Category Archives: Android

The Samsung Galaxy S 2 Review

On the face of it the Samsung Galaxy S II looks to be a pretty good phone with some great specifications of the hardware. So how does the iPhone compare against the Galaxy SII and the first thing to note, is that it is cheaper. Without doing a full set of research on this it looks like the Samsung is about 100 euro cheaper as a SIM free phone than the iPhone. The question is though, what is it like in terms of really getting down to it and using the phone.

Technical details of the Samsung Galaxy SII

The important statistic is that it has a 4.3 inch display screen and a dual core processor. With the bigger screen it also comes with greater graphic performance and fast processing of the data. The camera is an eight megapixel autofocus camera which is on par with the iPhone 4S. The galaxy phones that are being sold at the present come with the Android Gingerbread operating system and one would think that sometime very soon they will be supplied with Ice Cream Sandwich. It has 1 GB of RAM with 16 GB installed and you can also put in a Micro SD card, up to 32 GB.

What do Samsung Galaxy S2 users think of the phone.

Looking through the customer reviews on Amazon for this phone, out of 187 reviews it has been given 144 five-star reviews and 23 four-star reviews. I would say that this is pretty conclusive that the owners of the Galaxy are very happy with their smart phone. I’m not sure that this phone would be good for me though because I tend to use my iPhone a lot for playing music. It has been reported that if you use it to play music is uses a lot of the processor power to do that and as well as getting hot in your pocket, it kills battery very quickly. To counter against that you would have to wonder how that would compare with the reported battery problems with the iPhone 4S using iOS 5. The usage for the music and the iPhone should be better with it having its background history based on the iPod.

Another thing to take note of, with regards the battery usage is that if you have the widgets on the home screen of the phone, it can have a detrimental effect on the life of the battery. As with many things, is down to give and take and the balance of the technology you want to use and how much battery life it takes to use it.

Users have reported that the Android operating system is now surprisingly useful and intuitive and will do just about all you need it to do, as soon as you take it out of the box. Samsung have put their own layer over the top of Android which they call Touch Wiz. It seems that it makes it quite a lot like iOS but perhaps a little bit more customisable.

Swapping Ecosystem

For an iPhone user that is thinking about making the change to Android, the biggest difficulty to this will be having to move from one app ecosystem to another. There you are with your iPhone with all of the apps that you have purchased over however many years you have been using the iPhone. Do you really want to change to Android and the Samsung Galaxy S 2
and have to buy apps that you have already purchased for the iPhone. For someone coming new to using a smart phone then this difficulty is not going to arise. Certainly though, it really is worth considering how much money you have spent on applications, whether you are moving from the iPhone to Android or going the other direction from Android to the iOS ecosystem.

People that have made the move from iOS to Android have really enjoyed having widgets on the home screen, finding them very useful indeed. Also popular is the fact that you can make shortcuts to contacts on your home screen for someone that you might want to instantly call, send an SMS text message to, or an e-mail. One thing that switchers have said about the Android is that it is not as easy to use, but that comes out that way because Android is much more configurable.

Overview of the Samsung Galaxy S2 mobile phone

Technically the phone is better than the iPhone 4S and even works well for making telephone calls. No problems with the antenna or with dropped calls. The screen is actually quite wonderful, is bigger than the iPhone and the fact that this phone is quite a bit cheaper than the iPhone 4S might be very tempting for users. If technically you are a bit technophobic and would prefer the easier route to using a smart phone, then the iPhone is probably for you. For anybody else considering a smart phone then the Samsung Galaxy S 2
smart phone could be a very good choice. You might also have a look at the Galaxy Nexus which is just being released and has the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich already installed on it. So why not go and buy Samsung Galaxy S II , looks like a great smart phone.

While I will admit to being a devout follower of the Apple religion, I’m not totally blind to the fact that there are other devices and systems out there. I don’t tend to come into contact with these other devices, but I will read reports about them even though it can be difficult to find information that is unbiased. Competition in any arena is a good thing and in the area of tablet computing, it is necessary for the iPad tablet computer to have some competition to push it onwards to better things. I am sure that Apple do as much as they think is necessary to improve their products revision by revision and nothing more than that. Like any good manufacturer and marketer, they want to have upgrades waiting in the wings, that they can offer later. When there is no competition and the growth is stunted by this sort of activity and way of thinking, it is frustrating for us consumers of new technologies.

As a user of the iPad I get the impression that there is little out there as yet that seriously would challenge the iPad domination in this tablet computing arena. Sometimes the specifications of other tablet devices can be as good as and possibly even better than the iPad specifications, but still in the view of the buying public the iPad is the sought-after device. Here is a look at Samsung Galaxy vs iPad.

