Samsung Galaxy S3 vs S Advance | Full Specs Compared
The third generation smartphone from Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S family was unpacked in London today (04 May 2012). The Galaxy family has earned the majority of credit endowed upon Samsung in their success of smartphones. They started with Galaxy S and continued the legend with Galaxy S II and now they have announced Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III). Samsung will release Galaxy S3 over 50 competitive markets around the world and will start rolling to the market in end may 2012 in Europe. The latest marvel of a phone from the Galaxy family, the Galaxy S3, is compared here with Galaxy S advance, another device from the same family which was released in 2011.
Samsung Galaxy S3 (Galaxy S III)
After a long wait, initial impressions of Galaxy S III haven’t disappointed us at all. The much anticipated smartphone comes in two color combinations, Pebble Blue and Marble White. The cover is made with a glossy plastic that Samsung called as Hyperglaze, and I have to tell you, it feels so good in your hands. It retains a striking similarity to Galaxy Nexus rather than Galaxy S II having curvier edges and no hump at the back. It is 136.6 x 70.6mm in dimensions and has a thickness of 8.6mm with a weight of 133g. As you can see, Samsung has managed to produce this monster of a smartphone with a very reasonable size and weight. It comes with a 4.8 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that features a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels at a pixel density of 306ppi. There’s apparently, no surprise here, but Samsung has incorporated PenTile matrix instead of using RGB matrix for their touchscreen. The image reproduction quality of the screen is beyond expectation, and the reflex of the screen is also rather low.
The power of any smartphone lies in its processor and Samsung Galaxy S III comes with a 32nm 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9 processor on top of Samsung Exynos chipset as predicted. It also accompanies this with 1GB of RAM and Android OS v4.0.4 IceCreamSandwich. Needless to say, this is a very solid combination of specs. The initial benchmarks of this device suggest that it’s going to top the market in every aspect possible. A significant performance boost in the Graphics Processing Unit is also ensured by the Mali 400MP GPU. It comes with 16 / 32 and 64GB storage variations with the option of using a microSD card to expand the storage up to 64GB. This versatility has landed Samsung Galaxy S III with a huge advantage because that was one of the prominent disadvantages in Galaxy Nexus. As predicted, the network connectivity is reinforced with 4G LTE connectivity that varies regionally. Galaxy S III also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity and the built in DLNA ensure that you can share your multimedia contents in your big screen easily. S III can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot enabling you to share the monster 4G connection with your less fortunate friends. The camera seems to be the same available in Galaxy S II, which is 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash. Samsung has incorporated simultaneous HD video and image recording to this beast along with geo tagging, touch focus, face detection and image & video stabilization. The video recording is at 1080p @ 30 frames per second while having the ability to video conference using the front facing camera of 1.9MP. Besides these conventional features, there are a whole lot of usability features that we can eagerly await.
Samsung is boasting a direct competitor of iOS Siri, the popular Personal Assistant that accepts voice commands named S Voice. The model exhibited didn’t have a sound model of this new addition, but Samsung guaranteed that it would be there when the smartphone is released. The strength of S Voice is the ability to recognize languages other than English, like Italian, German, French and Korean. There are a lot of gestures that can land you in different applications, as well. For instance, if you tap and hold the screen while you rotate the phone, you can go directly in to the camera mode. S III will also call whoever the contact you were browsing when you raise the handset to your ear, which is a good usability aspect. Samsung Smart Stay is designed to identify whether you’re using the phone and switch the screen off if you’re not. It uses the front camera with facial detection in order to achieve this task. Similarly, Smart Alert feature will make your smartphone vibrate when you pick it up if you have any missed calls of other notifications. Finally, Pop Up Play is a feature that would best explain the performance boost S III has. Now you can work with any application you like and have a video playing on top of that application on its own window. The window size can be adjusted while the feature worked flawlessly with the tests we ran.
A smartphone of this caliber needs a lot of juice, and that is provided by the 2100mAh batter resting at the back of this handset. It also has a barometer and a TV out while you have to be careful about the SIM because S III only supports the use of micro SIM cards.
Samsung Galaxy S Advance
Galaxy S Advance is a smartphone anyone could easily mistake for Galaxy S II because they resemble with such level of similarity. It is only slightly smaller than the Galaxy S II scoring dimensions of 123.2 x 63mm and a thickness of 9.7mm. It has a smaller screen of 4 inches featuring a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels at a pixel density of 233ppi. The Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen panel adds value to the package because it has great color reproduction. It comes with 1GHz Cortex A9 dual core processor, but we have no information about the chipset. We can assume it to be either TI OMAP or Snapdragon S2. It has 768MB of RAM, which falls somewhat short but nonetheless, it has smooth and seamless operation, so we figured Samsung has done some tweaks. Galaxy S Advance runs on Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread, and we haven’t heard any news on an official upgrade to Android OS v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, but we hope it’ll come out soon.
Although this smartphone may sound like a low end phone, that’s not the case either. We actually have some trouble figuring out whether Samsung meant this phone to be an economical replacement for Samsung Galaxy S. In any case, this falls somewhere in the middle between Samsung Galaxy S and Samsung Galaxy S II. It has 5MP camera with autofocus and LED flash with geo tagging enabled. It can capture 720p videos at 30 frames per second and it also has 1.3MP front facing camera bundled with the Bluetooth v3.0 for conference calling. It has 8GB or 16GB version with the support to expand the memory using a microSD card. It comes with HSDPA connectivity yielding up to 14.4Mbps of speed while having Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. It can also act as a wi-fi hotspot and build in DLNA connectivity ensures that you can stream rich media content right from your phone. It comes in either Black or White flavors and has the normal sensors like any Android phone. Samsung has ported Advance with 1500mAh battery and we reckon it will comfortably power up your device for more than 6 hours.