April 26, 2011 at 09:53A smartphone instead of a computer or how I spent the day with the Samsung Galaxy S II
Good morning, Guards!
Today I would like to provide you with a strict trial review of Samsung’s flagship mobile phone model, which will break into Russian stores at the end of May - Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) . This will not be a banal review of the points, but a la “design-screen-control-interface-platform-experience”, but a kind of experiment. For one working office-plankton day, I decided to set aside laptops, all-in-ones and PCs and work using only the Galaxy S II. Under the cut lies the sum of my labors in the form of a multitude of photo cards, several videos and a story about how it was.
10 a.m. The working day has begun. But I have not yet reached the office, so there’s nothing to talk about.
10:17 a.m.I'm at the office! What do you do when you overcome crushing millstones in electric trains and buses, crowds of zombie penguins in the subway and finally get to your native workplace? That's right - go drink tea with cookies in order to somehow restore the non-repairing nerve cells after the morning rush hour. This important morning ritual was successfully done, after which it was time to pick up my workhorse for the day - the new Samsung Galaxy S II. At first glance at the phone, one gets the feeling that this is not a smartphone at all, but rather a microplate, because the model is impressive in length and width: 125.3 x 66.1 mm with a thickness of only 8.49 mm and a weight of 116 g.
“A very wide screen diagonal, the thinnest body, very light in weight” - these were my first thoughts when I picked up the Galaxy S II. The front surface is covered with a special high-strength mineral glass “Gorilla Glass”, which is distinguished by the fact that it is quite difficult to scratch or break it. According to its specifications, it is about two to three times stronger than ordinary glass reinforced with chemical materials. An interesting history of the creation of this technology can be read here . You can also look at ruthless attempts to break a similar screen on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
The phone’s screen (Super AMOLED Plus with a resolution of 480x800 pixels) is one of the key differences from the previous model: the diagonal has increased by almost a third - up to 4.3 inches. It is stated that it consumes 18% less energy than Super AMOLED (for example, its predecessor, Galaxy S) or IPS-matrix used in monitors.
In the upper left corner is the front 2 MP camera, which will come in handy for video calls and as a mirror for girls.
At the bottom center, the OK button is recessed into the case, there is a Menu button to the left of it, and a Back / Cancel button to the right.
The back cover is made of embossed plastic, quite pleasant to the touch. At the top is an 8 MP digital camera with autofocus and a set of useful functions, at the bottom right - a speaker.
At the ends, everything is extremely concise: a button for adjusting the sound volume on the left, a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack at the top, a phone on / off button on the right, and a microUSB connector for charging and connecting to a computer - at the bottom.
Actually, here is the whole review of the appearance - then we turn on and start.
10:35. To work normally on this device, by itself, it was necessary to shove a SIM card into it. “Under the hood” it looks like this:
Battery - lithium-ion at 1650 mAh. You can insert a SIM card into the socket without removing the battery, which is convenient. To insert an additional memory card, you still have to remove the battery. You can expand the storage capacity with microSDHC cards up to 32 GB.
10:37.After the sim card fell into place, the phone was turned on. The device boots up for 15 seconds, which is very good. Runs on Android 2.3.1 (Gingerbread).
The first thing I tried was to flip through the desktops. We have 7 of them at our disposal, and you can switch from one to the other in three ways: “turning” left and right, immediately choosing the right one, “tapping” along one of the seven numbering points that are lined up in one navigation line below the screen equator, or delay finger on this very line and wind the desktops by moving your finger from side to side.
Samsung Galaxy S II implements the proprietary TouchWiz 4.0 interface, which now understands the new two-finger multi-touch gestures: you can move widgets on the desktop in edit mode by simply moving the device in space to the right and left, or you can scale the image using the so-called Motion Zoom by rejecting Phone back and forth is a very funny thing . For avid SMSers and lovers of working with text editors and mail on a mobile phone, there is an output technology available called SWYPE (finger drawing monograms on the screen, which are then converted into readable text). Having played enough with tachev functionality, I decided to climb on applications.
