Also, be sure to check for software updates as soon as you tear your phone from its box. It's not all bad news concerning the Galaxy S2's software. In fact, moving through the Galaxy S2's screens feels wonderfully whizzy, thanks to the phone's powerful, dual-core processor. Menus pop open without delay, and scrolling is satisfyingly smooth. All the apps we tested also opened with alacrity. Not having to suffer lag, stutter or hang-ups when opening apps, rattling out text messages or downloading new software makes a world of difference to the overall user experience.
Indeed, we struggled to slow the S2 down. Even when we had a bunch of apps running, with more downloading in the background and Flash video playing in the browser, it still felt very fast. But, compared to the king of touchscreen scrolling smoothness, the iPhone 4, the Galaxy S2 does lack a certain creaminess.
Scrolling through long text on Web pages is fast, but the phone doesn't always do a good job of figuring out when you want to quickly flip down, and when you want to reposition the page. That makes it all too easy to move the side of the text off the screen when you merely meant to skip to the next paragraph. It's not a terrible problem on the Galaxy S2, it's just not a perfect situation.
The lock screen also takes just a fraction of a second too long to appear after you wake the phone up, even if you're not using a password. The phone fares better with the two-fingered multi-touch gesture that you use to zoom into photos and Web pages.
The zooming is as smooth as silk. It's too bad the Android browser displays a grey and white checked area where it's struggling to render the page, as this looks less classy than the iPhone's system, which manages to throw up what we think is a cached screenshot.
Samsung's added some motion-control features to help you out too. While in the browser, touch the screen with two fingers, and then tilt the phone forwards and back to zoom in and out of Web pages. This feature is slightly too sensitive, and we're not convinced it's easier than just zooming in and out using a pinching gesture, but it's easy to turn off. In general, we prefer the Android browser on the Galaxy S2 over its Apple rival, for one big reason -- Flash support.
Flash videos, menus and games are all visible where they'd just be empty holes on the iPhone. Searching is easy -- you type into the same address bar where you enter a site's URL, and you also have the option to hit the microphone icon to say your search out loud. Like most of the latest Android-powered phones, the Galaxy S2 sports a healthy seven home screens, each of which you can stuff full of shortcuts and widgets. The default set-up for these screens, which appears when you first turn on the phone, isn't the most intuitive if you're not already an Android user -- there's just screen after screen of icons and boxes.
This can be very confusing if it's your first time entering the wonderful world of widgets, but don't panic. You can set the screens up so that the phone is just as you want it, with a little know-how. If you're not sure where to start, you may want to stick with the widgets that are already there until you get used to them.
A few of them suggest that you tap them to get started -- for example, the photo-gallery widget will show a slideshow of your favourite shots, but first you need to decide which photos you want to appear in the gallery. We like to start with a blank slate, though. To remove items from the home screen, simply hold your finger on them for a second, and, when an icon of a bin appears at the bottom of the screen, drag them down into the bin.
Many widgets can also be resized in the same way -- hold them down with your finger, and then drag the yellow lines that illustrate how big the widget can be. Samsung has sorted out its own method for adding widgets and shortcuts to the home screen. When you hold your finger on a black area of a home screen, a menu pops up along the bottom from which you can select your choice of widgets, shortcuts and folders, and change the wallpaper.
The selection of widgets is shown in a scrolling menu that looks very slick as you swipe through it. The downside of this fun menu, though, is that you can only see four widgets at once. Once you've installed a lot of apps, which then automatically add their corresponding widgets to the menu, the list of widgets can become pretty long and difficult to move through quickly. We wish we could have more of an overview of what's on offer.
Nevertheless, we like Samsung's method of letting you add items to your home screens from a menu at the bottom, because you can still see the screen clearly enough to help you make up your mind what to add. The motion-control feature is also employed for home-screen customisation -- hold down an app for a moment, then tilt the phone from side to side to slide through the seven available home screens, and drop the app where you want.
Samsung's own widgets improve with every phone it makes. HTC has whipped up a customised skin that's more extensive than the ink on a Hells Angel, and its light, curvaceous widgets make Android appear more accessible. Samsung's widgets tend to be more straightforward and squarish. Which you prefer depends on your own taste, but, overall, the Galaxy S2 sticks closer to the basic appearance of Android than its HTC competition. Moving between the Galaxy S2's many home screens is made simple by two quick navigation tricks.
You can jump to a specific screen by tapping one of the numbered dots along the bottom of the screen, or you can perform a two-fingered pinch to shrink them all down to thumbnail size, and then tap the one you want to see.
We first saw this thumbnail view on HTC phones like the Desire , and it demonstrates how Samsung makes a habit of reproducing some of its rivals' best ideas on its own phones. The real Samsung flavouring, however, lies in the app offering.
Out of the box, the S2 offers a mix of Samsung's own apps, pre-loaded third-party apps and, on our review sample, Vodafone apps. The most useful app is the Task Manager, which nimbly solves the problem of monitoring and closing down apps that are running in the background. If you're trying to conserve battery life or keep your phone running at peak speeds, using this app to do some housekeeping now and again will make all the difference.
Polaris Office is another great addition -- it's a suite of apps for creating and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. It provides a pared-down experience compared to Microsoft's desktop software, but it's slick, intuitive and could prove a life-saver if you need to perform a quick edit on the move.
