| Review of the Samsung Galaxy S II |
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The Samsung Galaxy S II is the successor to the wildly popular Galaxy S line of Android smartphones. Because I already own a Samsung Galaxy S Captivate (running the Firefly custom ROM) I felt that it was the perfect phone to compare the new one to. From what I’d already heard, I expected the S2 to be a vastly better phone, but as you’ll discover, it’s only an incremental improvement over the older model. Last Updated: 27-Jul-2011 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
RF Performance
Click on this link for a full description of
RF Performance, and how to interpret it.
To test RF sensitivity I went with Howard Chu to the IKEA store in Etobicoke on
The Queensway. That had previous been a terrific place to test RF capabilities
of phones because no network could penetrate the lower level of the building.
Sadly (well okay, it’s really good news) Rogers, Bell, and Telus now have a site
inside the store and their coverage is great. As for testing, we were able to
use the underground level of the parking structure on the south side of IKEA.
There we could fade out the signal from Rogers and thus provide a way to compare
two phones in a fringe signal area.
Rather than test the phones using a voice call, as I’ve done on all previous
tests to date, I concentrated instead on data connections. HSPA data is far more
demanding than voice and it provides a wonderful window into the quality of the
service both on the uplink and the downlink. The better the signal, the faster
the data rate. The Captivate
and the S2 were both tested on Rogers and the results were astonishingly close.
If there was any difference at all between the two phones, it was barely
detectable.
The Captivate is hardly a strong contender in the RF sweepstakes, and so the S2
falls pretty much in the same mediocre camp. I was rather disappointed by the
results, because Samsung had apparently done some work on the antenna design in
the new phone and moved it from the bottom to the top. In the real world then,
it seems the modifications had very little impact.
Audio Performance
Click on this link for a full description of
Audio Performance, and how to interpret it.
Sound
Quality: The S2 sounds almost identical to the Captivate in every way,
and so I’ll just cut-and-paste my comments concerning the audio from the review
of the Captivate:
Compared to the Nokia N95 (my previous
day-to-day phone) some voices sound a tiny bit harsh, but others sound
positively astounding, and so this one is a bit difficult to call. The N95
sounded good, but if you read my original review of it you’ll see that I was a
bit leery of giving its tonal balance unreserved praise. The same can be said of
the Galaxy S, but for slightly different reasons. I’ve been impressed with the
tonal balance of the Galaxy S far more often than I’ve been disappointed, but I
wish it had a bit more low-end.
While the tonal balance was a tough call, the sound reproduction was not. The
Galaxy S is exceptional in this respect, beginning with its startlingly natural
reproduction of all nuances of speech. This is backed up by the most eerie lack
of hiss and background noise I’ve heard in quite some time (a trait it shares
with the Samsung Focus). When I talk to people on the Galaxy S the only thing I
hear is their voice. No hiss, no crackling, no distortion. If there is no
background noise at your callers end and they aren’t speaking, it’s almost like
the phone is turned off.
Earpiece Volume: The Captivate already had fairly
good earpiece volume, but the new S2 improves on that SLIGHTLY. The big
difference is a less pronounced sweet spot, and so you don’t have to struggle as
much to find just the right spot against your ear to get maximum volume.
Outgoing Audio: Outgoing sound quality is very good
in a quite environment, but as background noise increases the phone attempts to
blot out that noise. In the process it does enormous damage to your voice. This
seems to be a flaw common with many Samsung models, though surprisingly the
stock Captivate ROM offered a way to turn off the noise suppression, but it
doesn’t seem to be in the S2 (nor is it in the Firefly ROM).
Speakerphone: The speaker in the S2 is virtually
identical to the one in the Captivate. It isn’t any louder and it doesn’t sound
any cleaner. The only real difference is that it has been moved from near the
top of the back side of the phone to the bottom of the backside. I didn’t find
that this helped in any meaningful way. Like the Captivate it provides
relatively mediocre volume and sound quality during speakerphone operation, but
it does provide surprisingly good audio for listening to music or the soundtrack
of videos.
Support Features
Ringer Volume: Again, because the speaker doesn’t
differ from the Captivate, the ringer provides identical performance. As I said
about the Captivate, the performance of the ringer is tied directly to the
quality of speaker in multimedia situations. In that respect the S2 does well,
but not nearly as well as the Nokia N95’s much-louder stereo speakers. I put my
loud ringer.mp3 file onto the phone and it does a much better job of cutting
through the background noise than the silly musical ringtones provided natively,
but it still isn’t anywhere near as loud as the same ringtone on the N95.
Fortunately, putting custom ringtones on an Android phone is dirt simple.
Display: The S2 comes with a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED
Plus screen with a resolution of 800 x 480. This is the same resolution as the
Captivate, but on a screen that’s slightly larger (the Captivate has a 4-inch
display). The big claim-to-fame in the new Super AMOLED Plus, over that of the
Super AMOLED used on the Captivate, is that it no longer uses the PenTile
sub-pixel arrangement.
