Samsung Galaxy S 2 (International) Review - The Best, Redefined
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on September 11, 2011 11:06 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Galaxy S II
- Exynos
- Mobile
Display
One of the highlights of SGS2 is its 4.3“ SAMOLED+ display, which we’ve seen before on phones like the Droid Charge, and a 4.5” version of on the Samsung Infuse 4G. Though the panel is the same as what we’ve seen in the past, the controller and software are different.
As a quick refresher, Samsung has now passed through three variants of AMOLED. The first was straight up AMOLED which we saw on phones like the Nexus One and Incredible in a 3.7“ WVGA format with RGBG PenTile. The next was Super AMOLED, which was 4.0” WVGA with PenTile and adorned Galaxy S. The main improvements with Super were integration of the digitizer with top glass and use of optically transparent adhesive to reduce air gaps and subsequent fresnel reflections that add glare and reduce transmissivity. The net effect of that was improved outdoor readability and potentially some power savings from losing less light to back reflections.
Left: Super AMOLED Plus, Right: Super AMOLED
So now we’re up to Super AMOLED Plus (SAMOLED+), so what does this add? Well first, size is now 4.3“ or 4.5” (depending on what tickled some carrier’s fancy), and resolution is still WVGA (800x480), but the big change is that PenTile RGBG is gone. In its place is a standard RGB stripe. I’ve been rather critical of RGBG PenTile in the past purely because it emulated higher effective resolutions by using fewer subpixels (2 per logical pixel) and as a result had a characteristic grain in some circumstances. On AMOLED especially it wound up being distracting more than it was novel, and on 4" displays, it seemed that subpixels were visible with the naked eye and average visual acuity. Furthermore there were some issues with an offset pattern like RGBG and the UI direction Android was taking. Single pixel wide UI elements, some text, and solid primary colors were the main culprits where RGBG could, without considerable scrutiny, look characteristically grainy.
So why is it gone now? The big reason is probably because a corresponding move to a larger panel increases the size of those subpixels, and no doubt 4.3“ WVGA with PenTile would look even more grainy despite having the same ”effective“ resolution. Four inches was pushing it for a grid that started life at 3.7”, and 4.3“ probably was a step too far. In addition, subpixels are also correspondingly larger in the 4.3” RGB stripe (and the process mature enough now) that certain color subpixels being more prone to failure than others (and this needing to be sized appropriately) should no longer be a concern. Samsung also claims that power drain has been reduced in SAMOLED+ by almost 20% from the previous generation, no doubt partially thanks to fabrication maturity and changes made that come with better understanding of the process.
The same benefits apply with SAMOLED+ as the previous generations though - absolutely black blacks due to the subpixels not emitting any light in the off state, and potentially super vibrant colors (if calibrated properly). Unfortunately the few issues we saw with SAMOLED+ on other phones continues here as well - white point that varies with brightness level, a chance of overheating, and a bit of lingering sharpening.
Let’s start with the first one, which a lot of users have dubbed ‘yellowing’. For a while now we’ve been gathering white point data at various brightness levels. Obviously we did the same thing with SGS2.
I’ve measured brightness (full-screen white and black) and white point at six brightness levels on the SGS2. Before I measured the SGS2, I noted that subjectively there’s the most visible change in color temperature after you dip below the 50% brightness mark. To that extent, I took more measurements below that halfway point. I also tossed in the Samsung Infuse 4G (which we received but didn’t formally review) which has a 4.5" SAMOLED+ display that no doubt is identical to what’s headed to the Sprint and T-Mobile SGS2 variants, though with a different display controller. I also tossed in the Samsung Galaxy S 4G as a SAMOLED data point, and the Nexus One as an AMOLED data point, just so you can see how things have changed over the now 3 generations of AMOLED panels Samsung has shipped.
The data bears out the effect that numerous subjective parties have noticed - SGS2’s display temperature gets warmer at lower brightnesses, and varies between 7328K at 0% brightness and 8600K at 100% brightness. It’s enough of a delta in white point to be unfortunately very visible to the naked eye. There’s also an interestingly large amount of variance between the three SAMOLED+ phones we’ve measured, though the same shape curve is just translated around for the Infuse, the Charge appears to be very blue everywhere. Bear in mind again that the SGS2 uses a different display controller than the previous generation of devices.
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numberoneoppa - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Guys, that mysterious notch you write about is not for straps, it's for phone charms, and it's arguably my favourite feature of samsung phones. (In korea, phone charms can be used for more than just cute things, one can get a T-money card that will hang here, or an apartment key).Tishyn - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
I spend hours every week just browsing through reviews and tests comparing devices and vendors. This is one if the most interesting and most comprehensive review I've read for a veery long time.I especially enjoyed the rendering part and how it relates to the ultra mobile device market. Thumbs up!
milli - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Brian / Anand, why are you so reluctant to test chips from this company? ZiiO tablets, sporting the ZMS-08, are available for a while now and i'm sure Creative would send you the new Jaguar3 tablet (ZMS-20) if you guys would ask for it.The ZMS-20 has 26 GFlops ... faster than anything you've tested till now. The ZMS-40 coming in Q4 doubles that number!