10:40 a.m.What we have available from standard applications: we’ll not sort any default clocks-calendars-music_players-browsers — and it’s clear that all this is available. It is much more interesting to delve into the hubs that are so actively discussed, of which there are already four in the Galaxy S II.
The first one that caught my eye was the Social Hub , which was mentioned more often than others in numerous press releases. Having performed the simple steps of synchronizing my facebook, myspace, twitter, google and hotmail accounts with a smartphone, I got a single news feed pulling out of these social networks. networks and mail services.
YouTalk , after a series of similar synchronizations, gave me a list of all my Internet pagers: icq, msn messenger, gtalk, etc.
AboutGame Hub and Reader's Hub will tell a little later.
In addition to the hubs, my attention was attracted by a couple of Samsung's own applications: AllShare and Kies Air.
AllShare is a single multimedia center designed for wireless synchronization of laptops, mobile phones and other devices with Samsung smart TVs. It allows you to quite quickly and without unnecessary gestures to drive various content from a mobile phone, tablet or laptop on a zombie or monitor: streaming audio / video signal, viewing tabs, photos, information about calls and text messages - all in real time. By the way, not only Samsung devices, but also any others supporting the DLNA protocol are hooked to AllShare.
Kies Air is a cloud service that allows you to store data on a remote server, accessing it via Wi-Fi via IP and controlling your smartphone through a browser on a PC. I tried it myself: one click to create a link by which you can get into the phone from a computer. We drive the link into the browser on the PC - and, voila: the admin panel appears, in which you can manage all the contents of the mobile phone.
The phone has built-in NFC technology, with the help of which they create payment systems in civilized countries: many purchases can be paid by swiping the screen of the phone over a reading scanner. Such systems will develop - there will be a holiday on our street in a couple of years, but for now these opportunities can only be considered as an investment for the future.
Similarly, with Wi-Fi Direct technology, which allows you to directly throw content from a device to a device (such as Bluetooth or infrared, only at Wi-Fi transmission speed). At the moment, few devices can boast of having this, of course, useful feature. But in the coming years, things can change for the better.
11:03. So, for the job! To get started, I climbed into my mail to clarify the scale of disasters at the beginning of the working day. The application for working with Gmail is in the package of pre-installed programs.
It’s convenient to work with it: with a good Wi-Fi signal, new letters are loaded instantly (without exaggeration), scroll down the list no less quickly. It is very convenient to print a letter on such a wide screen: the buttons of the virtual keyboard are noticeably larger, respectively, there are much fewer digits in the process of typing the text.
In general, working with mail “microplate” Samsung Galaxy S II allows you to comfortably and, most importantly, quickly.
Unfortunately, the Galaxy S II, like the first model, lacks indicators. You can detect a missed call or a new message only by turning on the device. This can only be compensated by installing an additional application (No LED, for example), which, in combination with the Super AMOLED + display, allows you to display alerts about calls and messages on the off screen.
Having examined the spam from the authorities and colleagues and paying them with the same coin, we go directly to the duties.
11:37.I don’t know about you, but I, as a bright representative of the office-plankton fraternity, have a rather uniform range of duties, with rare exceptions. If you exaggerate much, my work consists of daily mail correspondence and calls, signs and reports, presentations and press releases. In fact, everything is limited to the default set of office software. This is where I came in handy, included in the standard Polaris Office application suite. This is a mini Word, Excel and Power Point in one.
Below you can see the process and the results of my painstaking work in each of the applications.
In Word, I needed to compose those. task to develop several small applications for the Facebook page.
You can work quite tolerably (by itself, much more slowly than on a regular PC or laptop with a keyboard): there are many settings for text, document format, the ability to insert photos, links, tables, etc. into the file. You can save the file in the old (97-2003) or new (2007) .doc format - similarly in Excel and Powerpoint. Functionality in different versions of the format varies.
In Excel, I needed to tabulate the statistics from social. networks. To form the desired table structure, enter data and format it was not difficult. There is a set of basic functions for working with tables: it is even possible to create simple graphs. This was enough for me to report.
