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
Keyboards
By default, the SGS2 comes with Swype and the Samsung keypad preinstalled. I’ve moved away from Swype in recent months and started taking to the default gingerbread keyboard quite a lot, and it’s odd to see that Samsung has removed it from their stock ROMs. For me, this was one of the major enhancements that came with 2.3, and it’s puzzling how many different OEMs choose to purposefully not include it, and instead include their own strange keyboard in its place.
The Samsung keypad honestly is less than ideal and feels like it belongs back in the Android 2.1 world from whence it came, which is likely why Swype is set as default. It lacks autocorrect functionality by default and generally just looks drab.
Getting autocorrection enabled requires diving into the menus and enabling it for your given language, and even then isn’t that great. I guess I’m confused why Samsung would elect to not include the excellent 2.3 keyboard and instead force users to install the APK themselves.
Messaging
SMS is one of those things that each phone needs to do perfectly, and I think it’s especially worth taking a formal look at when an OEM moves away from the stock Android application. Bring up messaging and you get a list of ongoing conversations sorted by last activity, just like you’d expect.
Tapping new gives you a nice, clean composition page complete with character count. The conversation view is threaded and in large speech bubbles, complete with date and time stamps on each message.
Honestly I can find no fault with the Samsung messaging application. It doesn’t make the mistake that other OEMs have made by making font overly huge or decorations take away from usability and vertical space, though the composition box could stand to be a row shorter so more of the thread is visible. In addition, I spent a lot of time hammering on the SGS2’s messaging stack to try and make it slow dramatically like I’ve seen a few other Android phones do - no such lag took place, which is a great sign, even after a few weeks without deleting anything.
Browser
Like the original Galaxy S, on SGS2 samsung has made enhancements to the browser that dramatically increase smoothness. At the time we could only explain the performance increase by shrugging and claiming it was GPU accelerated. We know a bit more now about what enhancements are required to make browsing smooth in this fashion, and the answer lies in a backing store. A backing store is essentially a nice way of saying cache, and in this case what’s being cached is the rendered page itself, which is either rendered into a texture or some intermediary that’s a step above final rendering.
A backing store is what makes iOS’ browser so smooth, and you can see it render into the texture (or if you overscroll beyond the render, where it hasn’t yet) with those little grey rectangles. Render into a big texture, and then it’s a relatively free GPU operation to transform and clip that texture when a user scrolls around the page, though zooming will require a re-draw. Until Android 3.x, however, the stock Android browser hasn’t had a backing store, which is why translating around feels choppy. As a result, it has been the burden of OEMs to make their browsers feel snappy by incorporating their own backing stores. HTC works with Qualcomm to bring an appropriate level of smoothness to their devices, I already mentioned Android 3.x has one (which will no doubt carry over to Ice Cream Sandwich), and Samsung again has one this go-around in SGS2 just like they did with the original SGS.
So how good is SGS2’s browser backing store? Very good. Far and away this is the smoothest Android 2.x browsing experience, by a large margin. The only downside to the whole thing is that the browser has 16 bit color, again undoubtedly to make this an easy texture for manipulation by the GPU. I’ve also noticed one or two times that the browser will go to a white screen instead of showing the content after it’s loaded, which to me indicates that getting the backing store always working perfectly with a big page can be a challenge - perhaps GPU memory is at a real premium when this happens. I’m told this is fixed in newer firmware editions. That said, the tradeoff is well worth it, as zooming, translating, just about everything is buttery smooth. Browser smoothness is finally basically at parity with iOS.
What’s very impressive is that Samsung even manages to keep Flash 10.3 plugins animated while panning and scrolling around, something that currently HTC temporarily halts while translating around in their browser. It’s hard to communicate just how smooth and fluid the SGS2 browser is, and I’d encourage interested parties to watch our video which demonstrates it.
Finally, there’s one last semi-hidden browser feature - custom user agents. Enter “about:useragent” into the URL bar, and you can pull up a menu and select between a number of different user agents and masquerade the SGS2 as an iPhone, Galaxy S, Desktop (OS X 10.5.7 Safari), Nexus One, Lismore, or custom. This is something again I wish the stock Android browser would offer similar control over.
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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?