Hello everyone. OK, so big news for all
Samsung Galaxy S3 owners in Europe. The Galaxy S3 premium suite has started to roll out to
unbranded handsets
so if you bought your handset off contract, so you bought an unlocked handset,
or if you were one of the people that bought the S3 during the first couple
of weeks a lot of the networks didn't have branded handsets at that point, they
were just sending out the Samsung stock handsets,
So to get the update, all you need to do is plug you Samsung device into your PC and run the
Kies software from Samsung.
It will check for an update and deliver it to you if you have it
or you can use the over the air update built into the phone.
If you have
got your device on one of the networks and you're
waiting effectively for the network to say yes the premium suite will be released, I'm
afraid you're still waiting.
Most likely now it's going to be after Christmas for the networks to
send the update out. But
what are you getting? Well,
what Samsung decided to to is take some of the features from their other leading
phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 2
and their tablet like the Note 10.1 and they've brought those
features down onto the S3. Well, I say down, let's call it across.
The big feature, the headline grabbing feature of the premium suite as it were is
multi window support so to enable multi window support once your
phone has been updated
all you need to do is check
first of all
that the multi window option is turned on
you're getting some new
quick options within the notification tray
all share cast and multi window support, so make sure multi windows support is turned on.
OK, so to turn on multi windows support, all you need to do is
long press on the back button and that will bring up this new multi window bar
then grab the item that you would like to make
multi window, drop the first one.
Then,
grab the second item and drag that in
and that then creates your multi windows. So you can see here, this is the top browser area,
and if I want to I can bring up a keyboard
to appear down here and
you can see this is a much smaller keyboard allowing the multi windows support to kind of
take up the majority of the view space.
And if we just type in there, let's just go
to Google.
So there's Google, and you can see there
I've got the Google search page
and you can see here I've got YouTube running as well.
Let's have a quick look at the YouTube Year in Review.
So there you can see, that's the video playing quite happily at the bottom there
and I can still carry on browsing around this if I want to.
Go to Google's Twitter account
ironic.
I can pick up this centre bar and I can drag it to allow
the window to have more or less room.
If you want to, you can close it pretty much all the way out so
it only leaves just the top most space.
So you can just see that the other app is there.
But that is multi windows support.
Another really cool feature
is the new notification area which I touched on a moment ago
but in here is the all share cast option
turning that on
will immediately kick in all share and it will start scanning for devices like televisions
or other
DLNA enabled product.
If it finds something, it will then allow you to share your media directly
to it or have media shared to this device.
Really really quick and easy, I've given this a
try on one of the Samsung smart TVs
and it works really well
quite literally
flick it on, scan, they sync up, share your data.
And you know, you can take your videos and your images directly from this
and put them directly onto your television set or another DLNA connected device.
Another thing that's really really nice is paper artist.
So you may know that you can get an S Pen for the Galaxy S3, unfortunately the Note 2 Pen
doesn't work,
slightly different technology
but the idea is that you can
choose a photograph from your library
and you can then
kind of turn it into these highly stylized
artistic
pieces of kind of paper art
so let's just grab a
humorous image I found earlier.
So as you can see, it's taken me the traditional image that would have been full colour and it's sort of
stencillized it
and you can do
different options
You also have various pen tools in here, bucket tools and so on so you can draw onto the
images,
kind of make them your own.
Very very cool. Nice to see this app brought across, adds a little bit more fun and
functionality to the S3.
It's something to do when you're bored I suppose.
But nice to see these apps making their way across.
Also updated is SMemo.
so this is a really popular app on the Galaxy Note 2.
On the Galaxy Note 2 you have the SPen, you don't have that built in with the Galaxy S3 although
you can buy that separate S Pen as I mentioned to you.
But you have a note taking app already built in.
They've updated to the latest version with any new bells and whistles
that are available.
To be fair, I don't actually use this all that often,
I tend to use it an awful lot on my Note 2.
So I couldn't quite tell you what they have changed between them but
essentially this is updated to the same version as the Note 2 so you'll
find a few more bells and whistles going on in there.
Another new feature that we have to play with
is the new smart rotation setting so what this will do is
if you happen to be reading the device in bed it will stop the screen from flicking
around really really quickly if you happen to be just at a funny angle,
it will understand that you're currently looking at the device
and it won't keep rotating the screen, it will keep it locked in.
OK, so to enable that, you come into display
and in here you've also got the new page buddy option as well which
provides contextual home screens depending on what you've plugged in or plugged out
So if you've plugged in your headphones for instance, it will flip round to a
music player.
So likewise what you have also is auto screen rotate and smart rotation.
Pop that on
and what it will do is it uses the camera
and adjusts itself so that it knows whether you have actually rotated the
screen or if the device has just
vibrated a little bit and it's caused the gyro to think
you've turned the screen around.
Turning that on means
the device will check you
check the position of your face and knows if you're actually trying to
keep the screen in landscape or portrait mode, saves it
blinking backwards and forwards all the time.
But other than that, the only other option in there is the new page buddy
system , earphones page, docking page, roaming page etcetera. Really nice little feature, again
it's adding to kind of usability and not having to muck around. When you plug in
your earphones it will immediately flick round to a music player for you
so you can just start playing music straight away.
Really nice little feature.
And the final cool feature which is actually quite difficult to show, probably
one of the nicest additions on the S3 premium suite
is the best face feature for the camera. So what this will do
like I say, I can't demonstrate it for you very easily, is
when you are taking a burst of shots you can set it to best face
and when it's taking the photographs of people
it will make sure to select the ones where people's eyes are open and they're
not pulling funny faces etcetera
so ideally you will get the best shot, you'll get the best photograph.
The burst mode in there obviously helps
being able to fire off eight or so shots really really rapidly.
The camera will then pick which is the best one. So which is the best posed etcetera.
Eyes open, mouths closed
all of the usual things that you need from a really good group shot
it will help with that.
Cool little feature and that is what Samsung are bringing to the premium suite.
Like I say, if you already have an
unlocked S3 check your update is probably available now
in Europe.
If you are on a network,
I'm afraid you might wait until just after Christmas or the New Year
for this update to start rolling out but
keep your eyes open, it is coming.