Samsung Galaxy S3 – hands on experience!

Firstly, thanks to the tens of thousands of people who tuned in to the the site and the live blog! It was great to be able to bring you what we were hearing and seeing as it happened. Unfortunately though, we only had enough bandwidth for web browsing, and didn’t have anywhere near the upload capacity needed for images. We do now though, so let me show you them and give you my thoughts!

It’s a big boy

Good line-up right?

As you can hopefully see from the image above, the Samsung Galaxy S3 is large, very large. I think it is a little fraction longer than the One X. As I predicted, it is a blend of design from the SGS2 and the One X. The iPhone 4S in the picture below gives you a good screen-size comparison. We’re talking about some serious, serious screen real estate here people. The screen to bezel ration is out of this world.

The SGS2 and the SGS3 together. Both beautiful.

The SGS3 and the One X! The SGS3 is indeed slightly larger – but better?

I think the SGS3… wins?

How does it feel in your hand?

In a word, amazing. Despite its large display, it still manages to feel incredible in the hand. It’s amazingly light for its size, and weighed substantially less than an iPhone. Honestly, putting the two next to each other felt just wrong, actually.

Light, and comfortable to hold

Many words spring to mind: sleek, elegant, gorgeous. One that stands out in my mind more than any other though is ‘light’. This phone feels feather-like and makes the iPhone 4S feel like a brick.
In hand it feels about the same weight as the Samsung Galaxy S2, coming in at 133grams.

What’s the user interface like?

Elegance!

The Samsung Galaxy S3 is running our beloved Ice Cream Sandwich to the point that there is no loading lag. Everything is instantaneous. I can visualise the 1.4Ghz quad core sitting somewhere in this phone, crunching away at whatever I threw at it.
Altogether the user interface resembles that of the Samsung Galaxy S2, but done up to the max. Everything is at a rich resolution with deep vibrant colour.

Which features impressed me the most

The larger 2,100 mAh battery is great. I was hoping for more, but that is still a decent size. I also like the ability the phone has of detecting your friend’s faces in photographs, and then giving you option to distribute the photograph to them by whatever means you choose.
NFC was hoped for, and I’m glad they’ve included it. At the show one of the speakers mentioned they are working closely with Visa to make contactless payment ever more popular.
Oh, and I like the idea that the phone knows when I am looking at it. Probably going to end up being a battery hog or something like that, but it was definitely a neat thing to see in action (small eye icon appears at the top right of the notification bar when it detects you looking back).

What disappointed me

Although I am personally not that fussed, the lack of a higher megapixel rear camera was a surprise. A lot of rumors said 12MP and it turns out they were false. However, it does have the fast-capture feature to make up for this – 3.3 pictures per second!
The biggest thing that disappointed me is that they didn’t give a price! I also asked Samsung’s Head of Marketing what the RAM capacity was and his was “I don’t know, but I can tell you the flash memory, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB”. Since he is the guy in charge of selling these phones you would think he would know, but we had to get it from another source in the end.

Final Thoughts

Again, thank you to those of you who viewed the live blog, and also thank you for bringing Android Authority its most number of of readers yet. Everything we do here is for you, our readers.
I’ve just gotten home from the event, and it’s 01:26 now. Tomorrow, I want to wake up to a barrage of comments below asking me about the Samsung GS3. I want you to ask as many questions as you can think of, so I can really lay out everything I know for you.