While all of the reasons given as to why the traditional sub-pixel layout of the
Plus display is superior to the PenTile layout of the previous-generation
display, the results are virtually undetectable in the real world. Text DOES NOT
look sharper and you can read ultra-tiny text on the Captivate just as well as
you can on the S2. To be fair however, my custom ROM does include a tweak that
claims to alter the anti-aliasing used. While I couldn’t say for sure I noticed
an improvement when I installed the custom ROM, it might have had an impact on
my assessment in this case. At the same time it does demonstrate that the
PenTile sub-pixel layout of the Captivate is not the cause of less-readable or
blurrier text.
I also noticed that Samsung greatly increased the contrast of the display, which
results in a loss of visible detail in dark areas of photographs. While the
extreme contrast works well in icons and text, it just doesn’t cut it in
photographs and videos. They also jacked up the color saturation, which seems
odd given that a commonly-heard complaint about the previous-generation Galaxy S
phones was that they seemed a little too over-saturated. Fortunately there is a
way to adjust the color saturation on the S2 and you CAN turn it down so that it
at least matches on the older phone.
At maximum brightness, the S2 display is no brighter than the Captivate’s
display. This means that it’s no easier to see in directly sunlight than it
predecessor.
So the new screen doesn’t really seem to offer anything substantial over that of
the old one. It is slightly larger, which for some is a plus, but otherwise it
offers no real-world advantages, no matter what fans may try to argue should
theoretically be the case.
Icing on the Cake
Camera: The S2 now sports an 8-megapixel camera
that takes the place of the 5-megapixel unit on the old Galaxy S phones. I took
numerous photographs with S2 and my Captivate and the truth is that the extra 3
megapixels don’t amount to a hill of beans. The real advantage to the S2 comes
in the form of better camera software, which provides a much more user-friendly
interface and improved exposure calculations. So overall, your pictures are
better exposed and better color-balanced, but the sharpness and overall clarity
are not much different.
On the video side of the equation however, the S2 really shines. It provides
1080p HD video vs 720p on the old models. Not only does it provide greater
resolution, it also does so with smoothness that is nothing short of terrific.
Whereas the old Galaxy S phones would skip slightly on fast pans, the S2 can
handles pans with the aplomb of a dedicated camera. The sensor is also a bit
more sensitive, meaning you can shoot video in lower light than was previously
possible.
Processor: As with the Motorola Atrix I reviewed a
few months ago, the S2 has a dual-core processor. That doesn’t mean your apps
will run faster, but it does provide a markedly smoother user interface. One
especially astounding improvement is in the performance of Flash. Embedded
videos on web pages run as smooth as silk, and the existence of flash video
within a page seems to have no impact on the smooth scrolling of the screen. How
much of this can be attributed to the dual-core processor and how much can be
attributed to 1 GB of RAM (vs 512 MB in the older Galaxy S phones) is difficult
to say, but the results are hard to ignore. The same is true of Google Maps,
which scrolls with astounding smoothness, even in satellite mode. Generally
speaking the U/I is noticeably snappier and the overall the graphics are
rendered more smoothly.
There is no longer an issue with LAG because Samsung wised up and dumped the RFS
file system in favor of Ext 4. Most of the “Lag Fix” mods for the old Galaxy S
models entailed replacing RFS with Ext 2 or Ext 4. Without getting into a long
discussion on how Flash memory differs from hard drive storage, suffice it say
that writing to Flash is far more complex than writing to a hard drive. How you
do it can have a huge impact on performance.
Odds and Ends: A number of small changes were made
to the phone’s design that some may find welcome, while other may find a pain.
For example, the USB/charge port was moved from the top of the phone to the
bottom, but the 3.5 mm headset jack stayed on the top. For those of us who use
the phone as a source of music in our cars, this is a perplexing design decision
that has cables coming out of the top and the bottom that makes putting the
phone down in the car a huge problem. I find that having both on top (as is the
case on my Captivate) is a perfect solution. Whether they put the jacks on the
top or the bottom, it would have been nice if they’d put on the same ends.
Conclusions
The new Samsung Galaxy S II is a mixed bag. It provides clearly better
performance, especially in rending Flash content, and the 1 GB of RAM should
mean that the phone virtually never has to dump anything to free up space (which
occurs commonly on phones with 512 MB or less). On the other hand, it offers
very little improvement in other areas and it adds new annoyances such as the
top-and-bottom connectors.
If you already own a Samsung Galaxy S (Captivate, Fascinate, or Vibrant) you may
not find much reason to trade-in your existing phone. The new S2 is an
incremental improvement over the old phones to be sure, but you don’t gain all
that much and if you wait another 6 months you’ll probably be able to buy a
phone that puts the S2 to shame.
However, if you currently don’t own an Android phone, or you have something
that’s a few generations old and you just have to get something new, then you
can’t really go wrong with the S2. It is without a doubt one of the most
powerful Android phones on the market at this time.
