the usability aspect of the smartphone and make sure that has the due attention. Galaxy S II comes in either Black or White or Pink and has three buttons at the bottom. It also has the same curved smooth edges Samsung gives to Galaxy family with an expensive looking plastic cover. It is really light weighing 116g and ultra-thin too having a thickness of 8.5mm.

The renowned phone was released in April 2011 and came with a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A9 dual core processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset with Mali-400MP GPU. It also had 1GB of RAM. This was top notch configuration back in April, and even now only a few smartphones surpass the configurations. As I have mentioned earlier, this itself is good enough reason to dig the previous advertisements to be replayed. The operating system is Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread, and luckily Samsung promises an upgrade to V4.0 IceCreamSandwich soon. Galaxy S II has two storage options, 16 / 32 GB with the ability to expand the storage using a microSD card upto 32 GB more. It comes with 4.3 inches Super AMOLED Plus Capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and a pixel density of 217ppi. While the panel is of superior quality, the pixel density could have been somewhat advanced, and it could have featured a better resolution. Nonetheless, this panel reproduces images in a great manner that would catch your eye. It has HSDPA connectivity, which is both fast and steady along with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and it can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot which is really attractive. With the DLNA functionality, you can stream rich media directly to your TV wirelessly.

Samsung Galaxy S II comes with 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash and some advanced functionalities. It can record 1080p HD videos at 30 frames per second and has Geo-tagging with the support of A-GPS. For the purpose of video conferences, it also features a 2MP camera on the front bundled with Bluetooth v3.0. Besides the normal sensor, Galaxy S II comes with a gyro sensor and the generic android applications. It features Samsung TouchWiz UI v4.0 which gives a good user experience. It comes with 1650mAh battery and Samsung promises a talk time of 18 hours in 2G networks, which is simply amazing.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Samsung Galaxy S III brings a whole new set of features to the table. This has always been the predecessor-successor relationship in Samsung Galaxy family. Thus, it is needless to say that Galaxy S III is definitely better than Galaxy S II. But we are not at liberty to discuss the pricing schemes as of now, and your key question will be whether S III is worth for the buck. I’d say it does even if I don’t know the pricing schemes just yet for S III has many awesome features I’ve been looking forward to have. For starters, the performance boost in S III is imminent. If you feel a little sluggish with your S II, then it’s probably the time to move on to S III. With the enhanced usability aspects of Galaxy S III, we at DB have no doubt that it would rank the top of the smartphone world for the coming couple of months.