At Powerpoint, I threw a draft of ideas for promoting the new series of Samsung Smart TVs on social networks. The slides turned out worthy, however, and here the functionality of the application did not allow to unfold to the full.
Nevertheless, to “finish” some details of the presentation in an emergency, when only a phone is at hand, is quite real.
13:00. War is war, and lunch is scheduled!
Lazy and sleepy afternoon cinema. Everything works very smartly, no additional codecs are required for watching movies (the tradition of pre-installed DivX codecs was supported in Galaxy S II).
14:33. Perhaps the most enjoyable moment of the day has come: a detailed overview of the entertainment hubs - gaming and readers.
Game hubprovides us with two tabs with an impressive list of games to choose from: "Social Games" and "Premium Games".
Social games consist of a dozen simple online games: from tactical strategies to turn-based RPGs and arcades. It is enough to register once in the system, after which your account will always be available in any of the games. You can invite friends to the games and the crowd chopped into them in the sweet moments of procrastination.
Premium games turned out to be more interesting: they collected samples of HD quality blockbusters transferred to the mobile platform of the notorious Gameloft office: Assassin's Creed, Spiderman, GT Racing, Brothers In Arms, FIFA 2011 and others. True, all of them are available only in trial versions of “Try before buy”.
In general, playing on the Samsung Galaxy S II is very exciting: the dual-core Cortex A9 (XMM6260 + S5PC210) at 1 GHz and 1 GB of RAM do their job. No brakes were found in the games, and the graphics level is really impressive, considering that these are games for a mobile phone.
Reader's Hub came in handy in the toilet, where from pulp fiction there wasn’t even a can of air freshener. The hub is a platform for reading newspapers, magazines and books. Magazines and newspapers are covered by a paid subscription (but 7 days are given for free use everywhere), books can also be read only after payment (the cost of one book is from 20 to 200 rubles). The volume of content looks impressive: more than 2.2 million books, 2,000 international and local newspapers in 49 languages of the world, as well as 2,300 popular magazines in 22 languages of the world.
16:34. At the end of the working run of the Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone, I went through the media entertainment: photo and video shooting, music player, radio.
The camera is very fast, pictures and videos are also saved without delay. The settings are intuitive, everything is selected directly from the screen. The quality of the pictures for the mobile phone camera is very good. There are quite interesting photo and video editors that provide ample opportunities for experimentation.
The new Galaxy S II music player has a different, more concise interface. Available sound processing technology DNSe and SRS. The music search service has remained the same. We were pleased with the sound settings: there are 9 equalizers and 6 effects (except the usual, wide range, concert hall, music clarity, bass boost, externalization). FM radio provides for air recording (by the way, the radio application has also been updated).
19:49. Everything that you just read was hammered into Habr also using Samsung Galaxy S II.
20:07.PS: on the way home I tested the navigator. Everything worked quickly and clearly (these words are applicable to almost every aspect of the smartphone during the review): even with the use of mobile Internet, maps are loaded in a few seconds, and the navigator builds optimal routes (but Google should be thanked for this).
Samsung Galaxy S II is a smartphone stuffed with powerful stuffing, which has a wide range of features and the latest technological innovations that will please even the most sophisticated geek. If you need a fast multifunctional multimedia device, then this model, at least, deserves your close attention and study.
Networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS / HSDPA 900/2100, EDGE
Operating system: Android 2.3.1
Platform: XMM6260 chipset, dual-core S5PC210 1 GHz processor (later versions with 1.2 GHz and Tegra 2 will be available )
Memory: 1 GB RAM, 16/32 GB flash, microSD slot (up to 32 GB)
Screen: capacitive, 4.27 inches WVGA (480 x 800), Super AMOLED +
Camera: 8 MP with autofocus and flash, 1080p video 30 fps
Wireless: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, DLNA
Power: 1650 mAh battery
Dimensions: 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.49 mm
Weight: 116 g.
In Russia, sales of the Samsung Galaxy S II will begin in late May. Recommended price for 16 GB version: 29 990 rubles.
