A smartphone instead of a computer or how I spent the day with the Samsung Galaxy S II
Good morning Habrazhiteli!
Today I would like to provide to your strict court a review of Samsung’s flagship mobile phone model, which will burst onto the shelves of Russian stores at the end of May - the Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) . This will not be a trivial point-by-point review, a la “design-screen-control-interface-platform-impression”, but a kind of experiment. For one working office plankton day, I decided to set aside laptops, all-in-one PCs and PCs and work using only Galaxy S II. Under the cut is the sum of my works in the form of many photographs, several videos and a story about how it was.
10:00 The working day has begun. But I have not reached the office yet, so there is nothing to tell about.
')
10:17. I'm at the office! What are you doing, having overcome the grind of crowds in trains and buses, crowds of zombie penguins in the subway and, finally, getting to the native workplace? That's right - go drink tea with cookies in order to somehow restore the non-regenerating nerve cells after the morning rush hour. This important morning ritual was successfully completed, after which it was time to take my workhorse for the day - the new Samsung Galaxy S II. When you first look at the phone, it seems that this is not a smartphone at all, but rather a microplate, since The model is impressive in length and width: 125.3 x 66.1 mm with a thickness of only 8.49 mm and a weight of 116 g.
"A very wide screen diagonal, the thinnest body, quite light on weight" - these were my first thoughts when I took the Galaxy S II in my hands. The front surface is covered with a special high-strength mineral glass "Gorilla Glass", which differs in that it is quite difficult to scratch or break it. According to its specifications, it is about two to three times stronger than ordinary glass reinforced with chemical materials. An interesting history of the creation of this technology can be found here . You can also look at the ruthless attempts to break a similar screen in the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
The phone screen (Super AMOLED Plus with a resolution of 480x800 pixels) is one of the key differences from the previous model: the diagonal has increased by almost a third - to 4.3 inches. Stated that it consumes 18% less energy than Super AMOLED (for example, its predecessor - Galaxy S) or IPS-matrix used in monitors.
In the upper left corner there is a front 2 MP camera, which will be very useful for video calls and as a mirror for girls.
The “OK” button is recessed down the center in the case, there is the “Menu” button to the left of it, and the Back / Cancel button to the right.
The back cover is made of embossed plastic, quite pleasant to the touch. Above is a digital 8 MP camera with autofocus and a set of useful features, and a speaker at the bottom right.
The ends are extremely concise: a button to adjust the sound volume on the left, a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack at the top, an on / off button on the phone on the right and a microUSB connector for recharging and connecting to a computer - at the bottom.
Actually, this is the whole review of the appearance - then we include it and start it.
10:35. To work normally on this device, of course, it was necessary to shove a sim card into it. "Under the hood" it looks like this:
Battery - lithium-ion at 1650 mAh. You can insert a SIM card into the slot without removing the battery, which is convenient. To insert an additional memory card, you still have to pull out the battery. You can expand the storage capacity with microSDHC cards up to 32 GB.
10:37. After Simka fell into place, the phone was turned on. The device is loaded for 15 seconds, which is very good. Works on Android 2.3.1 (Gingerbread).
The first thing I tried was to look through the desktops. We have 7 of them at our disposal, and we can switch from one to another in three ways: “scrolling” left and right, choosing the right one at once, “tapping” one of the seven numbering points that are lined up in one navigation line below the screen equator, or delaying finger on this very line and wind the desktops by moving your finger from side to side.
The Samsung Galaxy S II features a proprietary TouchWiz 4.0 interface, which now understands new two-finger multi-touch gestures: you can move widgets around the desktop in edit mode by simply shifting the device in space to the right and left, or you can scale the image using the so-called Motion Zoom by deflecting phone back and forth is a very funny thing . For avid sms-ers and amateurs working with text editors and mail on a mobile phone, there is an output technology called SWYPE (drawing monograms on the screen with your finger, which are then converted into readable text). Having played enough with the tacho functionality, I decided to climb through the applications.
