Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here at the 4 review for you of the samsung galaxy s2 for AT&T let's go ahead and dig in and see if this really is the king of the smartphone world so very few phones come with as much hype as a galaxy s2 is our European brethren have had this phone for a few months before it finally hit us shores and here it is I'll dressed up in AT&T clothing so let me run through the specs of this super phone very quickly this is arguably one of the best spect phones on the market so we are looking at a 4.3 inch super amoled plus display with a resolution of 480 x 800 Scott Gorilla Glass on there so you can bang it around your pocket put some keys in there hopefully not scratch it does not mean it's scratch proof though so don't get upset and yell at me when your beautiful new phones got a gash across it it's not to protect it much and drops either so keep that in mind so it's got TouchWiz 40 with Android Gingerbread sitting on top of it being powered by a dual-core 1.2 bigger chip and this thing is a screamer I will talk about that a bit more it's augmented with one gig of ram and that's my big word for this review 16 gigs of storage 8 megapixel camera on the back with a pretty awesome autofocus sensor that can also shoot 1080p at 30 frames per second and it weighs 116 grams alright so let's go ahead and talk about call quality first the phone doesn't matter how many giga hertz our cores it has if it sucks making call it's not going to be much used to you this phone runs on AT&T hspa+ network so they are billing it as a 4G network called quota is actually very good I experienced only one drop call in my 20 call test speaker phone was exceptionally loud what is surprising for a device this thin but the speakers on here are not bad I did have a tad bit of popping noise though on my ends on about seven of the calls that I made it wasn't necessarily that noticeable but I did hear it and I did have some issues connecting with a few Bluetooth accessories those made by job or a particular I do that some difficulty with that might have been just this device but if java is what you use for your bluetooth you might want to try this out first in the store if possible so call quality was decent not tremendous it's good enough so you don't have to worry if you want to get this it's going to be fine in the call quality department but let's talk about what everybody wants to know about the galaxy s2 and that's the raw speed of the phone so for me where I know to speed the most and where the power comes most to me and maybe I'm alone on this is web browsing I hate seeing that checkerboard patterns I'm scrolling through a website and I don't see it here at all this phone is incredibly fast pinch-to-zoom with flash on although no flash concepts being shown here is really quick the browser is outstanding it is probably one of the best browsing experiences on a mobile device if you saw my review on the droid bionic I praised it for its extremely fast really almost eloquence buttery smooth browsing this one is just as good just really samsung did an incredible job taking advantage of the native browser here you can see the physics engine at work in androids put together just an amazing browsing experience so if browsing is going to be important to you the speed here is pretty pretty outstanding see a speed of loading a web page here it's ever been loaded before I'm not connected to Wi-Fi just the hspa+ network talk about that in just a minute could see how things work it is just lightning fast all right so there's browsing for you even on sites that are heavy on flash wasn't a problem here at all all right so let's talk about speed of applications with one gig of ram I never once had to go into a task manager and readjust application to close things it was never even issue something that I was very conscious of let's say the last generation android devices on this generation has a gig or more never been an issue at all opening applications lightning fast just pleasure to use so whether or not you are a multitasking demon you're not going to have to worry everything here just opens up and works very quickly and they're not going to have to close applications for those of you that want to know what the raw speed numbers were I did run a quadrant test and I use this test on all of my smart phones that I test leads on the Android smartphones it might not be the most accurate but it is what I've tested on every single android phone for the past almost year so it does make for a pretty even test and I did get a square of 2881 and this is what they stock rom you can see it sort of how far ahead that is here so from a spec standpoint even with the stock rom it is outstanding if I want to get in there and tinker with the roms you can even get that square up higher point being if speeds what you're worried about you are not going to have to concern yourself with it on the galaxy s2 this thing is just absolutely incredibly fast from a speed standpoint let's talk about network it is a 4g device after all right so I am hspa+ I'm in Southern California which is blanketed hspa+ and I've got almost full bars of service let's go and run