Today I would like to provide you with a strict trial review of Samsung’s flagship mobile phone model, which will break into Russian stores at the end of May - Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) . This will not be a banal review of the points, but a la “design-screen-control-interface-platform-experience”, but a kind of experiment. For one working office-plankton day, I decided to set aside laptops, all-in-ones and PCs and work using only the Galaxy S II. Under the cut lies the sum of my labors in the form of a multitude of photo cards, several videos and a story about how it was.
10 a.m. The working day has begun. But I have not yet reached the office, so there’s nothing to talk about.
10:17 a.m.I'm at the office! What do you do when you overcome crushing millstones in electric trains and buses, crowds of zombie penguins in the subway and finally get to your native workplace? That's right - go drink tea with cookies in order to somehow restore the non-repairing nerve cells after the morning rush hour. This important morning ritual was successfully done, after which it was time to pick up my workhorse for the day - the new Samsung Galaxy S II. At first glance at the phone, one gets the feeling that this is not a smartphone at all, but rather a microplate, because the model is impressive in length and width: 125.3 x 66.1 mm with a thickness of only 8.49 mm and a weight of 116 g.
“A very wide screen diagonal, the thinnest body, very light in weight” - these were my first thoughts when I picked up the Galaxy S II. The front surface is covered with a special high-strength mineral glass “Gorilla Glass”, which is distinguished by the fact that it is quite difficult to scratch or break it. According to its specifications, it is about two to three times stronger than ordinary glass reinforced with chemical materials. An interesting history of the creation of this technology can be read here . You can also look at ruthless attempts to break a similar screen on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
The phone’s screen (Super AMOLED Plus with a resolution of 480x800 pixels) is one of the key differences from the previous model: the diagonal has increased by almost a third - up to 4.3 inches. It is stated that it consumes 18% less energy than Super AMOLED (for example, its predecessor, Galaxy S) or IPS-matrix used in monitors.
In the upper left corner is the front 2 MP camera, which will come in handy for video calls and as a mirror for girls.
At the bottom center, the OK button is recessed into the case, there is a Menu button to the left of it, and a Back / Cancel button to the right.
The back cover is made of embossed plastic, quite pleasant to the touch. At the top is an 8 MP digital camera with autofocus and a set of useful functions, at the bottom right - a speaker.
At the ends, everything is extremely concise: a button for adjusting the sound volume on the left, a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack at the top, a phone on / off button on the right, and a microUSB connector for charging and connecting to a computer - at the bottom.
Actually, here is the whole review of the appearance - then we turn on and start.
10:35. To work normally on this device, by itself, it was necessary to shove a SIM card into it. “Under the hood” it looks like this:
Battery - lithium-ion at 1650 mAh. You can insert a SIM card into the socket without removing the battery, which is convenient. To insert an additional memory card, you still have to remove the battery. You can expand the storage capacity with microSDHC cards up to 32 GB.
10:37.After the sim card fell into place, the phone was turned on. The device boots up for 15 seconds, which is very good. Runs on Android 2.3.1 (Gingerbread).
The first thing I tried was to flip through the desktops. We have 7 of them at our disposal, and you can switch from one to the other in three ways: “turning” left and right, immediately choosing the right one, “tapping” along one of the seven numbering points that are lined up in one navigation line below the screen equator, or delay finger on this very line and wind the desktops by moving your finger from side to side.
Samsung Galaxy S II implements the proprietary TouchWiz 4.0 interface, which now understands the new two-finger multi-touch gestures: you can move widgets on the desktop in edit mode by simply moving the device in space to the right and left, or you can scale the image using the so-called Motion Zoom by rejecting Phone back and forth is a very funny thing . For avid SMSers and lovers of working with text editors and mail on a mobile phone, there is an output technology available called SWYPE (finger drawing monograms on the screen, which are then converted into readable text). Having played enough with tachev functionality, I decided to climb on applications.
10:40 a.m.What we have available from standard applications: we’ll not sort any default clocks-calendars-music_players-browsers — and it’s clear that all this is available. It is much more interesting to delve into the hubs that are so actively discussed, of which there are already four in the Galaxy S II.
