Stuntman
Android Expert
So, back in July 2012, I had to get a new phone. The battery on my HTC Desire Z was going bad and I was unable to get a new battery in time for my vacation. Under tight time constraints, I decided to burn my early upgrade eligibility on the Samsung Galaxy S III. I was planning on waiting until another new keyboard slider became available, but alas had to pull the trigger. I decided on the SGS3 because the HTC One S did not have an SD card slot and 16GB was insufficient for my needs. The only keyboard slider available was the Motorola XT860 which was already a year old and only less than a year newer than my Desire Z.
My first impression of the phone is that it is huge. Going from a 3.7" screen to a 4.8" one is a really big change. I can't really wrap my hand around it. It is also difficult to reach all points of the screen when trying to operate it with one hand. I have gotten more used to it after 3 months. I also arrange my home screen so that my most commonly used objects are not on the left side. Still, there are some things I really need to use 2 hands for.
The large screen size does make viewing more comfortable. On occasion, I would watch some tennis matches on my phone. It is a little more comfortable on the eyes. Personally, I've gotten used to a 3.7" screen. I never felt the need for a larger one. I do like it, but it don't feel like I couldn't go back to a smaller screen.
What I really like with regard to the screen and software is the auto-brightness feature. On my old DZ, I never used auto-brightness because it was usually too bright and there was no way to calibrate it. Although there is no way to calibrate it on the SGS3, I find that the auto-brightness is calibrated exactly the way I like it. I used to use a widget that allows me to manually control the brightness. With the SGS3, I no longer need it and it saves a spot on my home screen.
The biggest difference I noticed is the increased speed of this phone. Scrolling home screens is much smoother. I use a lot of widgets and I noticed my old phone wasn't as smooth as I fill up my home screens. On the SGS3, it's smooth as the default home screen. I am now running the Nova launcher and configured it to have 5 rows of icons as well. Another indication of the speed of the SGS3 is web browsing. On my old DZ, I used the Opera Mini browser mostly because it is faster than any fully featured browser. I no longer need Opera Mini to make my phone surf quickly. I use Chrome as my default and it feels as fast as old phone running Opera Mini.
There are a number of nice subtle things about the SGS3. ICS and/or TouchWiz includes an auto-rotate setting in the drop down notification bar. I had to use a widget on my old phone for this. Also, the SGS3 can display the battery power percentage in the notification bar which I also used to use a widget to get this info.
With 32GB of storage, I can now put all of my music on my phone. Before, I kept my old Nokia N97 for music. It had an FM transmitter for playing music over my FM car stereo and other FM radios. Now that I have BlueTooth connectivity in my car, the FM transmitter is not needed for my car at least. BT on the SGS3 worked a bit better than on my N97. It displays song titles and other info where as on the N97, it only displays the time of the track. I still have an issue with the SGS3 and BT connectivity with my car. For some reason, it doesn't handle the situation where I walk away with my phone while it is connected to the car's BT audio. The BT connection doesn't reestablish properly and only rebooting the phone fixes it. It doesn't happen often. Usually it happens when my wife is in the car and turns it on to roll down the windows while I run into a building to do some quick errand.
Battery life seems a bit better than my old phone. My estimate would be that I can surf the internet for about 5 hours straight before I run out of power. My phone can usually last all day. Now that I am using my phone for music now, I am using more power than my old phone. Occasionally, I will have to charge it part way through the day. It is the same with my other smartphones I have used.
There were a number of things that I do miss from my old DZ. I happen to be a fan of Sense and HTC. The HTC's Twitter and Calendar widgets are among the best widgets I have seen. I have had to find substitutes for these widgets which I feel are not quite as good. The smart dialler on the DZ is better than the dialler on the SGS3. On the DZ, when I press a few digits, the DZ narrows down the numbers from my contacts based on both the phone number and the spelled out name on the T9 dial pad and presents me with a list that shrinks with each digit I enter. On the SGS3, I have to press another button to get to a short list. Overall, I find I have to press more buttons on the SGS3 to dial a number compared to the DZ.
One of the most annoying things about the SGS3 is with regard to my music. Actually, it's with the album covers. I have my music collection on my PC. I have used Windows Media Player to get the album covers for the songs. That process took some time for me to do. When I copy these songs to my DZ, all of the album covers show up in the music player app. When I do the same on the SGS3, none of them do. I ended up having to download anther app to get the album covers. It doesn't get all of them automatically and I have to manually search for about 10% of them which is a significant amount of time.
The last thing that I really miss is the physical keyboard. I thought that I could get used to a touch screen keyboard. I have tried SwiftKey and ultimately settled on Thumb Keyboard. Still, I find I am making a lot more mistakes than on a physical keyboard. I expected that it would take me a month to get used to a new keyboard. With my last two phones (landscape keyboard sliders) and my Transformer tablet with keyboard dock, this is how long it took me to get used to the new keyboards. It's been 3 months and I am still not used to typing on my SGS3. I'm just not satisfied with touch screen keyboards.
