Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com with the release of the Samsung Galaxy s2 Samsung's flagship for 2011 we're seeing TouchWiz 4.0 which is Samsung's proprietary interface that sits on top of Android in this case Android 2.3 Gingerbread in this video we're gonna take a tour of everything that is TouchWiz 4.0 so let's get to it alright and TouchWiz starts here on the home screen which you can turn on or you can unlock the phone by pressing the standby button on the right over here or you can press the home button right here to unlock the device kind of like an iPhone actually so we can press on that we are taken to the lock screen very simple plain lock screen it's not functional like you'll find on newer HTC devices you just get the time and the date nothing else which is a little bit annoying so we can slide that off the screen slide it up to the right however you want to do it and we are taken to the home screen interface now before jumping into any of that let's just give you a sort of framework or some context of how fast this device is let's take a look at what we score in Quadrant yeah you know benchmarks aren't truly representative of day to day performance they're just numbers but they help to provide some context as mentioned so here we are scoring about 2900 in quadrant sometimes it goes as high as 3100 we're gonna have a full suite of benchmarks coming up in the final review on pocketnow.com what you probably want to see is how this device is a day to day meaning how fast is the web browser how good is the launcher and things like that we're gonna talk all about that in this video just went to sleep now another thing you probably care a lot about is data speeds so this phone has three states I have to actually turn off the Wi-Fi to show you this three states of network connectivity by the way this is another aspect of TouchWiz 4.0 you get these Quick Links to Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS you can mute the sound and turn on and off autorotation which is a nice feature kind of get that from previous generation Samsung devices so this indicator has three states right now it says h plus implying HSPA+ it can also say H which would mean H as a DPA or it can say 3G like it just bounce back to which is actually UMTS and if we go into about phone and status you'll see then it says UMTS right now and it might actually bounce back to HSB plus at any moment so the reason we think that this phone has HSPA+ meaning that it's a sleeper AT&T 4G phone is because well we've we've been mark this phone so if you go to speedtest.net the application we were in Washington DC running some tests and look at these tremendous speeds we got five point nine megabits per second down these are not HSDPA speeds these are those faster HSPA+ speeds that we've been hearing about four point eight down let's see what else we have here those are really the two best runs four point five down was pretty impressive but I mean five point nine down that is absolutely HSPA+ and of course that was over cellular you can see the little notification there really really impressive stuff if we run the benchmark right now we're over 3G we'd probably do something like one point eight down one point five up or so so if you want to if you want the Samsung Galaxy s2 on AT&T S 4G network it's already it's it already can do that so that's kind of an interesting headline for this device so TouchWiz for point out what is it well this is what it looks like you get a doc along the bottom which is changeable you get a variety of home screens with a bunch of different widgets and you can tap and hold on them to remove them kind of like you'd expect on any Android phone and the way that you manage home screens is kind of like you're used to on any other Android phone you pinch right so you pinch your take into the zoomed out view and from here we can rearrange home screens tapping and holding we can add new ones see how many we can add so that is a total of two four six seven home screens and you can actually take them away by doing this clicking them into the trashcan and you get the point from there so here are the home screens you can get to them by swiping left and right of course you can tap on the number to jump right to five and go to one you can also tap and hold and then you get this really cool 3d animation to bounce from one home screen to another and let's talk about what it's like to add widgets because Samsung has done some really cool stuff to make the widget adding process kind of a little bit nicer so you tap and hold then you get this nice little translucent menu from the bottom let's actually go into live wallpaper and show you two live wallpapers that Samsung is added this is probably the best one it shows you the weather when it's going through a demo right now with windmills spinning in the back Brown super smooth great frame rate then we get to this one ocean weather which just seems very crappy look health choppy the wave animations are it's just kind of seems a lot worse than the other one that they threw in and of course you can choose from a variety of wallpapers Samsung has added some pretty cool ones you might not care that much about wallpaper but these are really nice actually so we go along choose one that we like starry night this is probably a nice one to use in this video because it's not very distracting click Save picture it takes a little bit too long to to add the wallpaper but there it goes okay so here we go let's add some widgets tap it home go down to widgets now the way that you add widgets a little bit different you don't get the vertically scrolling list that you get in standard Android you get horizontally scrolling widgets which is a nice touch but it's also less intuitive because if you want to