One feature Samsung wants desperately to succeed is S Voice, not exactly the company’s answer to Apple’s SIRI. For one thing, S Voice keeps going to sleep, which means opening the app and saying “Hi, Galaxy.” And this doesn’t always work, to boot. When I told it, “Text Yoni Gross,” the app gave me two Yonis and a person with the last name Gross, but not Yoni Gross. Additionally, I asked the phone to call my wife Suzannah and it thought I said “sex.” How Freudian. I suppose if I had a few months to tweak it, I could, but who has that kind of time these days? S Voice has potential though and shouldn’t be totally ignored.
As an aside, between the camera screen brightness sensing and S Voice’s listening, this is a nosy product. Tie in the location awareness of every smartphone and you have a paranoid person’s nightmare.
Samsung uses the built-in Near Field Communication (NFC) chip to create its own special S Beam app. Touch two S IIIs back to back and they’ll transfer files. This assumes you have a friend with an S III and that it’s not easier to just email, text, or share files using a cloud service. All of those solutions don’t involve physical contact, making it look like your phones are having intercourse.
AT&T’s LTE network is a bit more crowded than the last time I used it, but it continues to find ways to amaze me. At one point, the network managed to get more than 5 Mbps download speed and almost 2.4 up. That’s a heck of a lot better than 3G.
The camera is a basic 8 MP shooter with a few bells and whistles added. One such whistle is “buddy sharing,” which lets you tag a person in the photo app. You should only have to do it once, and then facial recognition does the rest. Apple’s Faces feature is my favorite part of iPhoto, so this gets some serious love from me. The camera app supports macro photography, which I’m not cool enough to be any good at, and has burst mode for quick photos.
Let me take a deep breath before I launch into my least favorite feature. I can deal with all of my minor quibbles, but there’s one thing that drives me batty — text entry. The auto complete on the S III is crazy invasive. Like, “cannot type an actual sentence” invasive. Turning off the text prediction leaves you at the mercy of the aforementioned slimy feeling front glass. As a result, I had the lowest accuracy I’ve ever had on any mobile device. There’s no Swype keyboard pre-installed either, which is a letdown.
On the plus side, all of the S III variants are easily hackable. Sure, Big Red locked the S III down and is selling a special “developer edition” for those who might want to try other ROMs on the device, but that’s been “handled” by enthusiasts already. There are presently alpha builds of Cyonagen Mod 10, featuring the latest Android build. Yes, you lose all of the neat little customizations that Samsung built into the OS, but you end up with a great OS, awesome hardware, and you shed all the unneeded dross. Throw a screen protector on so you don’t have to directly touch that odd glass and you have a sweet phone.
In fact, if the S III ran stock Android, I would strongly consider recommending it to anyone. As it stands, I need to suggest that you give yourself at least half an hour to play with it. You need to see if the flaws get in the way of the greatness.
[…] been a much more drastic shift in body type between the S II and S III, but that makes sense. The S III took what didn’t work in the previous model and rejected it, and the S4 continues that by […]