Editors' Note: The Samsung Galaxy S III models on all four major carriers are extraordinarily similar, therefore we're sharing plenty of fabric between our varied reviews. That said, we're testing every device separately, therefore scan the review for your carrier of selection.
Physical style
All of the new Galaxy S III models look an equivalent, aside from the carrier emblem on the rear panel. every is out there in dark blue or white (AT&T additionally incorporates a red possibility returning this summer), and they are a number of the most important phones we've ever handled. At 5.4 by 2.8 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and four.7 ounces, the GS3 is slightly larger than the already-large HTC One X ($199, 4.5 stars), though it's still noticeably smaller and lighter than the Samsung Galaxy Note phone/tablet hybrid ($299, 3 stars). That said, this is often not a phone for people with little hands.
I'm not a friend of the massive phone. however I've given up on panning them as a result of whenever I recommend these handsets are too massive, i purchase pummeled by comments from those who adore them. Huge phones are the factor. I settle for it.
The all-plastic body feels to a small degree less high-end than the exotic materials of the HTC One series, however the phone is solidly designed, and light-weight despite its size. The front of the phone is dominated by the four.8-inch, 1280-by-720-pixel Super AMOLED HD screen. Yes, it's PenTile, which may generally look slightly pixelated. But, no, you most likely will not notice. Below the screen, there is a physical Home button, additionally as light-up Back and Multitasking buttons that begin out invisible, therefore you have got to memorize where they're or amendment a setting to stay them illuminated. The 8-megapixel camera is on the rear panel, which, due to its reflective end (on the blue model), doubles as a pocket mirror.
The default Automatic Brightness setting makes the screen too dim. Kill it and pump up the brightness and it's fine, even outdoors. it is not as bright because the One X's Super LCD two show, however it's fine.
Unlike the competing HTC One X, the S III incorporates a removable 2100mAh battery. setting out the rear cowl additionally reveals the microSD card slot, that supports cards up to 64GB.
Call Quality and web
Are you willing for Sprint to pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today? The EVO 4G LTE guarantees spectacular decision quality with HD Voice…sometime in 2013, once Sprint gets the network running. however the GS3 permits you to tweak your decision quality currently.
Default decision quality is sweet. Volume is on the high finish of average, with no distortion from loud inputs. The speakerphone is not quite loud enough to use outdoors, however it's fine for the automotive or a boardroom. The microphone will a decent job of cancelling background noise. Bluetooth headsets work fine with Samsung's S-Voice voice dialing system.
But like such a large amount of things here, decision quality gets richer if you burrow down into the GS3's menus. A Volume Boost button throws the phone into a super-loud, quasi-speakerphone mode for noisy areas, however that is simply the beginning. Deep inside the settings, there is an choice to set custom decision EQ. The phone plays you a sequence of quiet high and low tones and you tell it which of them you'll hear, and then it EQ's calls accordingly. this is often pretty radical stuff. I like my calls sharp, with a lot of high-end, and also the GS3 delivers.
On information though, the Sprint GS3 is crippled. All new Sprint phones are. though the phones support speedy LTE, Sprint has steadfastly refused to provide us a rollout timetable for its new LTE network, leaving its high-end smartphones on the slowest 3G network in America. we have a tendency to tested Sprint LTE, and it's competitive with AT&T and Verizon, however none of this matters a whit if Sprint will not tell us when anyone is obtaining it.
This is why Sprint's Galaxy S III is obtaining a rather lower rating than the opposite major carrier models. Sprint has to get its act along. we'll not provides a Sprint phone a four.5-star rating till the carrier provides its subscribers a lot of data regarding LTE coverage.
You'll have higher luck obtaining your web via Wi-Fi on each the two.4GHz and 5GHz bands. Bluetooth four.0 and NFC are onboard, and Google Wallet is preloaded.
Our battery take a look at did not complete as a result of we have a tendency to ran out of your time. however that is good; we have a tendency to around worn-out the battery with an eight hour, thirty five minute decision. This phone has solid battery life, and considering the battery is removable, you'll carry a spare. that is one thing you cannot do with the EVO 4G LTE.
