Hey guys, it?s Michael with Pocketnow.com. This is a big week for Samsung in the United
States; they?ve announced their Galaxy S 3 for all four nationwide carriers, as well
as US Cellular. Now, the US version of the Galaxy S 3 is essentially identical across
all carriers, but it differs significantly from the international version released a
few weeks ago, as far as specs under the hood go.
I?ve got the international version here, as well as a Sprint-branded Galaxy S III here.
We?re going to do some app launch comparisons, some benchmark tests, and see how they stack
up, speedwise. It?s Pocketnow. Here we go. Alright, so I mentioned some spec differences
between these models; let?s see what they are. The international version of the Galaxy
S 3 is powered by an Exynos 4212 Quad-core Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1.4GHz, backed
up by 1GB of RAM. The radio is pentaband GSM. Storage options are available from 16 to 64GB,
and MicroSD expansion up to an additional 64 gigs. The Sprint version, like all US variants,
is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core CPU clocked at 1.5GHz. That?s a dual-core
processor, but it allows the Sprint version to incorporate support for LTE, and it?s made
with the 28-nm process, as opposed to the Exynos? 32nm. And it?s backed up by double
the RAM - 2GB in all the US versions, as opposed to one. For storage, there are 16 or 32GB
variants, with the same expandable MicroSD card slot. For all those changes under the
hood, though, as you can see, these are very similar -almost identical devices physically.
Both are running Android 4.0.4 with the TouchWiz 5 Nature UX skin, in the out of the box configuration.
Because it?s so hard to tell them apart, I?ll keep the Sprint one here on the right for
the duration of the video. Okay, let?s start the test battery. Let?s go for a boot-up time
check. So, both of these devices are on the same page; the international version was given
a hard-reset, and I installed only the apps we?re going to be testing today. The Sprint
version was new out of the box just a few days ago, and I did the same on it. So aside
from setting up the bare minimum of accounts and home screen shortcuts, these are very
close to an out of box condition. Here we go, then. 1, 2, 3. Lets move on to app launching,
and see how the device fares launching stock applications.
Just to be sure we?re on the same page here, these devices are running with zero open apps,
and they?re both connected to the same WiFi network in the office here. One of the first
things we do out of the box, especially if you?re coming from another Google device,
is to re-download all your apps from the market, so let?s try a launch test of the Google Play
store. Here goes. Play Store Email Messaging Maps Camera Browser
-Bookmarks: Browser page loads Pocketnow.com -Scrolling to check for rendering. Double-tap
to zoom in, pinch-to-zoom. -Tap a link to see new page load ?Let?s try
to load another page. I like nasa.gov because it?s image-heavy, and it?s full of awesome
space stuff.? Of course, if stock apps were the whole story, we?d all still be using dumbphones.
What about third-party apps? Flipboard Facebook Twitter G+ YouTube -and for YouTube we want
to check to see how these manage video. Not load time; we don?t care about that; we just
want to see if there?s any difference in how these devices buffer and play the same video.
And speaking of video ? while we?re here, we might as well see how the device handles
one of the more processor-intensive tasks: Pop Up Play. This is a 1280x720 WMV file from
Nasa.gov called Dynamic Earth. let?s see how we fare swiping around on these devices while
it?s playing. Now, as we covered before, these devices have very different hardware configurations
as far as processor and RAM go, so let?s run some benchmarks and see what we?ve got.
One of the big reasons to buy a fancy smartphone with a lot of processing punch is gaming.
Let?s see how the phone compare. I?m going to load
X-Plane, which is a graphically-intense flight simulator for Android. I?ve already downloaded
the game and its resource packages, so let?s see how these do on a launch speed test ?Finally,
we want to do a speed test.So we?re on the same network here, so we won?t run the test
at the same time so as not to corrupt these results. These
should be similar. Does this really mean anything? Probably not, but
this is one
of our geekier videos, so we figured we?d throw it in. So there are significant differences
between these two models under the hood, but as we?ve seen today, there?s really
very little difference between these two devices unless you?re doing some very processor-intensive
stuff This has been Michael with Pocketnow.com. Give us
a thumbs-up if you liked this comparison! If you?ve got something to say, leave a comment
on the post at Pocketnow.com. Follow us
on twitter at pocketnowtweets, and you can follow me
on Twitter at Captain2Phones - we
got a lot more Galaxy S 3 coverage coming down the pipe - stay tuned for that. I?m Michael,
this is Pocketnow, Thanks for watching!