Gadgetory

we've unboxed it we've reviewed it we've routed it we've given you in-depth feature coverage on every nook and cranny of the Samsung Galaxy s3 and now that it's seeing its stateside launch on five US carriers it's time to do it again this is Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and this is the video review of the Sprint Samsung Galaxy s3 let's check it out as I wrote in my full review which you can read at pocketnow.com I started my mobile phone life with a Samsung phone on Sprint 11 years ago so it's only right that I should kick off my first review of the summer with a Samsung phone on Sprint now normally when there's a high profile device launched across multiple US carriers we get to take you through what elements of this specific model differ from the international version and from its sister versions across the carriers but Samsung now has enough brand power with the galaxy brand to make every galaxy s3 essentially identical across all of the major carriers essentially identical that means the same positives an attractive pebble like design with almost no straight lines display glass that curves down into the body of the phone an extremely pocket-friendly slimness and lightweight there's also the big bright LED notification light up top invisible went off which I love and the backlit menu and navigation keys down here like Brandon I found the back keys placement to the right of the HOME key to be unintuitive unlike Brandon though I kind of like how the light diffuses through the casing on the marble white version here in the dark the notification light up here illuminates the whole bezel making the phone almost glow in the dark some will find it cheap looking but I don't mind it in fact I love it being identical to its international cousin though also means the same negatives here as well a fake looking brushed aluminum bezel with a visible seam running the middle and materials that while they aren't actually cheap it's polycarbonate under a hyper glazed coating still feel cheap at times the device feels smooth and comfortable in the hand but it picks up fingerprints and skin oils very very readily and it doesn't handle drops terribly well either that plastic bezel already has a nice looking chip in it here on my international version after a very slight drop also we've posted a few pieces at pocket now about when a smartphone can be too light for me the galaxy s3 is definitely one of them to my hands it just feels lower quality than similar devices in its class like the HTC One X as always though your mileage will vary when it comes to subjective stuff like this this is probably the most subjective area of any mobile phone review is the feel in hand about half of the friends and family I allowed to handle this phone agreed with me that it felt a little too light a little too cheap the other half thought it felt fine some of them even said it felt too heavy so you want to go to a retail store and handle this in your hand don't listen to me don't listen anybody just go handle it for yourself I can only tell you how it feels to me ask them in the retail store if they can give you a model to hold yourself so that you don't have to deal with the rubber band Eve tether on the back of it and see how it feels to you before you pull the trigger on it now popping off the battery cover here we can catch one of the only visible distinctions between the international and the Sprint version to the device the Sprint version does not have a removable SIM that won't matter much to people who don't swap phones often but for you swap junkies that may make a difference just like with visual appearance the specs on the Sprint Galaxy s3 are similar to its international cousin with a 4.8 inch Super AMOLED display and a 1.9 megapixel camera here up front and on the back and 8 megapixel backside illuminated camera with flash under the hood though is where the differences come up the Sprint Galaxy s3 gets rid of the quad core Exynos processor in favor of a dual-core Qualcomm s4 running at 1.5 gigahertz that may sound like a downgrade but the s4 is built on the superior crate architecture using a 28 nanometer process there's more on this in our comparison videos and the full review but the bottom line is that performance doesn't suffer much at all that's all so thanks in part to the extra gig of ram samsung added to the US models and of course using the Qualcomm CPU meant Samsung could build in support for LTE which will be a lot more relevant once Sprint starts lighting up its first LTE markets later this month for software the galaxy s3 is running the same thing on the Sprint version as it is on the International Version it is Android 4.4 with the TouchWiz 5 nature UX layer on top that means the same relatively lightweight customized experience as the International version with nice additions to the UX like the toggle bar here in the notification drawer which Sprint has tweaked a little in their version along with the improvements Google brought to the table with Ice Cream Sandwich like these side swipeable notifications here to get rid of them as for the nature UX elements well I've said before that the analogy seems forced and I haven't changed my mind after about a month of exposure to the skin I don't really need to hear the sounds of a water droplet every time I press fast-forward in the music widget it got old very quickly fortunately that's easy to change also easy to change though you wouldn't know it right away necessarily is the app launcher and by default instead of listing all apps alphabetically like in stock ICS it lists the out-of-the-box apps first alphabetically followed by the apps you've installed chronologically it's not the most ideal situation it's good that you can change this with the tap of a menu button but frankly and call me what you want it took me watching Brendan minimums review to realize that I know I know amateur hour overall I found the device to run quite smoothly even on intensive tasks like downloading large files while browsing large web pages pop-up play works as well as it did on the international version as well I share many of the same thoughts as Brandon does in his review of the International Version TouchWiz is not at its best in the email app Oh or with the keyboard which is