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Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket Review

2011-11-21
what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here at a full review for you of the samsung galaxy s2 skyrocket it's the second galaxy s2 member of the AT&T lineup packs a few things that its regular galaxy s2 brother does not let's go ahead dig in and see if this is the right phone for you so before i get into the full review let me remind you of the specs of this guy cuz there is a lot of stuff packed into a pretty thin little package so its first LTE compatible it's one of two LTE devices with the HTC Vivid that works on AT&T is just launched and now slowly becoming more popular LTE network it also has support for hspa+ if you don't live in an LTE market like me it's got a 4.5 inch diagonal amoled plus display the same resolution of its smaller galaxy s2 brother on AT&T of 480 x 800 it's got a 1.5 gigahertz dual-core processor and that's the qualcomm built snapdragon variety on the back side got an 8 megapixel camera with a single LED flash i can shoot 10 20 p video on the fraud and ups the front camera game with a 2 megapixel sensor that lives on the front it's going to be available or it is available for about two hundred forty nine dollars on a two-year contract although coming to the holiday season chances are this guy is going to get a nice discount it's running android 2.3 point five so that's of course gingerbread 16 gigs onboard memory and you can expand that via micro USB with a pretty large 1,850 milliamp hour battery ha i take a deep breath so now you know what's in this phone let's go and talk about whether or not this is the right phone for you let's talk about call quality call quality on this guy was pretty decent i didn't have any white noise on my encode and have any white noise on their end i didn't have any popping although there was a slight hiss in the call quality department i heard it on about six to seven of my 20 and I did have to drop calls during that test AT&T has been getting I'm doing much better with dropped calls the past few phones I've tested I haven't had any so this one might have a bit of a worry when it comes to the signal go and show you a little sample what that sounds like go ahead and jump on into the dialer hit 611 you also do to hear what the speaker sounds like so go ahead and let that dial go ahead and kick the speaker on it's got a cool feature to in the phone rings if you flip it over it'll automatically meet the phone for you so you can hear a bit with a speaker 2 sounds like you can see what the call on her face is there a HTC is that same thing as well I can flip it over and hops on into speaker if you're on a call or will muta for you it's kind of neat so call quality pretty decent not the best though out of 18 t-phones that I've tested recently let's talk a bit now about the design this is a larger phoned a 4.5 inch screen and it gives a pretty big footprint so it's 4.5 inches tall 2.75 inches wide and about point 37 inches on the thickness department it's going to take up a decent amount of room in your pocket so if you do we're very skinny jeans you might want to try this in your pocket first not cuz you sit down you might give it a little bit of flex even though it's got Gorilla Glass and it's a pretty durable phone it's going to create a very very noticeable um I guess jokes intended bold in your pocket it also feels a little bit on the cheap side samsung packed tremendous processor and specs and their phones but also use sometimes low quality plastic this guy feels a little bit higher quality than the galaxy s2 for AT&T at least the one that came into the u.s. shores it's a little bit thicker plastic the battery sits flush with the battery door so you don't hear throw that hollow noise but this is plastic all around you definitely feel like it's a plastic phone it doesn't feel like the highest quality of devices out this question you compare it to the metal accents of the HTC devices however one of the benefits of that though is that it weighs much less so you're going to be able to carry this phone around with this larger footprint with a little bit less weight coming in at just four point six ounces so that's a little bit nitpicking it's definitely personal preference the screen here is super amoled plus and it's a tremendous display we've seen it many times text for example you can see right here it looks absolutely beautiful it's crisp it's clear images also look tremendous if you zoom in on an image or thans that picture you took with the 8 megapixel camera things always look great a resolution wise though we're still stuck the same resolution at 480 x 800 or 800 x 480 which for someone like me with not the best eyes is great I like things look a little bit bigger but if you're very into resolution in this dawn of 720p displays you may want to look elsewhere it was never an issue for my eyes but I definitely see how others might want a device with higher resolution especially as applications start taking advantage of more pixels so go ahead and jump back and actually I move to the side here so this is a white background you can still see there's a little bit of a blue tint that we've seen on amoled amoled plus super amoled plus and other variations of AMOLED technology it's not as prevalent as we've seen on previous iterations but it's definitely there you get used to it very very quickly yuly only notice if you hold your phone up against another device that perhaps doesn't have that same backing so if I for example were to bring in my iphone4 there on the side there it's sort of see a little bit of a blue tint on that screen not a giant deal so the operating system this is running as android gingerbread 2.3 point 5 with TouchWiz four-point-oh in touch with Samsung's proprietary skin and that brings a lot of sort of fun stuff here it's on the stuff we seen on previous version of touch was so if you pull down the menu