I'm an old school IT technician and I for one don't understand your lack of interest. The GPU's in these chips are based on technology that Creative acquired with the 3DLabs purchase.
rigel84 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Just a quick tip: You can take a screenshot by pressing the power and home button at the same time.If you double tap your home button it will bring the voice talk feature.
While watching video clips just press the power button to disable the touch sensitive buttons.
Swipe your finger to the left on contact name to send him a message
Swipe you finger to the right on the contact name to dial the contact.
To see all the tabs in the browser just pinch inside twice :)
If you experience random reboots when you drop it on the table, or if you are leaning towards things or running, then try to cut a piece of paper and put it under the battery. It happens because the battery shortly looses connection to the pins. If you check XDA you can see that many people has this problem, and I had it too. I was experiencing many random reboots whenever I had it in my pocket, but after I pit a piece of paper below the battery they all disappeared.
A few things...
- GPS is horrible if you ask me. Unless I download the data before with gps-status then it takes ages. Mostly 15-30 seconds with 2.3.3 (no idea if the radio got updated in the release)
- Kies AIR is HORRIBLE! It's on pair with realmedia's real player from 10 years ago. Crash on crash on crash and sluggish behavior.
- I don't know whether it's the phone or not, but I've been missing a lot of text messages after I got my Galaxy S2. I'm on the same net, but along with the poor GPS reception I'm suspectiong the phone :(
- There is a stupid 458 character limit on textmessages, and then they are auto-converted to an MMS message. There is a fixed mms.apk on XDA (requires root) or you can download something like Go SMS Pro (still free) on the market, which removes this stupid limit.
ph00ny - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
OddI haven't seen any posts about the battery disconnect issues and if you've been browsing the xda forum, probably saw my thread about dropping my phone on concrete twice...
As for Kies AIR, i've used it twice and my expectation was low to begin and it wasn't that bad. Some things were definitely slow but it's a good start
-GPS for me has always been solid. I even used it on multiple trips in less than ideal location, not a single glitch even with shoddy cell reception.
ciparis - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
I've been using Sprint's SGS2 (Epic 4G) for less than a day, but already there are some annoying points which I'm surprised aren't mentioned in this review:1) The digitizer lags behind finger movement.
In the web browser, when your finger moves, there is a disconnected rubber-band effect before the screen catches up with your finger. This is visible in the browsing smoothness video as well, and it's very noticeable in actual use. Coming from an iPhone 4, it feels cheap and broken.
2) Back/Forward navigation often ignores the previous scroll point.
If you spend some amount of time reading a page you arrived at from a link (it seems to be about 10 seconds or so), hitting back doesn't take you back where you were previously reading from -- instead of returning you to the page position where the link was, it drops you at the top of the page. This makes real web usage tedious. On the Sprint, the timing seems to be related to when the 4G icon indicates sleep mode: hit back before the radio sleeps and you are returned to the right spot. In actual use, this rarely happens.
3) The browser resets the view to the top, even after you've started scrolling.
When loading a page, there's a point in which the page is visible and usable, but it's technically still loading (which can go on for quite a awhile, depending on the page). It's natural to start reading the page and scrolling down, but typically the phone will randomly jerk the scroll back up to the top of the page, sometimes several times before the page is done. This is unbelievably annoying.
I suppose expecting an Apple level of polish prior to release is unrealistic, but Samsung seems hell-bent on positioning themselves as an Apple-level alternative; even the power brick looks like they took the square Apple USB charger, colored it black, and slapped their logo on it. The point being, they're inviting direct comparison, and it's a comparison their software team isn't ready to deliver on -- certainly not out of the box.
ciparis - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - link
How are you supposed to use this phone if the keyboard is covering up the text fields, there's no "next" button to get to the next field, you can't see what you're typing, and there's no button to make the keyboard go away?Case in point: go to Google News and click on Feedback at the bottom of the page. There's no scrolling room at the bottom, so the keyboard obscures the fields; I was unable to send feedback to Google that their news site was opening every link in a new bowser window on a mobile phone (...) despite my account having the preference for that set to "off", because I couldn't navigate the form fields.
mythun.chandra - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - link
Just realized there are no numbers for the Adreno 220 in the GLBench 2.1 offscreen tests...?sam46 - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link
brian,please tell me which one of these smartphones is the best.i wanna purchase one of them so,pls help me in deciding.b1cb01 - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - link
I love the green wallpaper on the first page of the review, but I can't find it anywhere. Could someone point me to where I could find it?