OK, here we are with the Samsung Galaxy S3.
Now what I'm going to show you quickly is some of the latest features, so,
this is touchless V5
you can see a very very slick interface.
There's quite a few pre-installed apps
that come with the S3.
Most of them I'm afraid
not very good.
For instance you've got video hub, music hub
S Voice which is Samsung's version of Siri
honestlyI am so bored with this voice control nonsense, you know
we could do it like
ten years ago it didn't work then it still doesn't work now and it's a bit of
a cheat
because all it's doing is sending data back to a data centre somewhere in America
processing the information and returning the result. Why when we've got all the power in these phones would we
want to do that?
What's the point?
It just doesn't really make much sense to me.
Flipboard
if you know it from the iPhone is also installed pre-installed really really cool and
Dropbox.
Here's a really cool tip for you.
Sign into your personal Dropbox account if you already have one,
or set up a new Dropbox account on your phone
and you'll immediately get 48gig of storage space in Dropbox for two years
courtesy of Samsung.
Genius.
And I'm reliably informed if you happen to log out of your account and log into say
your friend's Dropbox account on your phone, they'll also get 48gig.
Share and share alike!
Another thing is All Share which is basically DNLA,
the digital network living alliance
.
allows you to share your content from your phone directly to any dnla enabled
device including XBox360.
when it works, PS3 the Wii
and a host of other things like Boxee Box and what have you.
That's really about it from the Samsung installed stuff.
Widgets
the usual complement of widgets but nicely laid out.
get flip pad.
S memo is actually really really cool but you need the S Pen to really make use of it properly
to actually draw onto the screen and take notes as you're working.
You notice the physical home button
down at the bottom.
You can double tap to bring up the S Voice
but you know I really hate S Voice, I really hate Siri so I don't even use that.
At some point I might very well root my phone and find a way to get rid of that and
replace that button with something else.
If you long press
it will then fire up all of your tasks and one thing I really do like here which is new and
unique on the S3 is this removal button which allows you to close all of your apps
quickly
or you can fire up your task manager.
Go straight in, see what you're running, what I quite like about this is it will also show you your
RAM and you can put your kit and memory down if you need to.
Your storage space
and any stuff you've got downloaded and installed. Sadly you can't easily uninstall
all of the junky Samsung apps
which is a pity.
Go away S Voice.
For that unfortunately you have to root your phone.
which may very well have to happen because
I just can't see why I'm losing about
500meg of space to Samsung apps that
I'm never going to use.
Why, why Samsung why?
It just does not make sense.
Standard Ice Cream Sandwich option
is there for things like your folders
so you can just drop your app straight into a folder, Play Store.
One of the things that I found quite entertaining
Create a message,
and you've got Scribble
or Slide as I think it might also be called. So
doesn't always get it right, I think it depends on your fingers.
There you are, all done just by sliding.
You can change those options if you press and hold here. Down there.
You can then see you get a number of extra options you can actually
speak to your phone and it will convert it
you can use a scribble option
or no option. This is quite cool as well, clipboard.
hover over the clipboard and anything you've got stored in the clipboard will appear here.
and you can store multiple items which is very very cool.
Discovered last night by accident.
I though Aha, that's where all the stuff I put on the clipboard has gone.
Let's have a look in settings.
So data usage which is common to ICS is available.
Shows you exactly what's been using what while you've been using your phone.
How much data you've been using. You can set alerts.
Display, loads and loads of display options including smart stay which is really cool
if you are holding the phone to your face
well not to your face obviously but if you're looking at your phone,
the camera, the front facing camera will flick on and it will double check to see if you are
still there looking at the phone.
If you are it won't turn the screen off, even if you've got the timeout set to two minutes.
It's just such a labour saving device I lose track of the number of times I've had to turn my phone on
to look at something and then while I'm distracted and then my phone turns off.
Press the button again
absolutely pointless
SMS message just coming in.
Other than that, a lot of the options are very similar
got battery show you how long the battery is going for, what's drawing all your power, as usual screen is
really killing it.
Location services, your dock
an option for power saving which you can flick on
to generally reduce all of the power
on your phone so the cpu, turn the screen on and off quicker,
turns off the Haptic feedback, all the items that really draw on the battery.
Storage, all your storage information
also mount your SD card if you need to.
So some of the other really nifty features on the S3 are
your
quick access buttons at the top here
for kind of most used
system features I suppose is what you'd call those. You've got your wifi, gps
generally muting your sound, screen rotation
basically whether the screen will automatically rotate or not.
Dropping the phone into power save mode
turn your notifications off, turn your mobile data off.
Bluetooth on or off, driving mode
and obviously the overall sync.You can also access settings directly from there
as well
and you get your network operator and the date there.
All the rest of your notifications down there and a clear button to quickly clear everything
in the list and it sends you back to your home screen. Nice.
If you pinch,
how strange it doesn't work
not all that reliable actually for some reason.
Let's try that again.
Well, we'll probably not bother with that then. There we go.
So if you want to
see all of your home screens just pinch
nice feature,
just pinch and show all of your home screens
and then move to an appropriate one
add a new home screen
or drag and trash
if you want to get rid of one.
An Americanism!
That's really the core software features of the Samsung Galaxy S3.
There's a few others around things like near field communication that allows you to tap two
phones together to exchange information and it also has a wifi direct as well
so if the other phone has wifi direct
you can set up a really fast wifi connection between the two phones
Very very cool.
You'll also notice I've got Chrome installed there down at the bottom, very very excellent,
very excellent indeed.