The first one that caught my eye was the Social Hub , which was mentioned more often than others in numerous press releases. Having performed the simple steps of synchronizing my facebook, myspace, twitter, google and hotmail accounts with a smartphone, I got a single news feed pulling out of these social networks. networks and mail services.
YouTalk , after a series of similar synchronizations, gave me a list of all my Internet pagers: icq, msn messenger, gtalk, etc.
AboutGame Hub and Reader's Hub will tell a little later.
In addition to the hubs, my attention was attracted by a couple of Samsung's own applications: AllShare and Kies Air.
AllShare is a single multimedia center designed for wireless synchronization of laptops, mobile phones and other devices with Samsung smart TVs. It allows you to quite quickly and without unnecessary gestures to drive various content from a mobile phone, tablet or laptop on a zombie or monitor: streaming audio / video signal, viewing tabs, photos, information about calls and text messages - all in real time. By the way, not only Samsung devices, but also any others supporting the DLNA protocol are hooked to AllShare.
Kies Air is a cloud service that allows you to store data on a remote server, accessing it via Wi-Fi via IP and controlling your smartphone through a browser on a PC. I tried it myself: one click to create a link by which you can get into the phone from a computer. We drive the link into the browser on the PC - and, voila: the admin panel appears, in which you can manage all the contents of the mobile phone.
The phone has built-in NFC technology, with the help of which they create payment systems in civilized countries: many purchases can be paid by swiping the screen of the phone over a reading scanner. Such systems will develop - there will be a holiday on our street in a couple of years, but for now these opportunities can only be considered as an investment for the future.
Similarly, with Wi-Fi Direct technology, which allows you to directly throw content from a device to a device (such as Bluetooth or infrared, only at Wi-Fi transmission speed). At the moment, few devices can boast of having this, of course, useful feature. But in the coming years, things can change for the better.
11:03. So, for the job! To get started, I climbed into my mail to clarify the scale of disasters at the beginning of the working day. The application for working with Gmail is in the package of pre-installed programs.
It’s convenient to work with it: with a good Wi-Fi signal, new letters are loaded instantly (without exaggeration), scroll down the list no less quickly. It is very convenient to print a letter on such a wide screen: the buttons of the virtual keyboard are noticeably larger, respectively, there are much fewer digits in the process of typing the text.
In general, working with mail “microplate” Samsung Galaxy S II allows you to comfortably and, most importantly, quickly.
Unfortunately, the Galaxy S II, like the first model, lacks indicators. You can detect a missed call or a new message only by turning on the device. This can only be compensated by installing an additional application (No LED, for example), which, in combination with the Super AMOLED + display, allows you to display alerts about calls and messages on the off screen.
Having examined the spam from the authorities and colleagues and paying them with the same coin, we go directly to the duties.
11:37.I don’t know about you, but I, as a bright representative of the office-plankton fraternity, have a rather uniform range of duties, with rare exceptions. If you exaggerate much, my work consists of daily mail correspondence and calls, signs and reports, presentations and press releases. In fact, everything is limited to the default set of office software. This is where I came in handy, included in the standard Polaris Office application suite. This is a mini Word, Excel and Power Point in one.
Below you can see the process and the results of my painstaking work in each of the applications.
In Word, I needed to compose those. task to develop several small applications for the Facebook page.
You can work quite tolerably (by itself, much more slowly than on a regular PC or laptop with a keyboard): there are many settings for text, document format, the ability to insert photos, links, tables, etc. into the file. You can save the file in the old (97-2003) or new (2007) .doc format - similarly in Excel and Powerpoint. Functionality in different versions of the format varies.
In Excel, I needed to tabulate the statistics from social. networks. To form the desired table structure, enter data and format it was not difficult. There is a set of basic functions for working with tables: it is even possible to create simple graphs. This was enough for me to report.
At Powerpoint, I threw a draft of ideas for promoting the new series of Samsung Smart TVs on social networks. The slides turned out worthy, however, and here the functionality of the application did not allow to unfold to the full.