The Galaxy S III runs Android four.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" with an entire ton of exclusive Samsung extensions. Performance was glorious in my tests. The Qualcomm S4 chip running at one.5GHz is that the fastest one we have seen in smartphones to this point, and it's ready to strive against any app challenge you throw at it, as well as games on the HD screen. Our benchmark tests proved this, though they were inside the margin of error in comparison with the One X. each phones are terribly quick.
Exclusive new options embody S-Beam, the power to transfer files by tapping 2 phones along and employing a combination of NFC and Wi-Fi Direct; S-Voice, Samsung's answer to Apple's Siri; TecTiles, NFC-enabled accent tags which will amendment the settings on your phone, and plenty of sharing and tagging choices within the camera, like the power to automatically tag your friends' faces, and also the ability for multiple GS3s inside a number of feet of every different to automatically share all of their photos.
Many of those options work well, however they are the majority buried. The interface are a few things of a scavenger hunt. Take sensible keep, a neat new feature that detects your face and keeps the screen from going black whereas you are looking at it. i like it! however it is not on by default, and also the solely thanks to flip it on is by getting to the
Samsung helpfully pops up varied screens telling you regarding varied cool gestures you'll use, like raising the phone to your face to automatically decision somebody you are texting. however it is a ton of data to soak up, and plenty of gestures that you've got never used before. there is a sharp learning curve here.
Compare this with HTC, that has been operating to cut back distinctive UI parts. HTC's recent Sense four interface focuses on a number of new options and makes them integral: enhanced sound, a faster camera, and solid social networking integration. Samsung offers plenty a lot of, however it prices you plenty a lot of mental energy to work it all out.
I'll additionally decision out 2 minor disappointments. The screen rotated unexpectedly a lot of typically that i might like. Also, S-Voice is not as seamless or as complete as Siri. it is a fine voice-dialing system, as well as over Bluetooth, however I kept vocally stepping on its prompts when making an attempt to raise it a lot of difficult queries.
Beyond that, there is the standard raft of bloatware from each Samsung and Sprint: I count seventeen pre-installed apps, a number of that (Samsung's Music Hub store) did not really launch, and a few of that (Samsung Apps and also the S-Suggest app) are frustratingly redundant. Beyond that, there is the four hundred,000-plus apps within the Google Play Store.
Multimedia
The 16GB Galaxy S III we have a tendency to tested had 12GB of accessible memory and support for microSD cards up to 64GB, that match below the plastic back panel. there is additionally a 32GB model for $249.99 with contract, however given the phone's microSD support, i do not see the purpose of shopping for the more-expensive model. It plays all the standard music and video formats, as well as MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, Xvid, and WMV at resolutions up to 1080p.
Samsung has customized each the music and video players. they don't seem to be as good-looking as HTC's, however they are practical. at the side of the standard music navigation, there is a frill referred to as Music sq., that grades all of your music on a 2nd scale from "calm" to "exciting" and "passionate" to "joyful," making custom playlists by mood. there is additionally an epic range of EQ presets, that amendment the sound in effective, if gimmicky ways in which.
The picture/video gallery integrates Google and Facebook albums, and permits you to kind your videos as an inventory or with thumbnails. The flagship feature here is Pop-Up Play, which may float a video playback window over different apps; I found it to be fairly useless. Netflix and YouTube each look smart and run on LTE with none visible buffering. The phone additionally comes with Samsung's Media Hub music and video store, that incorporates a solid lineup of recent movies and television shows at industry-standard costs of $4 to rent and $15-$20 to shop for.
If you wish to play your video on an enormous HDTV, you would like to use Samsung's AllShare system, that like most different wireless video systems rarely works as a result of your home network does not have the bandwidth, or a new-style 11-pin MHL adapter. Our previous MHL adapters did not work.
The 8-megapixel camera takes good-looking, saturated photos that are sharp with very little noise, a minimum of in good light-weight. In our low-light take a look at, the shutter speed dropped to 1/40 second, which can cause some softness if you do not have a gentle hand. that is still higher than several cameraphones. The 1-megapixel front camera additionally showed solid low-light performance. The video mode captures 1080p videos at thirty frames per second indoors and out with the most camera, that is quite we have a tendency to might say for the HTC One X.