quickly see more widgets on the screen at once with this you can only see four at a time so what we can do here is we can click and drag we can add a variety of widgets I'll show you some of these ap Mobile agenda not too interesting this one called month needs an entire homescreen to work so we'll put that on this one go over to the side here got agenda today some pretty cool clocks you like clocks we've got a digital clock too actually several different styles of digital clock that you can just tap on here and that's pretty much it I mean the rest are built in Android widgets that some of them I've installed already and some of them that come with the device when you're done you hit the home screen button something really cool about these hope these widgets on the home screen is that they are actually resizable where some of them are like this one the weather so you tap it hold and let go and this shows you how big you can make it kind of like in launcher Pro where you can resize widgets so I can drag that here I could make it a 2x2 grid but it's obviously covered by the clock there so I hit the home button when I'm done you want to hit the home button it brings me back to the first screen so I'm gonna remove this and show you what it's like to expand this particular widget to its full size because it's kind of cool you actually get the weather so really cool functionality there and your ability to resize widgets here's some other widgets kind of a smaller size weather we've got the tasks widget another agenda widget there's the clock here I've got just the the digital clock with Google search and some icons this is the calendar widget so kind of like any other calendar widget you tap on an area it shows you the preview you can tap on that particular entry it shows you the calendar it's in it shows you the information if you swipe to the right we have this really cool widget I'm actually going to delete this one that is like a little post-it note on your home screen so right now I've got one that says hello and by the way you get swiped keyboard if you want it that was not very accurate trying to type hi again well perhaps it's sent to another language it is actually check this out so we tap and hold and switch it back to uh back to English right and has another keyboard that comes stock on this I cannot find English that is very strange here Australian English good enough so hi again so swipe is fun you get the point and when you're done you get this little sticky note when you want to add a new one you have to tap on this little + you get a new sticky note kind of a fun little widget so the TouchWiz UI version 4 brings this new way to add widgets kind of a nicer looking style than you get in stock Android and your ability to swipe to the right and to manage them another cool feature of TouchWiz 4 is moving around widgets has become easier so say I want to move around this widget I tap it with my thumb and I use the gyroscope to move to the next homescreen and then I can find a place where I can actually drop this it takes some practice as you can see it's a it's not very precise and it doesn't always work but if you're trying to move around a lot of widgets at one time it's a neat and handy looking feature another thing that you can do in terms of gestures we have to go into the gallery to do this it's this two finger gesture typically if pinch-to-zoom you go like this right well in TouchWiz 4 you put two fingers on the screen tilt the device towards you and again this one takes practice and it kind of zooms in and out I'm not sure the purpose for this one it seems to be kind of a novelty you can do this in the browser too so it's just it's just an added feature that seems kind of cool but who knows another component of TouchWiz 4.0 is the task manager so we can go into the task manager here and you can see all your open applications I'm actually surprised about the level of integration with the task manager in the galaxy s2 because it's got so much RAM it's got 833 megabytes of user accessible RAM the actual number on paper is 1 gigabyte so it doesn't really need memory management it just does a really good job at managing applications because it has so much RAM built into it another thing that's a little bit frustrating here is if you tap in home on on the home screen button you only get six recently used programs and not 8 which is stock for Android 2.2 this is 2.3 and we can tap the home button there's also a corresponding widget for the task manager I'll make some room here so you can see that it's very simple it just allows you to see how many applications you have running at a glance and it is called it's over here somewhere over here program on there here you go so quite simply you tap on that it journals you right into the task manager so kind of a cool way to manager programs if you like to keep an eye a very close eye on the sort of number of programs that you're running at once let's talk about the application tray now here it is it is side scrollable you can't get a vertically scrolling list unless you change it to list view but then that makes it even more difficult to find the apps that you want and the grid view is completely customizable so you can have one screen for your games one screen for your productivity apps and so on and so forth and if we go into edit mode you can see what I mean from here you can also change the dock icon so you can say put a little search down here if you want it move any of the dock icons you can also add a page from down here you just drag the icons you want onto the page and it creates a new page we can actually add folders which is super cool so we can put this down here readers hub and let's say Gmail just put it there and you can take the folder and plop it on a home screen name it something