a speed test for fun so here is the speedtest.net app finding closest server to be able to find the LA server if not i'll set it to it no Wi-Fi connected here at all let's begin test let's see what we get just for fun so connect it to the LOS angeles-based server and we are right now at point almost at 11.2 so we're getting there alright 1.43 was what we got it's actually the fastest test that ipad ground hspa+ network in just about points five ish on the upload and we are done alright so just for laughs let's bring in an iphone here using the non hspa+ network and let's run a speedtest Wi-Fi has been turned off just as 3g with about three bars so we'll go ahead and run a similar test and this is obviously just a test at 18 TS network there's nothing really to do with the galaxy s2 itself just something that I found very interesting let's see if I can duplicate the results here so the ping was just about the same i phone is just about one petering back down a little bit point 51 on there download let's go ahead and check the upload here and I I speak test everywhere I go I don't know it's a maybe too obsessive compulsive Singh compulsive thing or the inner geek and me I just can't stop testing so I even got faster speeds on the upload and about a third slower on the downs I got a hard time classifying this as 4G now certainly your speeds are going to vary depending on where you are this is just a test of a nice but instant in Southern California in fact that other tests I've ran this is actually come out much faster than this guy so can use that term 4G and take it with a bit of a grain of salt at least until we see LTE start coming out on mobile devices so i'll push this guy off to the side and we'll continue our test let's talk about this screen now it is super amoled plus and it's super amoled awesome text here looks really really crisp so let's go ahead go into some articles there we go well zoom in text here absolutely pops you're not going to have any sort of pixilation sometimes on older screens and you zoomed in you could see pixilation on these modern screens that you very rarely see it the screen here dosto is absolutely beautiful so let me show you some images here let's go ahead and we'll hit home and go ahead and jump into gallery so may I can find gallery owners have a hard time finding that let's see if I can spray Bobby see probably imagine you guys screaming at it in the comments there it is there it is there's gallery but I will find it on my own right so there it is gallery let's go ahead and show you some images that we've got here so I took some photos of water bottles something cool i'm going to show you guys in just a minute we'll go and hit done so there's a water bottle go ahead and turn it like this it looks really nice the autofocus here works extremely well and i'll show you guys an example of that but there's something else kind of need here so if you want to zoom in on web pages or images you can pinch to zoom like normal networks just about as well as you expect so very well but Samsung get something else doing here QB put two fingers on the screen you tilt in or out you can actually control the zoom which is kind of gimmicky but the more I use it more I found myself finally getting valuable actually started doing zooming like this it's pretty handy it's also pretty precise alright so let me go ahead and show you what this camera looks like we'll go ahead the camera button is not a hard button for camera it's all soft buttons here so there's that same water bottle used for a last subject go ahead and hit the shot and you can see it auto focus and takes a picture it's pretty fast stepping a picture to a video attest shooting 1080p looks average for a cell phone it's not outstanding but it's better than a lot of cell phone esque images I couldn't take this video and i can upload it to youtube but you're going to see a degradation in quality from thats take my word for it it looks decent if you're out shooting your friends or want to shoot pictures your dog this is going to work certainly it's not going to replace a handycam but it's going to you know do a decent job all right so let's talk a bit more about the screen then go ahead and jump back a web page and go back to the main technobuffalo com site so ever since samsung released the first AMOLED than super amoled amoled plus displays they've been plagued by a little bit of a bluish hue in it so if I go ahead and pull out here's the iphone by comparison the same page you can see that that bluish hue is still here on the samsung galaxy s2 it's not something that really impedes the use of the device something that I'm definitely cognizant of if you've ever gone to best buy walmart wherever you go to look at tvs for example and you see a really expensive TV next to a less expensive TV yo the difference of the screens when the next to each other however once one of them is gone and you get it home put on your wallet it looks great on the screen here is no exception I've spoken to a few people actually prefer this blue hue they find to be a bit more natural for me it's not my preferred sort of color drain but the screen is gorgeous and that's really hard to deny