These things that I miss about my DZ made me feel a little disappointed in the SGS3 and appreciate HTC a bit more. Overall, I do like the SGS3 as it is a very solid phone and good high-end device. I probably would have picked the HTC One X had it been available on my carrier. Due to the timing and short time frame I had to get a new phone, I felt that taking the hardware upgrade option with my existing carrier and getting the SGS3 was the best of the limited options I had at the time. For anyone getting a new phone, I would recommend the SGS3. For anyone who likes HTC Sense, I would recommend they check out the HTC One X.
My first impression of the phone is that it is huge. Going from a 3.7" screen to a 4.8" one is a really big change. I can't really wrap my hand around it. It is also difficult to reach all points of the screen when trying to operate it with one hand. I have gotten more used to it after 3 months. I also arrange my home screen so that my most commonly used objects are not on the left side. Still, there are some things I really need to use 2 hands for.
The large screen size does make viewing more comfortable. On occasion, I would watch some tennis matches on my phone. It is a little more comfortable on the eyes. Personally, I've gotten used to a 3.7" screen. I never felt the need for a larger one. I do like it, but it don't feel like I couldn't go back to a smaller screen.
What I really like with regard to the screen and software is the auto-brightness feature. On my old DZ, I never used auto-brightness because it was usually too bright and there was no way to calibrate it. Although there is no way to calibrate it on the SGS3, I find that the auto-brightness is calibrated exactly the way I like it. I used to use a widget that allows me to manually control the brightness. With the SGS3, I no longer need it and it saves a spot on my home screen.
The biggest difference I noticed is the increased speed of this phone. Scrolling home screens is much smoother. I use a lot of widgets and I noticed my old phone wasn't as smooth as I fill up my home screens. On the SGS3, it's smooth as the default home screen. I am now running the Nova launcher and configured it to have 5 rows of icons as well. Another indication of the speed of the SGS3 is web browsing. On my old DZ, I used the Opera Mini browser mostly because it is faster than any fully featured browser. I no longer need Opera Mini to make my phone surf quickly. I use Chrome as my default and it feels as fast as old phone running Opera Mini.
There are a number of nice subtle things about the SGS3. ICS and/or TouchWiz includes an auto-rotate setting in the drop down notification bar. I had to use a widget on my old phone for this. Also, the SGS3 can display the battery power percentage in the notification bar which I also used to use a widget to get this info.
With 32GB of storage, I can now put all of my music on my phone. Before, I kept my old Nokia N97 for music. It had an FM transmitter for playing music over my FM car stereo and other FM radios. Now that I have BlueTooth connectivity in my car, the FM transmitter is not needed for my car at least. BT on the SGS3 worked a bit better than on my N97. It displays song titles and other info where as on the N97, it only displays the time of the track. I still have an issue with the SGS3 and BT connectivity with my car. For some reason, it doesn't handle the situation where I walk away with my phone while it is connected to the car's BT audio. The BT connection doesn't reestablish properly and only rebooting the phone fixes it. It doesn't happen often. Usually it happens when my wife is in the car and turns it on to roll down the windows while I run into a building to do some quick errand.
Battery life seems a bit better than my old phone. My estimate would be that I can surf the internet for about 5 hours straight before I run out of power. My phone can usually last all day. Now that I am using my phone for music now, I am using more power than my old phone. Occasionally, I will have to charge it part way through the day. It is the same with my other smartphones I have used.
There were a number of things that I do miss from my old DZ. I happen to be a fan of Sense and HTC. The HTC's Twitter and Calendar widgets are among the best widgets I have seen. I have had to find substitutes for these widgets which I feel are not quite as good. The smart dialler on the DZ is better than the dialler on the SGS3. On the DZ, when I press a few digits, the DZ narrows down the numbers from my contacts based on both the phone number and the spelled out name on the T9 dial pad and presents me with a list that shrinks with each digit I enter. On the SGS3, I have to press another button to get to a short list. Overall, I find I have to press more buttons on the SGS3 to dial a number compared to the DZ.
One of the most annoying things about the SGS3 is with regard to my music. Actually, it's with the album covers. I have my music collection on my PC. I have used Windows Media Player to get the album covers for the songs. That process took some time for me to do. When I copy these songs to my DZ, all of the album covers show up in the music player app. When I do the same on the SGS3, none of them do. I ended up having to download anther app to get the album covers. It doesn't get all of them automatically and I have to manually search for about 10% of them which is a significant amount of time.
The last thing that I really miss is the physical keyboard. I thought that I could get used to a touch screen keyboard. I have tried SwiftKey and ultimately settled on Thumb Keyboard. Still, I find I am making a lot more mistakes than on a physical keyboard. I expected that it would take me a month to get used to a new keyboard. With my last two phones (landscape keyboard sliders) and my Transformer tablet with keyboard dock, this is how long it took me to get used to the new keyboards. It's been 3 months and I am still not used to typing on my SGS3. I'm just not satisfied with touch screen keyboards.
These things that I miss about my DZ made me feel a little disappointed in the SGS3 and appreciate HTC a bit more. Overall, I do like the SGS3 as it is a very solid phone and good high-end device. I probably would have picked the HTC One X had it been available on my carrier. Due to the timing and short time frame I had to get a new phone, I felt that taking the hardware upgrade option with my existing carrier and getting the SGS3 was the best of the limited options I had at the time. For anyone getting a new phone, I would recommend the SGS3. For anyone who likes HTC Sense, I would recommend they check out the HTC One X.