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.
132 Comments
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ph0tek - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
First of all Android is better than iOS in so many ways that i'd be here all day listing them..... and the same goes for this phones hardware compared to the iPhone so i wont even bother!Secondly the S2 might have a slightly lower display res but it has better response times, infinitely better contrast, vastly better blacks, more vibrant colours, plus superior viewing angles. And all this on a screen that isn't stupidly tiny. It's clearly better overall.
Everyone who i've shown to this phone to instantly says the screen is the best they've seen, even iPhone users.
With the battery theres not much difference, it has longer battery life for talk time than iPhone, and also longer battery when using hotspots, while displaying Flash content too! Yes you can view the WHOLE web on this.
I find it very amusing that you even try to compare the iPhone to this. Theres simply no comparison. Like comparing a ferrari to a skoda. Just makes you look stupid.
niva - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Why are you arguing with an iFanboy?LostViking - Saturday, September 17, 2011 - link
You could argue that the SGS 2 is better (for me it wins hands down), and you could argue that the iPhone 4 is better.Some people get sever rashes all over their body by using products not made by Apple ;)
For those people the original iPhone beats the SGS 2 and all future Android devices easily :)
jjj - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
hard to like any new phone now when Krait and A15 are around the corner.killerroach - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Remember... there's ALWAYS something around the corner.jjj - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
Actually there is rarely something like this around the corner.This time we got both new cores and a new node (and the jump from 40/45 nm to 28 nm is pretty big).3lackdeath - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
Nice phone but WP7 is faster and smoother.OBLAMA2009 - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
400x800? no thxMacTheSpoon - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
What a staggeringly awesome review. I am really impressed. The audio section--wow.I sure wish the screen were brighter and the audio better on this phone, but I have to put it on my short list.
Piyono - Sunday, September 11, 2011 - link
"There, Anand and *I* played with..."