and boom if we go to save you'll see that now we have a new folder pretty cool a folder in your app tray very good idea very useful thing and if you want to take the apps out of it you should be able to just do that and you're taken into edit mode immediately so you can just take things out of the folder pretty cool feature there now let's talk about the settings built in to the galaxy s2 we have some things to talk about let's go to display first and screen display we can actually change the font on this device which is awesome a lot of or most Android phones don't let you do this this one's kind of the coolest called shock go cookie and it changes the entire system fun which is great you can even add new fonts if you click get fonts online they're about a dollar each it just dumps you into the Android Market I think this particular font is the crisp most crisp and clean that exists here Scott's got some other options here like autorotation you can turn that off you can change the duration of the buttons down here because they keep shutting off to save battery and when they're off you can't see them I mean there's no way to really know unless you've memorized what you probably will which ones back and which ones menu but it's kind of nice to have it on six seconds so that they show up like so we can also have a power option here to adjust certain characteristics of the screen to save my battery life we can calibrate the gyroscope calibrate the accelerometer from the screen let's scroll down we've got a power saving mode which is nice so that you can have the device turn off GPS and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you get below like 15% so that you could actually make calls if you need to we've got this item here called motion which is pretty cool shows you all the gestures and the motions you can do a lot of them are very HTC esque now for example turnover is an HTC feature that they brought out several years ago so much calling you put the phone on its face like so hopefully not as rough as and you'll get the the sound to mute you've also got the tilt feature which I've showed you in the photo gallery you put two fingers on the screen move the device closer from you and further away from you you've also got panning also showed you that where you can move jet icons and widgets from one homescreen to the next and DoubleTap which is a feature I'll show you in the next video that allows you to quickly enter a voice command into the device let's scroll down see what else we have language and keyboard you get two input methods to choose from Samsung keyboard and swype let's see what the Samsung keyboard looks like and did you see that when we went back to the home screen the widgets had a tough time refreshing that's one of the problems with this phone the home screen takes a long time to read you're off let's go and type something so this is the Android keyboard so it's nice it works it's a magnifies the letter when you tap on it it makes a vibration and a sound let's jump back into the settings here so those are the input methods let's go down we've got some dock settings if you want to use an optional dock to connect this to a flat panel to go into about--we're see we're running on android 2.3.3 the latest go to battery usage just for your own knowledge yeah the displays using the most amount of power but this is a Super AMOLED plus screen so it's really good on battery power and we're gonna have remarks on battery power and battery life in the final review on pocketnow.com now of course TouchWiz goes into other places as well like the email application so if we go into email if you have a galaxy tab you know if you go into landscape view you get a split screen view that has actually come to the Galaxy S to watch this really cool you get a tablet view of your email so if you tap on the message on the left you will get the message to show up on the right which is a really nice feature to have especially with a device with a larger screen like this 4.3 inches now something that is extremely annoying is the time that it takes to delete an email in the email client this is obviously down up by samsung it's got a lot of and things like that so if we tap and hold something and click delete watch how long it takes one two three four five five seconds to delete an email that's insane there might be some setting with my email client or something like that but I've looked at this many times and everything seems to be fine another thing that really is annoying is that there's no checkmark checkboxes on the left side of the email client so if you take a look at an HTC device and kind of off camera and pulling up email you're going to see that you get check boxes so really quickly you can go down and delete or mark as read or unread a variety of emails and the Samsung Galaxy S 2 there are no checkmarks there's no way to select multiple messages you got to do a tap an old one at the time very very annoying in terms of the email client you know in the future you'll be able to flash this device put a different realm on there a different email client but out of the box the email client kind of sucks to be honest so that was a look at TouchWiz 4.0 Samsung has done a lot to change the experience of Android mostly for the better coming up in the next video we're going to talk about web browsing performance we're going to drill into the many included applications that come on the Samsung Galaxy s2 and talked about some other things as well if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if you want to jump back to that Hardware tour where we talked about specs and exactly what you get in terms of hardware again the annotation is up right there just tap on that jump back to that video and enjoy thanks for watching that's it for now