just a disaster in its English implementation the keyboard looks like the stock ICS version but it's not autocorrect is very very aggressive and it's impossible to go back and modify a part of a word the software assumes that you're making a new word regardless of whether you're in the middle of another one or not it'll probably do fine for occasional textures but that's not really the target market of the galaxy s3 if it bugs you you'll want to download a keyboard that's more to your liking again thanks to the nature of Android that's very easy to do it's anybody's guess when Samsung will bring jelly bean to the galaxy s3 but the extra gig of ram in the US version was meant to future-proof the device for just that reason in any event the software experience is better than good enough as it is just like on the international version the camera performs excellently though I wish HDR were the default setting out-of-the-box as pictures taken in that mode tended to be far superior to their non HDR counterparts samsung's panorama mode is also slightly easier to use than on the Galaxy Nexus and stock ICS but it also takes a very very steady hand burst shot came in handy a few times and video was crisp and smooth with great audio using stabilization tended to make the video more jumpy in my tests though you'll want to experiment with your own preferences now I tested the Galaxy s3 on Sprint between boston new york city and eastern Long Island's so two very urban areas and one very rural one and generally my experience was positive the whole way now sprint has not flipped the switch on their LTE network in the United States yet so all that testing was done on their 1x EVDO 3G CDMA network and you know I was surprised at the quality voice calls were just fine with good strong and clear audio callers said I sounded fine as usual speakerphone use was a little tinny but acceptable data rates were pretty good too and I was surprised at how well data intensive applications worked Spotify Pandora and Netflix in particular did very well even though I had such a limited bandwidth connection it was only the image intensive apps like Instagram that stuttered did I miss LTE absolutely but it wasn't as painful and experience on 3G as I thought it would be now that's in well covered areas mind you and when I went out into the boonies or when I was in Yankee Stadium with 40,000 other people trying to upload a facebook picture the performance was obviously worse also the phone tended to run very hot onto the galaxy s3 branding here it got very very very hot in the palm much more so than its international progenitor when it's getting hot hunting for service or fighting a high noise floor in a crowded stadium the gs3 will run out of juice quickly like any other smartphone really but in normal conditions if you live in a well covered area and you use smart power management techniques like we've covered in our earlier videos the Sprint Galaxy s3 should last you longer than a lot of Android powered phones some of that is due to fancy features like smart stay and some of it is thanks to the beefy 2100 million power battery in any case if you are a power user you'll want to still carry around a spare battery or a battery pack but the average user should be able to squeeze a day out of this device at least until LTE comes out there's a lot I didn't cover in this video review but not because it wasn't worth covering it's because we've covered a lot of it already in our existing reviews and head-to-heads but also there's so many more features on this phone than on almost any other phone it's amazing it's a bundle of new features so here's what I liked I've never handled a phone with this many innovations packed into one casing make sure a lot of them are gimmicky and not all of them work perfectly but many of them are very very useful and a lot of them will turn heads also the basic and advanced features required of modern smartphones are all handled so well by the GS 3 it's really an incredible performer the new TouchWiz is so light and so improved over its previous iterations that I like it better than the new HTC Sense which I liked a lot on the HTC One X I love the camera on this which is the best one I've used on an Android smartphone and it blows my Galaxy Nexus out of the water I like that it can get through a day on one battery charge if I'm smart about it I like that if I don't know what a feature does there's probably a tutorial there to tell me about it and even though it's pentile I love the big bright saturated display I don't like the hyper glaze coating the plastic bezel masquerading as metal and the unintuitive way some of the UI works I don't like the dripping water sound effects and I don't like how hot the device gets when it's under a heavy processing load and I don't like some of the bloat Sprint has added in particular it's very annoying loss of data message that pops up every time I'm on the subway and I lose coverage now would any of that stop me if I were on Sprint and in the market for a top-of-the-line smartphone H know if you're in the market for a smartphone don't mind 3G data speeds for the time being and want to be on one of the few carriers left in the u.s. that gives you truly unlimited data or at least doesn't throttle you before five gigabytes the galaxy s3 deserves your top consideration as of this week the galaxy s3 is available in all Sprint sales channels on my scoreboard the Sprint Galaxy s3 gets a four out of five be sure to read my full review at pocketnow.com and check out Brandon's review if you haven't already of the international galaxy s3 also we've got reviews coming for all four variants of the galaxy s3 in the United States stay tuned for those you can follow us on Twitter the official account is PocketNow tweets you can follow me on twitter i'm captain two phones that's captain the number two phones and if you liked the video be sure and give us a thumbs up if you want to leave a comment do so at pocketnow.com to join the discussion there we try and respond to as many of those as we can we generally can't respond to the YouTube comments because there's too many of them but thank you very much for those and thank you for watching stay tuned for the next one which will be coming very soon and we'll see you next time