10:40. What we have available from standard applications: we will not disassemble any default calendars watch-music-players-browsers - and so it is clear that all this is available. It is much more interesting to delve into the so actively discussed "Hubs", of which there are already four in Galaxy S II.
First I caught the eye of Social Hub , which was most often mentioned in numerous press releases. Having performed simple steps to synchronize my accounts in facebook, myspace, twitter, google and hotmail with a smartphone, I received a single news feed pulling out of these soc. networks and mail services.
YouTalk , after a series of similar syncs, gave me a list of all my instant messengers: icq, msn messenger, gtalk, etc.
About Game Hub and Reader's Hub will tell you a little later.
In addition to the hubs, my attention was attracted by a couple of Samsung's own applications: AllShare and Kies Air.
AllShare is a one - stop multimedia center designed to wirelessly sync laptops, mobile phones and other devices with Samsung smart TVs. It allows you to drive a variety of content from a mobile phone, tablet or laptop on a zomboyaschik or monitor quite quickly and without unnecessary gestures: streaming audio / video signal, viewing tabs, photos, information about calls and text messages - all in real time. By the way, not only Samsung devices are hooked up to AllShare, but also any others that support the DLNA protocol.
Kies Air is a cloud service that allows you to store data on a remote server, accessing it via Wi-Fi via IP and controlling your smartphone via a browser on a PC. I tried it myself: one click to create a link that you can get into the phone from a computer. We drive the link into the browser on the PC - and, voila: the admin panel falls in which you can manage all the content of the mobile phone.
The phone has built-in NFC technology, with the help of which payment systems are created in civilized countries: many purchases can be paid by swiping the screen of the phone along a reading scanner. Such systems will be developed - there will be a holiday on our street in a couple of years, but for now these opportunities can be viewed only as an investment for the future.
Similarly, with Wi-Fi Direct technology, which allows you to directly throw content from the device to the device (like Bluetooth or infrared, only at the wifi transfer rate of traffic). At the moment, few devices can boast of the presence of this certainly useful feature. But in the coming years, things can change for the better.
11:03. So, for the work! For a start, I reached my email to clarify the scale of disasters at the start of the working day. The application for working with mail Gmail is in the package of pre-installed programs.
It’s convenient to work with it: with a good Wi-Fi signal, new letters are loaded instantly (without exaggeration), scrolling down the list at least as quickly. On such a wide screen, typing a letter is very convenient: the buttons of the virtual keyboard are much larger, and therefore, in the process of typing, the buttons are much smaller.
In general, the Samsung Galaxy S II can work comfortably with the “microplate” mail comfortably and, most importantly, quickly.
Unfortunately, on the Galaxy S II, as on the first model, there are no indicators. You can detect a missed call or a new message only by turning on the device. This can be compensated only by installing an additional application (No LED, for example), which, in combination with the Super AMOLED + display, allows you to display alerts for calls and messages on the off screen.
Having examined spam from superiors and colleagues and repaying them with the same coin, we proceed directly to the duties.
11:37. I don’t know about you, but I, as a bright representative of the office-plankton brethren, have quite a uniform range of duties, with rare exceptions. If to exaggerate greatly, my work consists of daily email correspondence and calls, tablets and reports, presentations and press releases. In fact, everything is limited to the default set of office software. It was here that the Polaris Office standard application package came in handy for me. This mini Word, Excel and Power Point in one.
Below you can see the process and the results of my hard work in each of the applications.
In Word, I needed to make those. task to develop several small applications for the Facebook page.
You can work quite tolerably (of course, much more slowly than on a regular PC or laptop with a keyboard): there are many settings for text, document format, the ability to insert photos, links, tables, etc. into the file. You can save the file in the old (97-2003) or new (2007) .doc format - similarly in Excel and Powerpoint. Functionality in different versions of the format is different.
In Excel, I needed to put in a tablet statistics from the social. networks. It was not difficult to form the desired table structure, enter the data and format it. There is a set of basic functions for working with tables: it is even possible to create simple graphs. This was enough for me to report.
