Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II (Short) (No Pics)

[ithehappy]

Well I am the worst person in reviewing, still I have tried my best And I don't have a camera yet, so there will be no picture of the device atm.

The Box and Accessories::

It came with a nice black box. Inside the box there is a nice Leather pouch,the Headphone (crap anyway), the Charger and Data cable. There is NO SD card bundled with the box. All you have is the Phones 16 GB itself.



Design-

Pros:

► Well the design of the Phone is good. It's just 8.5 mm thick and weight is just 116 gm. For a device which is holding a gorgeous 4.27" S-AMOLED Plus it's really lite. At the Left side you will only find the Volume rocker, which allows you to increase or decrease the Incoming call ringtone, same goes for ongoing call volume and Music and Video player. On the Top, you will have only the 3.5 mm Audio socket. Right side is also alone with just the Power key and at Bottom the Micro USB port and the Mic. In Front you will have the main attraction, the 4.27" S-AMOLED Plus screen, and also the the Proximity sensor, the Front Facing Video Call Camera, the Earpiece and the Samsung logo just under the Earpiece. At the Bottom of the Front there are Three keys basically, the Home button and the Touch sensitive Menu and Back button, which does have Back light in them. At the Back side of the Phone you will find the 8 MP Fixed Camera and powerful of capable 1080p Video Recording at 30 FPS. There is also a LED Flash sitting aside the lens. At the very Right Bottom of the Back you will find a small Loudspeaker grill. That's all we have outside of the Phone.

►The device contains Gorilla Glass display.

► Now lets check inside. You open the Battery cover, which is well textured unlike original Galaxy S to hold and stick in your palm well, you will find the 1650 mAh battery, the SIM Card slot (you don't have to remove the battery to change the SIM card, which is great) and NON Hot swappable SD Card.

Well that's basically all we have both in external and internal part. Now lests look at the minus points in Design.

CONS:

► The Battery cover will and should be the first to take part of CONS area. Frankly, this is the most worst build battery cover I have ever seen on any cell phone. If you don't open it carefully, so carefully it will break very very easily. It's thin like a paper, so basically the construction of it is really poor. However, it does have a nice texture at the back

***- Found something interesting. I said the Battery cover is very poor, but look at this Video, what can I say now?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErXqn...yer_detailpage

► Non swappable SD card, it should come as a minus point. Although I don't change SD card regularly at all, still for others it will be a PITA.

► When you have a Camera of 8 MP and it is capable of doing 1080 P Video recording then you also should have a Lens Cover on the Camera, which is Not there.

► The whole body of the device is made by plastic, which won't give you the feel of a premium handset worth Rs.30K unlike the aluminium unibody on hTC devices (some of'em course).

Pics of the Battery Cover, you can see how thin it is and the plastic is very cheap. But still the texture at the back will help for good grip.



Telephone and Contacts:

The first and foremost feature of a Mobile phone is it's calling facility, how good it is.

Till now I am OK with the phone features of it. The in call sound is OK, I can't say it's loud enough though. The voice seems kinda soft always, that May be because of the Noise cancellation feature is On or else! It supposedly featured to come with a Noise cancellation feature but I can't find an option to tun it On or Off. Now this may be a Firmware related issue, I am on XWKE8, may be on other regions firmware the option is there.
The Speaker volume is loud enough though, there is no problem whatsoever with that.
While in call you have three options- Taking a Note, exploring SIM Services and browsing Contacts.



The Call log shows detailed entry of every calls.



The Phone book is well designed and have enough details. Sliding left on a name allows you to send message and right to make a call. I like this feature very much.
►But there is also a negative thing here, You can not save a contact to SIM card or see it unless you use the option Import/Export. This is bad cause every time you add a contact to your phone, you also have to save it separately on the SIM card, weird.



►The Voice command feature is really really helpful, especially if you are driving or your hands are busy this will come really handy. It works just flawlessly. It also works for Music, Message and Navigation.



Messaging:

Nothing new here. The messaging department is very straight forward. The messages are stored in Threaded mode (Conversation mode), frankly speaking I am not a fan of it . While messaging the best part is the SWYPE feature of GB 2.3.3. It works awesomely well. Adding multiple recipients and are other stuffs are really easy and not really mentionable in GB.