Nevertheless, to “finish” some details of the presentation in an emergency, when only a phone is at hand, is quite real.
13:00. War is war, and lunch is scheduled!
Lazy and sleepy afternoon cinema. Everything works very smartly, no additional codecs are required for watching movies (the tradition of pre-installed DivX codecs was supported in Galaxy S II).
14:33. Perhaps the most enjoyable moment of the day has come: a detailed overview of the entertainment hubs - gaming and readers.
Game hubprovides us with two tabs with an impressive list of games to choose from: "Social Games" and "Premium Games".
Social games consist of a dozen simple online games: from tactical strategies to turn-based RPGs and arcades. It is enough to register once in the system, after which your account will always be available in any of the games. You can invite friends to the games and the crowd chopped into them in the sweet moments of procrastination.
Premium games turned out to be more interesting: they collected samples of HD quality blockbusters transferred to the mobile platform of the notorious Gameloft office: Assassin's Creed, Spiderman, GT Racing, Brothers In Arms, FIFA 2011 and others. True, all of them are available only in trial versions of “Try before buy”.
In general, playing on the Samsung Galaxy S II is very exciting: the dual-core Cortex A9 (XMM6260 + S5PC210) at 1 GHz and 1 GB of RAM do their job. No brakes were found in the games, and the graphics level is really impressive, considering that these are games for a mobile phone.
Reader's Hub came in handy in the toilet, where from pulp fiction there wasn’t even a can of air freshener. The hub is a platform for reading newspapers, magazines and books. Magazines and newspapers are covered by a paid subscription (but 7 days are given for free use everywhere), books can also be read only after payment (the cost of one book is from 20 to 200 rubles). The volume of content looks impressive: more than 2.2 million books, 2,000 international and local newspapers in 49 languages of the world, as well as 2,300 popular magazines in 22 languages of the world.
16:34. At the end of the working run of the Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone, I went through the media entertainment: photo and video shooting, music player, radio.
The camera is very fast, pictures and videos are also saved without delay. The settings are intuitive, everything is selected directly from the screen. The quality of the pictures for the mobile phone camera is very good. There are quite interesting photo and video editors that provide ample opportunities for experimentation.
The new Galaxy S II music player has a different, more concise interface. Available sound processing technology DNSe and SRS. The music search service has remained the same. We were pleased with the sound settings: there are 9 equalizers and 6 effects (except the usual, wide range, concert hall, music clarity, bass boost, externalization). FM radio provides for air recording (by the way, the radio application has also been updated).
19:49. Everything that you just read was hammered into Habr also using Samsung Galaxy S II.
20:07.PS: on the way home I tested the navigator. Everything worked quickly and clearly (these words are applicable to almost every aspect of the smartphone during the review): even with the use of mobile Internet, maps are loaded in a few seconds, and the navigator builds optimal routes (but Google should be thanked for this).
Samsung Galaxy S II is a smartphone stuffed with powerful stuffing, which has a wide range of features and the latest technological innovations that will please even the most sophisticated geek. If you need a fast multifunctional multimedia device, then this model, at least, deserves your close attention and study.
Technical specifications Samsung Galaxy S II
Networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS / HSDPA 900/2100, EDGE
Operating system: Android 2.3.1
Platform: XMM6260 chipset, dual-core S5PC210 1 GHz processor (later versions with 1.2 GHz and Tegra 2 will be available )
Memory: 1 GB RAM, 16/32 GB flash, microSD slot (up to 32 GB)
Screen: capacitive, 4.27 inches WVGA (480 x 800), Super AMOLED +
Camera: 8 MP with autofocus and flash, 1080p video 30 fps
Wireless: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, DLNA
Power: 1650 mAh battery
Dimensions: 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.49 mm
Weight: 116 g.
Official video release: details about the Samsung Galaxy S II.
In Russia, sales of the Samsung Galaxy S II will begin in late May. Recommended price for 16 GB version: 29 990 rubles.
