Samsung Galaxy S3: exterior, hardware and display
We recently extensively reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S3. In the short time it's been out it has already become very popular despite its high pricetag of around £490. Please refer to the in-depth review for more information, here we will briefly summarise the main points.
The Galaxy S3 comes in white and dark blue with rounded edges. Because of this it resembles the Galaxy Nexus more than the Galaxy S2 that had much sharper lines. The main selling point of the Galaxy S3 is the large 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED screen. It's the largest screen we've encountered in regular smartphones, with the exception of the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note which is a bit in a category of its own.
The Galaxy S3 has an HD Super AMOLED screen of 1280x720 pixels, but it's actually also a pentile pixel matrix just like the HTC One S. Again, it's a bit less sharp than an RGB screen of the same resolution and dimensions, but it's barely or not noticeable on the Galaxy S3. Even when you compare is to the HTC One X and LG 4X HD that have RGB HD screens you can't tell much difference. The S3 also suffers less from colour shifting when viewed at an angle, much less than the HTC One S. The display looks very nice thanks to this, even if the colour range is wider than necessary which makes the colour rendering a bit excessive.
The hardware consists of 1 GB RAM and 16 GM storage, expandable with microSD cards. It's possible to replace the 2100 mAh battery, which is a very welcome quality in our opinion.The process is the Exynos 4410 quad-core chip with Mali 400 GPU, which we analysed extensively here. The benchmark results you can read later on prove that it's an excellent chip, generally superior to the Tegra 3.
Compared to the HTC One S and X, the Galaxy S3 feels a bit less solid, and this is because you can remove the back to gain access to the battery and sd card slot. It's a trade-off, either you have a solid-feeling unibody design of HTC where you can't replace the battery, or you have the detachable back of the S3 where you can replace the battery.
The back of the S3 has a glossy finish, which looks very nice until you touch it. Oily hand and finger prints become very visible, which doesn't happen on the matte finish of the HTC phones.