You get loads of gimmicky camera modes. HDR is significantly slower than on either the iPhone 4S ($199, 4.5 stars) or the HTC One X, and showed a bent to make "ghost" pictures after I tried it. Smile detection worked well, and Share Shot permits you to automatically stream photos to different GS3s within the space. Buddy Photo-Share tags faces with names based mostly on the photographs in their social-networking profiles. Those last 2 are buried within the camera settings and whereas cool, you are not probably to bump into them simply.
Conclusions
The Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC EVO 4G LTE are each state-of-the-art phones. In our scoring system, they tie, every with distinctive options. The Galaxy incorporates a removable battery, higher video recording quality, and no hiss in quiet audio output. The EVO 4G LTE is created from higher-quality materials, incorporates a brighter screen, a kickstand, a physical Camera button, higher home-screen widgets, and HD Voice within the future. you cannot get it wrong with either.
If these phones are simply too massive for you, select the LG Viper 4G LTE ($99, four stars) packs dual-core power and also the LTE future into a way smaller body. And if your upgrade is not urgent, you'll wish to contemplate hanging on to that previous WiMAX phone for a minute, a minimum of till you'll decide when Sprint LTE is returning to your town.
Specification for Samsung
Carrier
Type Sprint
Form issue
Form Factor Bar, bit screen
Size
Product Dimensions (inches) 5.38" x 2.78" x 0.34"
Weight (ounces) 4.7 Ounces
Color
Color Marble White
Battery
Battery, Standby 3G: Up to twelve.5 Days; LTE: Up to eight.3 Days
Battery, Usage Time Up to nine hours
Battery sort and Size 2100mAh
Network
Frequencies and information Type CDMA/1xRTT, EVDO, LTE 1900MHz
Data Speed CDMA/LTE®
Platform
Platform Android™ four.0, Ice Cream Sandwich
CPU / Processor
Processor Speed, Type 1.5GHz x 2, Qualcomm MSM8960
Display
Main show Resolution 1280 x 720 Pixel
Main show Size 4.8"
Main show Technology HD Super AMOLED™
User Interface
Features TouchWiz™; sensible Unlock; Accelerometer; Motion Gestures; sensible Stay; S Voice™; S Suggest™; Kies Air; Pop Up Play; Share Shot; AllShare® Play
Camera
Camera Resolution 8.0 Megapixel
Front-facing Camera Resolution 1.9 Megapixel
Digital Optical Zoom 4x
Features Auto Focus; Shot Modes, Auto, Cloudy, Daylight, Fluorescent, Incandescent; Camcorder; DivX®; HD Recording; HD Playback; Video Share; Zero lag shutter; Burst Mode; Best Shot; Share Shot; Smile Shot; Buddy photo share
Audio
Features Music Player; Compatible Music Files, 3GP, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, M4A, MIDI, MMF, MP3, PMD, QCP, WAV, WMA; Audio, Streaming; Ringtones, Polyphonic; MP3/Music Tones
Video
Features Video Player; Compatible Video Files, 3GPP, H.264, MPEG4, WMV; Video, Streaming
Fun and Entertainment
Features Downloadable Content; Animated Wallpapers; Samsung Widget Gallery; Samsung Media Hub; Google Play™ Books; Music and Movies; Google Talk™; Flipboard™
Business & workplace
Features Microsoft® Office-compatible; Voice Memo
Messaging choices
Features Messaging options: Email; company Email; image Messaging; Text Messaging; Instant Messaging; Threaded / Chat-style Messages; Predictive Text (T9®/XT9®); T9 Trace
Connectivity
Features Bluetooth®; Bluetooth® Profiles, A2DP, AVRCP, HID, HFP, PBAP, HSP, OPP, SPP; Wi-Fi® ; Wi-Fi® Hotspot; HTML Browser; Flash®; GPS
Memory
Internal Memory RAM (2GB), ROM (16GB)
External Memory/microSD™ Capacity Up to 64GB microSD
Calling Functions
Features Speakerphone; Voice Recognition; Voicemail; Visual Voicemail; Text-to-speech; Music ID; image decisioner ID; Multitasking; Call Restrictions; Hearing Aid Compatible (HAC), M4; TTY; Airline Mode
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