Samsung's own app store appears on the S2, as well as its music, ebook and gaming hubs, but we think these are mostly worth ignoring in favour of the Android Market and, for example, the Amazon MP3 store. We'd also get rid of the pre-loaded app that lets you play trial versions of games. Does anyone really want to play a single free round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
No way -- especially when mobile gaming hits like Angry Birds are totally free in the Android Market. This gaming bloatware simply clogs up your app menu until you have time to delete it. Google puts plenty of store in its voice features, but we're not big fans. Things like proper names never seem to work for us, and we always end up resorting to typing. We also tend to use our phone on the go, so shouting at it isn't as practical as stealthy typing. Furthermore, we often don't have the presence of mind to dictate text without repeating ourselves or hesitating.
Samsung adds even more vocal tricks to the default Android features by including Vlingo on the Galaxy S2. The app makes it possible to dictate text messages and emails, open apps and play music.
Technically, it's an impressive app, but it can have some unexpected consequences. After accidentally activating its 'driving mode' by tapping a widget, our Galaxy S2 decided to start reading out calendar reminders, letting everyone in the office know that about our yoga lesson. This could be disastrous if you have secret liaisons or embarrassing appointments in your diary, so beware. Vlingo is a perfect example of the type of software somersaults that are possible on Android. Vlingo is available for the iPhone too, but you can't do the same stuff -- launch text messages, for example -- because Apple doesn't like apps digging down so deep in the OS.
Android allows almost any app into its official Market, and doesn't stop you from installing non-Market apps, if you want to. The downside of all this app freedom is that you can't always trust Android apps to be of the highest quality.
Just one example is the official National Rail app, Train Times. Although we can't fault the S2's ability to run the app smoothly and quickly, the poor design, compared to its iPhone cousin, reminds us why, in some ways, Android is still less crave-worthy than the iPhone software.
It's not the Galaxy S2's fault that some app designers don't know their way around a user interface. But, if you're thinking of investing big bucks in the Galaxy S2, you need to know how it stacks up against the competition. Apps in the Android Market definitely win when it comes to innovation, but the Apple App Store has a bigger selection and its apps tend to be of better quality.
Another place where Samsung's imagination is evident is in the settings shortcuts that sit above the notification bar. Battery life on a smart phone like this one tends to be short, so it's important to be able to turn off features like Wi-Fi and GPS when they're not needed.
The battery life of the Galaxy S2 isn't bad -- check out our battery section to read more on this topic. But even so, we love being able to drag down the notification bar from the top of the screen to tap battery-hungry features on and off quickly. We still see room for improvement here. For example, we'd love to see a screen brightness control too, and it would be handy to be able to open the wireless settings so that we could do things like connect to a new Wi-Fi network.
But, for even more control, there's a settings widget that you can stick on your home screen -- it does all this and more. There was also this weird version - the Samsung i Captive Glide. It was technically part of the Galaxy S II family, but it was almost completely different.
Qualcomm's modem was still faster than the one in the Exynos, offering 42Mbps downlink, double what the vanilla Galaxy S II could pull down. S II branded devices used no less than four different chipsets and four different connectivity configurations. Actually more than that, there were revisions we didn't even mention - the Japanese phones with i-mode. Many of these variations were dictated by carrier needs. T-Mobile wouldn't begin its LTE rollout until early Today, the situation is similar except 5G is the new buzzword.
Some carriers already cover the busiest parts of major metropolitan areas and are boasting how fast their new network is. Those carriers are already at work promoting the 5G variants of the Galaxy S The selection of chipsets has narrowed down to just Snapdragon and Exynos, but this time around they are virtually equal in terms of connectivity both require an external modem.
I didn't owned this phone but I used few s2 devices of some friends'. I can say the s10 and s10 plus are the real and last successors of the s2. Because of Galaxy S2, I owned s10 plus. It's a timely release, considering Apple's iOS 5 revamp announcement just over a month ago. Aside from competing for customers with rival Android manufacturers, Samsung is fighting battles on other fronts.
Apple is currently suing Samsung in a bitter ongoing patent dispute, claiming the South Korean company is ripping off Apple's product designs.
Samsung quickly filed countersuits against Apple, claiming Apple was encroaching on Samsung's intellectual property by using a method to improve connections between cell phones and cellular towers.
Samsung's battles with Apple extend outside of the courtroom, of course. When measured against Apple's iPhone sales, Samsung's numbers pale in comparison.
Apple sold over 20 million iPhone 4 smartphones in the past three months alone, according to the Cupertino-based company's last earnings report.
That's over million iPhones sold to date. A straight apples-to-apples comparison so to speak is misleading. Samsung isn't just competing against Apple and its iOS platform. As one of many manufacturers producing hardware running the same operating system, customers can choose between Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson and others to get their Android fix. That's not to mention the other competitors in the space like RIM, HP and Nokia, though the latter two admittedly have a negligible market share.
If Samsung continues to pull ahead of other Android devices in the pack, the company seems to be the only true competitor to Apple's skyrocketing smartphone success. In the first quarter of , Samsung accounted for 13 percent of all smartphones sold globally, up from just three percent during the same period of time the previous year.
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