Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon venneman from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware review for the Samsung Galaxy s2 Samsung's flagship smartphone for 2011 let's get to it so again this is the European version that comes to us from cloaca UK they're shipping the device right now but it will also work on AT&T in the US it is a quad-band GSM quad-band UMTS phone so for those keeping track that is the 850 1909 hundred and twenty one hundred bands meaning it will work in Europe it'll work in the u.s. on AT&T as mentioned it'll also work on t-mobile in the US but not on 3G it's very likely that we're gonna see this phone released on all major carriers so if you don't want to pay 700 plus dollars for this right now just wait it's going to probably be available at a subsidized price in the near future on a carrier because the carriers are gonna want this phone it is pretty badass let's talk about specs it's got a dual-core 1.2 gigahertz Samsung Exynos processors they're brand new chip previously in the Galaxy S line of devices we saw the hummingbird chip clocking in at 1 gigahertz of course that was a single-core so they made a huge jump in terms of cores and clock speed here for the Samsung Galaxy S 2 of course Samsung is not alone Qualcomm is doing their 1.2 gigahertz Snapdragon which is going to show up in the HTC next wave of devices the sensation the sensation for Jeep the Sprint Evo 3d and then we've got Nvidia working with Motorola on the Tegra 2 on the device on devices like the Atrix 4G and the upcoming Droid Bionic on Verizon the Tegra 2 Kotzen at 1 gigahertz dual-core we can't really compare clock speeds because as you know in the desktop world you can get a chip that's a faster clock speed and it's slower than a different chip with a lower clock speed so we really have to look at day-to-day usage and we're going to do a lot of benchmarks here on the Galaxy s2 in terms of RAM we get a full gigabyte of RAM for multitasking that is a tremendous amount of RAM HTC sort of maxed out at 768 their next generations of the phones are going to have one gigabyte but we get it right now in the galaxy s2 just like the Atrix 4G has a gigabyte of RAM internal storage you get 16 gigabytes - though you can of course expand that if you get a micro SD card so we have got bluetooth 3.0 we've got Wi-Fi II it's hard to miss a B and G of course this is DivX compatible it's got two cameras the one on the front shoots at 2 megapixels which is actually pretty high for a front-facing camera it's also a larger lens so it lets in a lot of light we're gonna see in the four of you own pocket now that the front-facing camera takes really good photos on the back which we're going to see in a minute we have an 8 megapixel camera with a flash that can record 1080p video these next-generation dual-core processors can take advantage of the full 1080p resolution and this phone can even playback 1080p if you connect it to a panel you need a special accessory to make that happen but we'll talk more about that soon this is running on android 2.3 the latest Gingerbread which is nice we've got DLNA support so you can beam your content to TVs and whatnot wirelessly if you want so let's take a look at the hardware of the device it's a very shiny front so you're gonna see a lot of reflections happen it's kind of hard to avoid but the front is just this nice piece of glass and we know it's glasses we take a little piece of metal here coin and you can hear that it is absolutely glass so a really high quality screen here and we've got a very interesting design it looks just like the Galaxy S the original where we had the button in the center kind of like an iPhone actually and then we've got two Android buttons here back and home and what's kind of cool like the Nexus S when the when the Galaxy S 2 is off you don't see any buttons you just see this Darth vader-like dark display this massive piece of glass that covers the front and it looks really really good so up here we've got the 2 megapixel camera proximity sensor light sensor earpiece then we've got the screen which is 4.3 inches diagonal the resolution is 800 down and 480 across now this is the only downside to these higher end specifications we don't get the qHD display that word the next wave of devices which is of course 960 down by 540 across so not that big of a deal we've got the Super AMOLED plus panel here which we're going to compare to the previous generation AMOLED in a second now down here of course we've got the home button and it's nice to have a dedicated Hardware button it actually clicks in when you press it which is nice to try to bring it up here so it has a nice clicky sound to it and it automatically turns on when you press it and then as I mentioned these these other Android buttons only turn on when you actually turn on the phone so let's go to the side here this device is incredibly remarkably amazingly thin and everyone that I've had hold this device that says the same thing they look at it from the front and they're like oh it's just another slab phone and I said well actually hold it your hand they hold it in their hand and they are floored by how thin this is if you take four quarters if you want to try this at home to see how thick it is this is actually thinner than four quarters it is about eight point five eight point four millimeters thin it is the thinnest smartphone on the planet right now it's thinner than the iPhone four thinner than