Samsung Galaxy S II Review| Booredatwork
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The Samsung Galaxy S remains one of the most popular phones on the market today, so popular in fact that Apple have attempted to take out a law suit against Samsung centred around the device. With a beautiful 4" Super AMOLED display, and a snappy Hummingbird CPU, the Galaxy S touched the hearts and souls of Android enthusiasts around the globe.
With this in mind, has the Galaxy S II managed to uphold the family name? As an avid Galaxy S user, and enthusiast, I can happily say the answer is yes.
Build Quality
The only thing I could ever complain about with the original SGS was the build quality. Whilst not exactly poor it never felt solid in your hand; the plasticy feel, when combined with the lightness, left you feeling as if you were holding a cheap dummy phone, not a Β£500 android powerhouse. However I am glad to report that Samsung has addressed this issue with the SGS2. It still sports a plastic body, and is even lighter and thinner (8.49mm) than it's predecessor, but it has lost the cheap feel. The back is textured and the angular shape makes it feel solid in your hand yet comfortable at the same time. And the gorilla glass is screen is (supposedly) pretty much unscratchable. And the coating on the screen reduces finger prints to a much greater extent than the SGS or Iphone 4. The one thing I thing I don't like about the build of the SGS2 is just how thin the backplate is, granted it allows the profile of the phone to remain as slim as it is, but I can't help thinking that some sort of sliding back cover would have made more sense. The scarily minute plastic tabs which hold the backplate on look, and sound, like they could snap off the wafer thin cover at any moment.
Camera
The SGS2 has an 8mp snapper which takes the best stills I have seen from a phone perhaps excluding the Xperia Arc, however there is very little difference, and all photos look brilliant on the SGS2's screen, and the night mode does well to take low light images. The camera is accompanied by a single LED flash, which doubles as a torch and video light, and the 1.3mp front facing camera does the job for video calls. In fact for a 1.3mp camera it takes remarkably decent stills, much better than what I have seen from previous generation 3mp cameras. Video quality on the rear camera is a crisp 1080p which has a stunning colour representation, again helped by the screen, and the slight motion blur of the SGS has all but gone unless you are in very low light conditions, however the video light should counter this problem.
Summary
The SGS2 is the best Android phone we have seen. It combines an attractive, slim form factor with the impressive SAMOLED+ screen and the quickest mobile CPU out at the moment. The software is still not perfect, but I am confident that the updates, which Samsung have already started pushing out, will fix the minor niggles such as the auto brightness, which has been fixed already in the KE2 firmware update.
For all the hackers out there you will be glad to hear it ships with an open bootloader, is easily rooted, and the first custom ROM for it has already been released. You can buy it unlocked in the UK for just under Β£500, so what are you waiting for?