Samsung tab – What does the Galaxy have to offer?

Lets look at the Samsung Galaxy Size specification. The Galaxy tab 10.1 is thin and light, weighing only 565g, the thickness of it is 8.6 mm and the 10.1 refers to the diagonal measurement across the screen of 10 point 1 inches. With a resolution of 1280 x 800 and a density of pixels being 149 pixels per inch, you have a widescreen display which would work very well for watching movies. I am not totally convinced on how well it would work with documents, but then I use an iMac which is a widescreen device and I work on documents with that. Don’t have a problem there.

Samsung Galaxy Tab (10.1-Inch, 16GB, Wi-Fi)

Samsung tab – Running with the Android OS

On Android they call the home screen Live Panel. You have a row of icons at the bottom of the screen that can be tapped in order to get applications onto the main screen running. So from the home screen it should be simple to get to your e-mail and your favourite websites as well as organise your social networking such as Facebook and Twitter. Apps that you have running in this Live Panel will be constantly refreshing so that you can see the data in them immediately.

The claim by Samsung that there is better web browsing and that it is better because there is also the Adobe Flash support to me seems a little spurious. I think most people are aware that flash is a processor hog and if it’s works without crashing the system, at the very least it will completely drain your battery in no time at all. That is the view that I have of flash at the moment, unless you have one of these devices and can convince me otherwise.

What can you do with the Samsung Tab

Samsung Galaxy Tab features – There are the full applications on there that you would expect to see alongside the mini apps that are available. The mini apps are things such as PenMemo, world clock, calculator and a task manager and these are part of a multi-tasking feature that according to Samsung will make you more efficient and productive. I wonder ??

There is the Readers Hub through which you will have books, newspapers and magazines made available to you to read on your Samsung Galaxy. You are able to change the size of the font if you need a larger font to be able to read better and you can also zoom in and out. That is very handy if you would like to zoom in and have a closer look at a picture. for instance.

There is the Music Hub which gives you access to your music library wherever that may be. As you’d expect you can access all sorts of popular music and see the artistic information as well as album art.

One of the main functions of computers, especially mobile computers, tablet computers and phone devices, is that you should have easy access to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and your e-mails. With Social Hub it shows you your e-mail messages coming in and your social networking accounts and it does it all through one access point. I quite like the sound of that, as it would be very handy to not have to change from one application to another to do those similar sorts of tasks.

Getting productive with the Samsung tablet Office applications

Although within the Android marketplace you will be able to find a number of office applications, it does seem pretty good that Samsung have included Polaris Office that will let you open and edit your office type of documents. You will be able to get into your Microsoft presentations, Word documents and spreadsheets and it has a function that allows you to store up to 20 things on a clipboard, both text and images. Now that is a very nice feature to have. I think it may be possible with the iPad but only if you are using a third-party application.

Samsung Galaxy Tab (10.1-Inch, 16GB, Wi-Fi)

Accessories for the Samsung Galaxy Tab

As we have seen with the iPad, accessories and how they extend and complement the tablet computer are important for the way that you interact with the device and also with how you can protect it during day-to-day use. For the Samsung you will be able to buy external keyboards and covers and I would be interested to see if there are any other accessories that are worth getting.

Taking the pictures – What about the cameras?

Just going by the fact that the camera on the rear of the Samsung tablet is a three megapixel autofocus camera and it also has an LED flash and the camera on the front is a two megapixel camera, it is clear the cameras are better than the ones available on the iPad 2. But that is not terribly difficult, because the cameras on the iPad are complete rubbish. Certainly they are no good in comparison to the cameras on the iPhone 4. With the camera on the rear you can do 720p video recording at 30 frames per second. In terms of playing video back you do seem to have a wider variety of playback formats with the Samsung than you do with the iPad.

There are complaints about the USB connection being a non-standard cable, but that’s not really a very big issue. There are users saying that they think it is a quality piece of kit and it is no wonder that Apple want to see it banned. The Samsung Galaxy Tab comes with the Honeycomb version of the Android operating system and there are some that think it would probably work better when using Ice Cream Sandwich. I think if you are using that latest version of the operating system then you don’t have to deal with the TouchWiz interface.

As with other touchscreens you do sometimes have a problem with fingerprints leaving oily substances on the surface and perhaps giving a little bit of a rainbow effect, that you probably would rather not have. If you are a Mac user then you may have some difficulties with moving files to and from the Samsung Tab until you work out what are the third-party softwares that you need from the Android marketplace to have that task covered.

Shana says:-

I have the Galaxy, and I love it very much. Great screen, good battery life, light and small. I’m usually a Mac user, so I am surprised by how much I’m loving the Android interface.