Image Gallery:

The default Image gallery is pretty cool. It's the general Android one. Video and Still images are automatically separated. The Multi touch zooming technology will come really handy here. Also another cool addition is, you can press and hold two fingers on it and lean towards you to zoom out and lean outwards to zoom in. Cool.



Music and Video:

The phone comes with the standard TouchWiz Music player by default, which is nice but could have been a lot, lot better. It has a Custom equalizer preset and DNSe sound enhancing technology and 5.1 channel is there too.



But frankly just do not expect a good quality sound from the given headphones in the box, they just sucks. I am using my XB300 and the Bass is kinda OK, but nowhere near as good as SE 'W' series phones I've used.

The Video Player is pretty basic, but it supports almost every format, .MKV, .AVI(DivX and XviD), .MP4, .WMV everything. It also supports 1080P video playback, 720P will run like a jet. Subtitles are supported too.

Web Browser:

The best part of the device for me is the Web Browser. Maybe I liked it so much because this is my first Android, but still the Wen Browser is just awesome. It can play Flash videos, the rendering and loading of pages are damn fast. Thanks to Adobe Flash and GPU Acceleration. The Multi touch zooming is a handsome feature here too. Oh, it can play 1080P Youtube videos and you can play flash games in the browser too. All I have said above is about the Stock browser.



Bored with the stock browser? Don't worry, you have many options, like- Dolphin HD, Opera, Skyfire 4 etc. Out of them Dolphin HD is the one I found great next to the stock browser.



GPS with Google Maps:

Needless to say the device comes with A-GPS support. Browsing through Google Maps is very fluent. This map is the version 5.0, thus has the Voice guided navigation feature. The map also contains 360° view or Street view, but in India it's not available yet (though I heard Bangalore supports it).
There are other navigation softwares are available in Android market if GMaps doesn't do the job for you, but which is not a very good option in India I guess



Organizers:

There are many organizer like, Mini Diary (helps in attaching pics and location with note but data connection is needed), Memo, Clock (it has Alarm, World Clock, Stopwatch, Timer, Desk clock) and the nice looking Calendar (I personally very much like this cool Samsung calendar).



Applications and Android Market:

If you are bored after a lot of Video watching, listening to Music or web browsing then Android market is there to full fill your enjoyment. Just think an application and search it Android market, I bet you will find it, may be in paid or free section. One of the best feature of Android is it's market undoubtedly. You will also find Games, like Angry Bird and lot others in the market.



Benchmarks:

When you have a Dual Core 1.2 GHz A9 CPU, 1 GB RAM, Mali-400MP GPU with Orion chipset, why not do some benchmarks? I have done with the most popular application like, Quadrant and Linpack, AnTutu is also there. I am at Stock speed with stock/default XWKE8 firmware.



My score is nothing compared to the Overclocked GS II's. You can see the last pic, the GS II is running at an unbelievable 1.6/1.7 GHz

[sam]

review is short but very well detailed. waiting for part II. nice work

[Tenida]

Very nice review Good job

[ithehappy]

review is short but very well detailed. waiting for part II. nice work

Thanks

Very nice review Good job

Thanks buddy

[sujoyp]

Thanks for the review...

very nice.

[Terabyte]

Plenty of pics/screenshots and good review as well

[azzu]

Awesome dude...
thx for the Short review...
waiting for the pics
and what damage did it do to u (cost ) ?

[noob]

the only sad thing and the reason i am skipping this phone is total crap audio quality compared to SGS 1 .

Even SuperCrio at XDA confirmed that its hardware flaw and hence no driver trick (Voodoo) will solve this issue.

[Skud]

Very nice pictorial walkthrough. Looks really good IMO.

[Tenida]

Saurav upload phone's photograph as soon as possible to look this review beautiful and Wonderful :-P

[ithehappy]

Thanks for the review...

very nice.

Thanks.

Plenty of pics/screenshots and good review as well

Thank you.

Awesome dude...
thx for the Short review...
waiting for the pics
and what damage did it do to u (cost ) ?

