Published on May 25th, 2012 | by Jerry

The Samsung Galaxy S III review

The Samsung Galaxy S III had its fair share of rumors and excitement, but when it was announced it was almost as if you could hear the crowd all silently going “aaaawe.” The SG3 does bring some heavy hitting specs to the table, but as of late, cutting edge specs just isn’t enough to win the hearts of most any more. Its all in the design, and this is where the SG3 shows its lack of advancement.

So, we come to one of the GS III’s not-so-secret weapons: its Exynos Quad processor, which is the only other engine beyond NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 to bring more than two cores to a mainstream handset. If you need further evidence of just how bleeding-edge the new 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos is, you only need to look at its transistor size. Shrinking transistors is an expensive, painstaking business that only high-volume companies like Samsung can afford, but for the end user it broadly translates to a capacity for more performance with less battery drain — yes, that’s both at the same time; one of the physical world’s rare win-win situations. The GS III’s silicon is a fabricated with a 32-nanometer process, which is significantly smaller than last year’s generation of 45nm phones and also smaller than Tegra 3′s 40nm process. The only other mainstream mobile phone processors that benefit from such shrinkage are Intel’s 32nm Medfield, which is put to good effect in the Lava Zolo for example, and Qualcomm’s remarkable 28nm Snapdragon S4, which powers phones like the HTC One S and the LTE version of the HTC One X.

The best thing about the Galaxy S III? That it’s more than the sum of its parts. Individually, the slightly larger and better display, stronger processor and faster camera may not sound that special, but in daily operation they score major combo points: gathering up all the best bits of the older Galaxy S II and re-working them into a solidly modern (read: mid-2012) device.
And the worst thing about the GS III? No matter how hard it tries, it just isn’t greater than the sum of the HTC One X’s parts. Last year’s Galaxy S II landed on an unsuspecting world that was devoid of predators, but the GS III has no such luxury. The Snapdragon variant of the One X has similar computing power, battery life and photographic credibility, but it also has a much better user interface that sticks more closely to the guiding ethos of Android 4.0. It also has a more forward-looking physical design, while the GS III sticks to the tried and true styles of old. Perhaps the biggest sacrifice you’d make by going for the One X over the GS III is the loss of the cheap storage offered by the microSD card. That’s a painful thing to give up, but given how deeply we feel about the need for Android to move forward and not get stuck in a Gingerbread-flavored groundhog day, we’ll take the hit.