Samsung Galaxy S 2 (International) Review - The Best, Redefined

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.