the desire hd you name it this phone is incredibly thin and it is also very lightweight and yet the remarkable thing is that it doesn't feel cheap in hand in hand it has a good solid feel you might think it might twist a little bit but if we try to twist it don't try this at home it's a very solid phone it doesn't have aluminum unibody construction like the HTC phones but it is strong and rigid nonetheless okay let's go around the side here we've got a volume up and down rocker on the left side of the device we've got the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack dual microphone here for noise cancellation we'll have to test that to see how good it is over here we've got the power standby button kind of a nice location on the right so that you can actually you know press it with your thumb if you're right-handed or left-handed that's a different story going back over here we've got the port for micro USB the first microphone we've got the speaker back here we don't have dual speakers but the audio on this phone in terms of speakerphone and playing music is actually really good and even at maximum volume the speaker doesn't which is quite a feat so up here we've got the 8 megapixel camera which will do 1080p video quite impressive we'll have full video samples coming up soon got a nice LED flash they're not dual LED I think they're gonna start scaling back from dual LED because that's just too much light for for a smartphone there's the nice big camera sensor I can try to take off the back battery cover they don't make it easy ok here it goes it's it's plastic totally plastic extremely thin to keep with the thinness of the design also very flexible here we have the SIM card now we've got the sixteen hundred and fifty milli amp hour battery that's a big battery for a device that this is thin that is this thin if you think about it we've also got the non hot swappable micro SD port there so you can add up to a 32 gigabyte card and have a ton of memory on this thing getting the battery cover back on isn't so easy if to press it in what seems to be ten places but there it's finally on okay so let's talk Super AMOLED what is Super AMOLED or we should say Super AMOLED plus and why does it matter well if you remember the Galaxy S smartphones introduced Samsung's proprietary Super AMOLED screen Samsung is really the only name in town right now when it comes to AMOLED they sort of have the monopoly on these screens and em OLED is incredible in its level of contrast and power savings so in an AMOLED screen when something is black it is truly black the pixels are turned off unlike a an LCD screen where where you see black you might sort of see a greyish grayish color because it's being illuminated by a backlight so up here we've got a the the notification strip up here is black and if we flick it down you can see a little bit more black if you flick it back up you know it'll go back up there it is truly black and the contrast is just amazing now let's take a look at a galaxy s device that has the Super AMOLED screen not the Super AMOLED plus the captivate right so they all have the same panel let's zoom in and see if we see any difference between Super AMOLED plus and Super AMOLED so this is the same page loaded here and the contrast looks a little bit better on the left here on the Galaxy s2 but really not that big of a difference seems to have crash the browser there they are both set to automatic screen brightness let's just pull down their notification shades they're using darker colors in the galaxy s2 because it's Gingerbread so there's a lot more blacks than there are sort of the gray color but you can get a sense that there's not that much of a difference now that is not the case if we take out say HTC's super LCD screen so here is the thunderbolt need to connect the charger here now there's a really big difference again these are both on automatic screen brightness and it almost looks like the thunderbolt here has a white coating on the screen that's because the backlight is just blasting light onto the entire panel whereas on the Super AMOLED plus screen only individual pixels that are active are getting getting lit or backlit if you want a technical explanation of how AMOLED works versus LCD look it up on Wikipedia but that's sort of the explanation there and it's very apparent when you compare these devices side-by-side Super AMOLED plus is beautiful it's gorgeous it doesn't seem to bring that much of a difference over the previous generation Super AMOLED they look about the same and Samsung is getting kind of funny with the names of these screens is the next screen going to be Super AMOLED plus plus 2 or something it's kind of a long name that they just keep sort of adding to so beautiful screen beautiful hardware on the samsung galaxy s2 this thing is fantastic build quality it's ridiculously thin and so far it feels very powerful with the 1.2 gigahertz dual core Exynos processor the gig of ram and a lot of other goodies of course a phone is only as good as the software that is running on it and in the next video we're going to talk all about Samsung's new TouchWiz interface which does some really cool features has a lot of interesting gestures built in you're gonna want to stick around for that so if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if there's something specific you want to see about the galaxy s2 please leave a comment below and we'll try to cover that thanks for watching that's it for now