Connectivity / Display / Camera / OS

Reading the list of connectivity features is quite impressive. There is USB, DLNA, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, WiFi-Direct and HSPA. But one feature is missing: LTE (Long Term Evolution). It's hard to understand why the Koreans didn't equip this device with LTE. These days this technology is being pushed in a lot of countries and therefore such a feature would have made Samsungs new device even more future proof. Probalby they will introduce a version of the S3 with LTE.

One of the highlights of this devices definitely is it's display. Brilliant colors and very sharp fonts, that's what you get from the 720 x 1280 HDReady SuperAMOLED display. It really is 4.8 inch of eye candy. Samsung was also able to reduce power consumption of the display. Therefore it was possible to keep the load on the battery, caused by the display, on about the same level as with the Galaxy S2.

Samsung also overworked the camera which ships with the S3. The first thing we noticed is that it starts really quickly. According to the manufacturer it only takes 990 milliseconds until the camera is ready to take a picture. Furthermore also focussing is fast. So, Samsung finally has a put a camera into one of there samrphone that allows you to take proper snapshots. Furhtermore there is a continous shooting option which automatically take eight pictures and suggest the best one. The other seven pictures are automatically deleted. This feautres is very hand if you have kids and you want to picture nice moments. Also the quality of the pictures is good. There are crips colors and the LED flash helps taking decent pictures when there is not much ambient light.
It isn't a surprise that Samsungs chose to put Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich on the S3. To be exact they it is Android Version 4.0.4 that actually installed on their devices these days. And of course Samsung adopted its TouchWiz interface for Android 4. On the software side there aren't a lot of new apps but there are quite a few neat improvements. One itneresting thing is for example "Smart Stay". This feature uses facial recognition to track a users eyes and dimm the brightness of the display when a user isn't looking at it. Furthermore the S3 should be able to recognize faces when you take a group foto. It does this on the basis of the contacts stored on the device. Another improvement that concerns the camera is the new burst mode. If allows you to take a lot of pictures in very short time and after that the smartphone suggestes which one is the best to be stored. Someting that needs to be on the S3 is a voice recognition software. In this case it is called S-Voice. A big plus point with this version of S-Voice is for example that it does work with other languages than english too.