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
Applications
The next thing is a bit of enumeration of the skinned or custom applications that come bundled with SGS2 as part of TouchWiz 4.0. I’ve taken some screenshots of the default application bundle and some of the apps and tossed them into a gallery, and for the most part there isn’t much to talk about in detail.
Contacts takes you into samsung’s dialer application which thankfully is smart dial enabled, just like HTC’s.
Among the extras are a voice recorder, task manager, FM radio app, and of course Kies air. Voice recorder gets the job done and is pretty basic, as it should be. The TouchWiz task manager also is snappy and has some nice - kill everything - buttons to free up all RAM. The FM radio app supports multiple regions, RDS, and auto search. It has a nifty analog-feeling manual tuner too.
There’s also a video editing and photo editing application bundled. Photo editor lets you make some basic changes like crop, saturation, and some filters. It’s actually pretty decent.
Video editor does what you’d expect and seems to be a rather basic facsimile of iMovie for iOS, complete with a few themes and basic editing. The interface does a surprisingly good job at letting you trim and combine video clips, complete with transitions, and also stills. The live preview is a bit low framerate, which seems surprising to me, though my source material was 1080p video captured on the camera. Export is limited to 720p and does take a while.
Storage
Our SGS2 was the 16 GB unit, which came partitioned as follows:
Filesystem Size Used Free Blksize /dev 418M 76K 418M 4096 /mnt/asec 418M 0K 418M 4096 /mnt/obb 418M 0K 418M 4096 /mnt/usb 418M 0K 418M 4096 /app-cache 7M 4M 2M 4096 /system 503M 456M 47M 4096 /cache 98M 4M 94M 4096 /efs 19M 8M 11M 4096 /data 1G 402M 1G 4096 /mnt/sdcard 11G 1G 10G 32768 /mnt/sdcard/external_sd 7G 977M 6G 32768
What’s a bit curious to me is that it’s very well known that SGS2 has 2 GB of internal storage, however the /data partition above clearly shows only 1 GB. Apparently this is a known rounding error with the version of df in the firmware we’re running, and newer leaked 2.3.4 images show 2 GB for data appropriately.
Either way, having 2 GB is more than enough for application storage and shouldn’t result in anyone running out of space - this isn’t the 150 MB or so that early Android 2.x devices offered. Of course you can also add a microSD card for additional external storage and move apps to it, like I’ve done above as shown in the sdcard/external_sd mount. What’s really good, however, is that RFS is gone right out of the box, and in its place is EXT4:
/dev/block/mmcblk0p9 /system ext4 ro,relatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 /dev/block/mmcblk0p7 /cache ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 /dev/block/mmcblk0p1 /efs ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 nil /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw,relatime 0 0 /dev/block/mmcblk0p10 /data ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,barrier=1,data=ordered,noauto_da_alloc,discard 0 0 /dev/block/mmcblk0p4 /mnt/.lfs j4fs rw,relatime 0 0
The result is none of the filesystem lag that plagued the original SGS, looks like Samsung has learned its lesson here.
Software Conclusions
There are a bunch of other small things part of TouchWiz 4, including the ability to change the system font (which is becoming a pretty common feature) and motion-based gestures in some parts. Probably the most subtle extra I’m grateful for is screenshot functionality - screenshots can be taken by holding home and pressing power quickly.
For the most part, the experience is pretty pleasant and Samsung does make some welcome additions that improve browser and UI smoothness in Android 2.3 that likely won’t be part of mainline until Ice Cream Sandwich.
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jcompagner - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
When i am already using it for months and months now, and i am already thinking maybe next month or 2 i will replace it with its successor the Nexus Prime or what ever it may be called...Again here the complains about no updates.
What are you people complaining about, please...
Samsung releases, yes not officially but they are real samsung releases, quite often roms
for example here are the SGS2 once's:
http://www.samfirmware.com/WEBPROTECT-i9100.htm
A few releases per month, i am now on the latest one (2.3.4 of August 12)
If you look there to other phones you also will see many updates of all the latest phones of samsung.
So it is very easy and you dont need to root if you don't want to, just flash these roms. and you have a updated samsung made rom. (but yes 'leaked')
Reikon - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
"Vellamo produces its scores directly from frame counters, so what you're looking at is a direct representation of how fast these devices scroll through the three web tests above. The Galaxy S II is 20 - 35% faster than the Photon 4G and 45 - 100% faster than the EVO 3D."You mixed up Photon 4G and EVO 3D, either in the table or the comment under it. The data shows the SGS2 20-35% faster than the EVO 3D and 45-100% faster than the Photon 4G.
Stormkroe - Saturday, September 17, 2011 - link
I thought I was the only one noticing this too. I'm also concerned with the adreno missing from the 2.1 off screen render tests, as well as pointing out that it would definitely be beating the S2 in GL 2.0 Pro if resolutions were normalized there. Feels like the whole thing was meant to really set the mali on a high horse. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, just not "double the speed of the competition" when you throw the entire lineup in the mix.poohbear - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Nice to read this review finally, it is indeed an awesome piece of hardware. Im not even sure the iphone 5 will be able to compete? guess we'll find out next month!PWRuser - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Is the SGS2 memory the newer 30nm LPDDR2 1066 or the 800 one found in older phones?QWIKSTRIKE - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
When will you do a Sprint review with CDMA antenna signal repsonsivenessOlrac - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Just for those who would like to know I am running The galaxy s2 overclocked to 1.6Ghz and its rock steady no crashes or freezes does not even get much warmerLinpack Single Threaded = 74 average and Multithreaded = 114
Revolution rom with ninphetamine 2.1.3 kernel
lamecake - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Just for comparision.. I have a HTC Sensation clocked at 1.6ghz with a Sense based rom. It's actually perfectly stable to 1.78ghz here but 1.6 should be no problem for any sensation.Linpack Single Threaded = 58 average and Multithreaded = 95
Pyramid3D 7.4.0 with faux123 0.1.4 kernel.
CM based roms just popping up, so anxious to see how a non-sense rom compares to the SGS2.
Pessimism - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
is not a coin cell battery. it is a supercapacitor, sort of a cross between a capacitor and a battery, they use them as a buffer between the phone and batterylchen66666 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Rumors of iPhone5 indicate that iPhone5 will have the iPhone4 form. If this is realy, that would quite disappoint me. I will definitely consider GSS2 when I upgrade my old iPhone3GS. I was hoping iPhone5 comes with 4"+720P display+some other improvement(new camera chip, new design of antenna, and new CPU). 4" seems to be the sweet spot to be the smart phone(not too big, and not too small). If Apple doesn't have much improvement in the display. The faster CPU is not that useful.The review is very detail. Not very happy with a couple of things on GSS2. Resolution is not high enough for a 4.3" display. Audio quality is not good. Seems like GSS2 has very good camera chip for video and photo. Really like it. From your other review, I got impression that Super ALMOD plus display is much better than IPS. From this review, seems like SALMODE+ is similar to SIPS display used on other smart phones. I haven't seen Samsung SALMODE+ display in person.