this one my favorite features immediate toggle for Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS flight mode screen rotation and the rest go ahead and pull that off and if we go look to where you go ahead and add some widgets so if you long press on the screen you get now a nice four-way bar here it can pick what you want to do and you get a ton of Samsung specific widgets can see them here they go in scroll through buddies bookmarks applications monitor classic clocks there's a bit of animation to a little bit of a 3d effect as you scroll through overall the TouchWiz four-point-oh didn't bring that much it brought a lot of subtle OS tweaks and new animations that really take advantage of the raw horsepower of this phone alright so speaking of raw horsepower let's go and talk about speed it's a fast phone but it's not blazing fast I did get a quadrant score of 2560 one which isn't always the most scientific way to test phone but is what i use in all of my devices a lot has been made that this uses qualcomm chipset as opposed to the X enos hopefully I'm trouncing that right chipset that is in the regular samsung galaxy s2 despite a faster clock speed here of 1.5 gigahertz doesn't always necessarily mean a faster experience using the phone that's sort of how it ties in with with graphics the GPU and such but this phone for everyday use some gaming is plenty fast and pretty quick it's not going to set the world on fire but opening applications I had no issue I didn't have any slowdown I didn't have to go into any task manager and shut things down things just worked very nicely and you can see it there with that gig of ram on board really really helps so things are very quick scrolling through applications open up without a problem all your games you can be able to play without any issue so we'll go ahead and jump back this is LTE cable as I mentioned and certainly LTE is expanding as we speak into more markets I don't unfortunately have LTE where I live but people are reporting speeds in the 12 down 25 up range and certainly that's on uncongested networks since they aren't that many LTE devices out there it's also hspa+ compatible I generally got speeds around three down at about point seven five up but again that's going to depend on where in a country you live so let's sort of wrap this up actually you know what let's talk about camera very quickly before I do we'll go ahead and jump into camera here the camera shots actually we're pretty pretty decent you get a lot of effects here in the camera as well and things that you can manipulate and change you can change the white balance to change it is oh there's some color effects here and it was pretty good in low-light actually go and snap an image go ahead and take a good picture a lot of focus if you tap the screen it's go and jump at the settings and show you what I was just talking about dicen the shortcut shooting mode scene modes exposure value timer effects resolution white balance ISO image quality GPS and shutter sounds a lot of stuff you can customize let's go and put this back so as you're looking to get a phone and you're not sure what to get certainly some confusion between the galaxy s2 skyrocket and the galaxy s2 so let me help shed some light onto which one you should get I for deciding between those two and which one I would get so for my personal use the fastest phone available doesn't mean that much to me or at least the fastest theoretical phone doesn't mean that much to me if that means a lot to you as far as processor you're going to want to look at the original galaxy s2 if speed matters to you most as far as network connection you don't want to look at the sky rocket because it does have LTE capabilities and even if LTE is not where you live right now chances are it will be within the two years of your contracting something to really keep in mind that you looked for a phone that's going to keep you up for the next two years this phone is plenty fats by no means a slow phone and if we were in a world where the regular galaxy s2 didn't exist probably say this is one of the fastest android phones in 80 and T's lineup despite the questionable build and plastic material choices is a pretty solid phone represents a great choice for those in AT&T however this is a big however it is running Gingerbread in an Ice Cream Sandwich world we are on the dawn of the galaxy nexus and other Ice Cream Sandwich phones coming Samsung hasn't said specifically whether or not this device is going to get ice cream sandwich they have said the galaxy has two phones will so presumably it will make its way here to the sky rocket but you're going to have to wait and if you don't mind having the not most or the end of the second generation operating system or one that's not the most recent generation go for this if you want to wait for ice cream sandwich worked out its bugs but I'm Samsung gets it to the sky rocket then you're going to want to go for this if you want to have the latest and the greatest you want those features of ice cream sandwich how we've covered you're going to want to wait a little while ett has announced that they're going to be carrying the Galaxy Nexus however a Penta band unlocked version using hspa+ well will be available or you might want to look at the verizon galaxy nexus that's going to be coming with LT capabilities so there's a lot to weigh in a lot of options as you figure out which phone is right for you if you decide to jump on board the skyrocket you're going to get a great phone you're going to get a phone that's going to perform very well perform admirably over the next two years but you've gotta weigh the pros and the cons hopefully you guys enjoyed this review of the samsung galaxy s2 skyrocket i'm jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo sure to check us out for all of your tech news reviews unboxings and such and i'll see you guys in the next video bye bye you
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