I'll post some pics later. Stuck in home for fever atm. It had cost me 31k.

the only sad thing and the reason i am skipping this phone is total crap audio quality compared to SGS 1 .

Even SuperCrio at XDA confirmed that its hardware flaw and hence no driver trick (Voodoo) will solve this issue.

Well I didn't have the GS, so I can't comment. But you are right. The audio quality in this phone sucks. In fact it sucks in all the Samsung phones I've used so far. However you can use Power AMP for this one, heard its very good.

Very nice pictorial walk through. Looks really good IMO.

Thanks mate.
I think I should add spoiler to the pics as it's taking a bit long to load the page.

[Skud]

Thanks.

Thank you.

I'll post some pics later. Stuck in home for fever atm. It had cost me 31k.

Well I didn't have the GS, so I can't comment. But you are right. The audio quality in this phone sucks. In fact it sucks in all the Samsung phones I've used so far. However you can use Power AMP for this one, heard its very good.

Thanks mate.
I think I should add spoiler to the pics as it's taking a bit long to load the page.

But I think that would beat the purpose of a review. A picture says a thousand words or so they say.

[soumo27]

Excellent Review. And the phone looks awesome, though loading the pictures took a really long time.

[ithehappy]

Excellent Review. And the phone looks awesome, though loading the pictures took a really long time.

Thanks.
So where you live in Uttarpara?

Saurav upload phone's photograph as soon as possible to look this review beautiful and Wonderful :-P

You wanna see the Photo of the device or the photo taken from the device? If it's the latter part then it's coming shortly, if former then it'll take a bit. Thanks anyway.

[rhitwick]

Good review. Glad that u added screenshots. Keep it up.

[ithehappy]

Good review. Glad that u added screenshots. Keep it up.

Thanks.

[desiibond]

nice review and excellent pictures.

[Tenida]

Thanks.
So where you live in Uttarpara?


You wanna see the Photo of the device or the photo taken from the device? If it's the latter part then it's coming shortly, if former then it'll take a bit. Thanks anyway.

I am taking about Device photograph. BTW. you have given the photos taken by the device.Camera quality is very good.

[ithehappy]

nice review and excellent pictures.

Thank you mate.

I am taking about Device photograph. BTW. you have given the photos taken by the device.Camera quality is very good.

Oops, it was you, didn't get your new avatar. Device photograph will be uploaded as soon as I borrow my friends camera. Lets see when I can manage that. And yes the first photos are taken from the device and yes quality is good enough for a Mobile

As I am stuck in home was playing with it by taking some Macros, will upload them asap.

[soumo27]

Thanks.
So where you live in Uttarpara?

I live in Shibtala.. (Near Shakher-bazaaar) . It's more of Hindmotor than Uttarpara.

and u?

[ithehappy]

I live in Shibtala.. (Near Shakher-bazaaar) . It's more of Hindmotor than Uttarpara.

and u?

OK, I am about 1.5 km far from you, in Kanthal Bagan Bazar, hope you've heard

[soumo27]

^^yeah obviously heard about it...

[abhijeet_ghosh]

Nice review. I have a question. People have been reporting that this phone gets really hot over prolonged usage. Did you face any such issues? Also how is the battery backup?

[ithehappy]

Nice review. I have a question. People have been reporting that this phone gets really hot over prolonged usage. Did you face any such issues? Also how is the battery backup?

Nope, I don't think it's hot. It reached Max temp of 44°C when I was surfing net for 45 mins and it was charging. Now 44°C is not hot imo.
About Battery backup, it's good, but not great. The screen could be used for 5½ hours for Net browsing in Stock browser at 25% brightness from 100% to full drain and shut down. While browsing White is the color appears normally, and as you may know white color reduces battery far more than other colors on S-AMOLED screens. If you watch a Video it could go for 8 hours and odd. I'll add the battery backup too in my review later.
And Thanks.

[Zangetsu]

Nice review looked decent

[ithehappy]

Nice review looked decent

TY

[Zangetsu]

^^Preserve & use the device well...
never ever loose it.....(u knw what i m telling)