Samsung Galaxy S2 Smartphone Reviews and Deals

Samsung Galaxy S2 review

Good

Screen, power, everything – the best smartphone on the market (Aug ’11)

Bad

Not the best in-hand; battery can struggle to cope if you’re not careful

Overview

I don’t really see myself as a gadget geek. Sure, a lot of phones and tablets pass through my grubby mitts, and while I enjoy playing with them and putting them through their paces, I’m not the sort that lays awake at night with wide eyed joy at the next new ‘thing’ that’s going to hit the market tomorrow.

But today, I’m going to have to put the Samsung Galaxy SII back in a jiffy bag and pop it off to some other lucky soul. Perhaps I could just keep it for a few more days? I could say I’d lost it, or that it’s had fallen into the toilet, or that the dog ate it… You see, when it comes to smartphones, this really is something a bit special.

The Samsung Galaxy SII is the most technically sophisticated handset on the market and, more importantly, it feels and acts like it is too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t particularly look like it – this certainly isn’t the best looking handset out there. But when it packs this kind of punch, who cares?

The front is a large touchscreen, the edges unimaginatively curved; the black plastic casing is bog standard and the back uninspiring. It’s thin too – too thin for me, and not contoured, so that it feels a little clumsy in the hand. So what’s all the fuss about?

Work

Once you power up the Samsung Galaxy SII, the capacitive touchscreen immediately wows you – 4.3 inches of bright, clear, Gorilla Glass awesomeness. Super AMOLED, 480x800 pixels, 16 million colours, multi-touch; it really does make pretty much any other touchscreen on the market fade into insignificance in terms of quality.

To do this screen justice, the insides need to be pretty special. Thankfully, you’re treated to a dual-core 1.2GHzCortex A9 processor rocking along with 1GB of RAM and with either 16 or 32GB of internal storage – as well as a microSD card slot to double that. It’s fair to say we have netbooks on the site that this will give a run for their money.

Of course there is no physical QWERTY keyboard, but the large and responsive touchscreen makes typing a relatively enjoyable experience. If you need to type a lot you might still want to go for a ‘real’ keyboard, but you’re unlikely to find a better touchscreen typing experience on a smartphone.

If you want to access your email on the move, Android handles things quickly and efficiently. Polaris Office is installed as standard to let you open, save and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, so you can work on the move too. It’s an intuitive and well functioned office suite, allowing you to easily make changes to everything from fonts and colours and add the likes of bullet points and images.  

Play

An increasingly important part of the smartphone experience, happily the Samsung Galaxy SII excels at the fun stuff. Pics, games and videos is what that great big clear and bright screen is all about and with the power to back it up, this handset is a real multimedia powerhouse.

I’m no fan of smartphone cameras, but Samsung has done a good job here: it has an eight-megapixel (3264x2448-pixel) autofocus snapper with LED flash, plus all the usual bells and whistles (geo-tagging, face and smile detection etc). It shoots 1080p video as well, at 30fps, while there’s a two-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat on board too.

Both the screen and huge memory are perfect for video, with the now obligatory YouTube app and BBC iPlayer working well to show it off. Both the music and video players are the typically intuitive and unfussy Samsung Android offerings. There’s an FM radio too, meaning that all your multimedia needs are more than comfortably catered for.

Connectivity

As always with an Android phone, connectivity is simple and efficient with the Samsung Galaxy SII. A pull down menu on the home screen gives you simple access to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS options, as well as informing you of incoming texts, emails, Facebook messages etc. Social networking is of course well catered for, and Google Maps works like a dream. Call quality is great too.

You’ll have access to the Android Market to fill in any social networking, office or gaming gaps you may find in the selection of apps already installed. While the Android Market may not have quite as much choice as the Apple Store, I think it’s getting to the point now where the difference between the two is merely numbers, not experience. I’m not sure I care how many more hundreds of thousands of apps I can get from Apple – I should be able to find what I need from the 250,000+ on offer here, thanks.

Performance

Having used a whole lot of Android handsets over the last couple of years, the Samsung Galaxy SII blows them all out of the water in terms of performance. There’s hardly any lag between screens or applications and you really get the feeling that this is a processor made to cope perfectly with this impressive Android v2.3 operating system.

So, with all this awesomely fast functionality and multi-tasking going on, how does the battery cope, I here you ask? Not quite as well as you’d like, to be honest, but it’s certainly not a disaster. It has a Li-Ion 1650mAh battery on board, making it competitive on battery life with other Android smartphones out there right now. However, with all that power on board you really want to put it through its paces and it can struggle a little. That said, with a bit of exploration, you can find a lot of little tricks to preserve it for longer.

Verdict

If money’s no object and you’re all about having the best smartphone on the market right now, bar none, then the Samsung Galaxy SII is the only real choice out there. It ticks all the boxes you could possibly want ticked, unless you really don’t want an Android powered handset.

That said, it certainly won’t be for everyone. The looks shouldn’t put people off; because once the screen comes to life no one will be worrying about the casing. But the dimensions of the handset – its oversized height and weight, plus unusually shallow depth in comparison – make it a little unwieldy. It’s certainly a shape that you should try before you buy, but if you can get over that hurdle you’re getting your hands on an exemplary piece of hardware.

Samsung Galaxy S2 specification and features

Model

Samsung Galaxy S2

Manufacturer

Samsung

Operating system

Android

Colours

Black, white, pink

Mobile internet

WiFi

Yes

3G

Yes

HSDPA

Yes

Size

Size

125mm x 66mm x 9mm

Weight

116g

Features

Talktime

8 hrs

Standby

610 hrs

Touchscreen

Yes

QWERTY keyboard

No

Camera

8 megapixel

Video

Yes

GPS

Yes

Bluetooth

Yes

Music Phone

No

FM Radio

Yes

Quad Band

Yes

Video featuring Samsung Galaxy S2

Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone reviews by real users

• 

  by Gaz at 17:42 on 10 Sep 2011

  I'm not a touch screen fan, having tried an iphone, as I've got large fingers, However the screen on this is great and I can type perfectly well. In landscape mode the keyboard can just about be operated two handed.
  The OS is very fast and the only lag I've encountered is when it opens the picture/video gallery.
  I've had it hang a couple of times but I had that on my Nokia E71 that this replaced. The nokias screen was just too small for the web and the navigation apps I used.
  Battery life is fine once you get over the initial "got to try everything" phase but make sure you have plenty of chargers available. i.e. Home, Car, Work.
  I've got mine on 3 and the signal strength seems much better than O2 so far.
  In summary a great phone that does everything my Nokia used to but faster and easier.

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