that this is probably one of the best screens on a mobile device right now but keep that in mind if you're one of the few people out that blue hue is going to bother you try it out in the store after using it for a couple of days I hardly even noticed it anymore at all all right so now let's talk a bit about the design I mentioned at the beginning that our European friends had the galaxy s2 for a little while and indeed they did but when it came to us shores here in ATT clothing AT&T hugged up a supermodel looking phone on the european version you had just three buttons you had a big home button here and then two buttons flanking it now we've got those forts or a typical capacitive android buttons and it's a great it is not a good-looking phone which is unfortunate because it's really pretty inside the specs here are incredible it's like putting Groucho Marx glasses on a supermodel it's just not the prettiest phone to look at it looks like every other end right phone out there which is unfortunate because it's much better than pretty much every other Android phone out there I liked that big home button that Samsung had on the air kuna version I wanted to unlock the device I could just tap that as opposed to having to hit the button here on the side which admittedly is not a big deal but I was kind of cognizant of it as I was using the phone so a personal preference I think it's not the best looking phone on the market but it's definitely one of the best android phones on the market and certainly the best android phone in 18 tease lineup on the back samsung this whole back part here is plastic and it's kind of flimsy plastic if you take it off go ahead and show you see it's very very thin however once it's on its it so flush over that battery they don't even notice how thin it is so the built quality does feel pretty solid you know that it's a bit of a plasticky feel to it but it's not bad I would have liked to be some sort of metal actions that would have made it be a bit heavier but you know I might be a personal preference thing here on the offerings at them side so you do have TouchWiz you can see all the TouchWiz II goodness that Samsung's got here TouchWiz has gotten a lot more out of your way than in previous versions we've seen so it's now in its fourth iteration let me show you some of the widget action here so you hold that down now you've got immediately a new way to select what you want see it right here we'll go ahead and jump into widgets and now they all show up serve as a nice list you can see what they are is sort of crunch in and crunch out on there's a lot of nice additions here featured apps latitude power savings voice stuff and all the goodness they'd expect from Android including a really awesome free turn-by-turn navigation if you're on this bench with what operating system to get and you're not in love with Apple forever reason you don't have to have windows phone 7 the free turn-by-turn navigation really is a killer feature that people have forgotten about you don't have to pay for TeleNav or any sort of additional add-on it's free you can deal with the robotic voice it works really really really well as well as any other navigation system that I've used on a mobile device so keep that in mind as you guys can decide what phone is right for you so a bit of an ugly design aside this is definitely the best android experience i have used if it had true 4g speeds i can say that this phone is the best phone bed reviewed but those dismal one point eight ish 1.5 speeds which is actually the fastest that i've seen on my test here make it hard to give this guy a perfect five out of five now if you're in an area where that speeds not going to be a problem you're always connected to Wi-Fi or hspa+ is faster by you then five out of five no brainer hands down for the galaxy s2 however if you're like me in an area where hspa+ might as well be edge speeds it's tough to give it five stars so give it a solid four and a half with that half to make up for the speed difference my battery standpoint I was easily able to get to a full day with the screen set to auto brightness and with email accounts pulling down all the time about two hours of phone calls and a ridiculous amount of browsing more than I want to admit on video it is a great phone and when I can wholeheartedly recommend to those on AT&T looking to pick up the best smartphone on the planet and one of the questions that I get is should I get the galaxy s2 I hear quad-core might be coming this is an awesome phone it's a well SPECT phone it's going to be a fast phone for the next two years so it might not be the fastest phone on the market a year from now but it's always gonna be able to keep up with what's coming and with processor like this can be able to get the most recent updates of Android assuming samsung releases them you know ice cream sandwich or whatever comes next after that so don't worry pick up the phone if you want some Android action i'm jon rettinger from technobuffalo Android action that sounds that sounds really bad i'm jon rettinger from technobuffalo be sure to check out the website for all your tech news and I will see you in the next video bye bye you