In Powerpoint, I put on a draft of ideas for promoting the new Samsung Smart TV series on social networks. The slides came out worthy, though, and here the functionality of the application did not allow to turn to the full.
Nevertheless, it is quite possible to “finish” some details of the presentation in an emergency manner, when there is only a phone at hand.
13:00 War is war, and dinner is on schedule!
Lazy and sleepy afternoon mini-cinema. Everything works very fast, no additional codecs are required to watch movies (the tradition of pre-installed DivX codecs was also supported in the Galaxy S II).
14:33. Perhaps the most pleasant moment of the day has arrived: a detailed overview of entertainment hubs - gaming and reading.
Game Hub provides us with two tabs with an impressive list of games to choose from: "Social Games" and "Premium Games."
Social games consist of a dozen straightforward online games: from tactical strategies to turn-based RPGs and arcades. It is enough to register once in the system, after which your account will always be available in any of the games. You can invite friends to the games and choke them in the sweet moments of procrastination.
The premium games turned out to be more interesting: there are collected samples of blockbusters of HD quality, transferred to the mobile platform of the infamous Gameloft office: Assassin's Creed, Spiderman, GT Racing, Brothers In Arms, FIFA 2011 and others. True, they are all available only in trial versions of “Try before buy”.
In general, the Samsung Galaxy S II is played in a very exciting way: the dual-core Cortex A9 (XMM6260 + S5PC210) at 1 GHz and 1 GB of RAM do their job. There are no brakes in games, and the graphics level is really impressive, considering that these are mobile games.
Reader's Hub came in very handy in the toilet, where even a can of air freshener could not be found from reading. The hub is a platform for reading newspapers, magazines and books. A paid subscription applies to magazines and newspapers (but 7 days is free for free use), books can also be read only after payment (the cost of one book is from 20 to 200 rubles). The volume of content looks impressive: over 2.2 million books, 2,000 international and local newspapers in 49 languages of the world, as well as 2,300 popular magazines in 22 languages of the world.
16:34. At the end of the working run of the smartphone Samsung Galaxy S II, I walked through the media entertainment: photo and video, music player, radio.
The camera works very fast, pictures and videos are also saved without delay. The settings are intuitive, everything is selected directly from the screen. The quality of the pictures for a mobile phone camera is very good. There are some pretty interesting photo and video editors that provide ample opportunity for experimentation.
The new music player Galaxy S II has a different, more concise interface. Available technology sound processing DNSe and SRS. Music search service remains the same. We were pleased with the sound settings: there are 9 equalizers and 6 effects (besides the usual, a wide range, a concert hall, music clarity, bass boost, externalization). FM radio provides for recording the air (by the way, the radio application has also been updated).
19:49 Everything that you have just read was embedded on the Habr also using the Samsung Galaxy S II.
20:07. PS: tried the navigator on the way home. Everything worked quickly and clearly (these words are applicable to almost every aspect of the smartphone during the review): even using the mobile Internet, the maps are loaded in a few seconds, and the navigator builds the best routes (but Google should thank for it).
Samsung Galaxy S II is a smartphone stuffed with a powerful filling, with a wide range of features and the latest technological innovations that will appeal to even the most sophisticated geek. If you need a fast multi-functional multimedia device, then this model, at least, deserves your close attention and study.
Networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS / HSDPA 900/2100, EDGE
Operating system: Android 2.3.1
Platform: XMM6260 chipset, S5PC210 1 GHz dual-core processor (later versions with 1.2 GHz and Tegra 2 will be available)
Memory: 1 GB of RAM, 16/32 GB of flash, microSD slot (up to 32 GB)
Screen: Capacitive, 4.27 inches WVGA (480 x 800), Super AMOLED +
Camera: 8 MP with autofocus and flash, 1080p video 30 fps
Wireless: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, DLNA
Power: 1650 mAh battery
Dimensions: 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.49 mm
Weight: 116 g
In Russia, sales of the Samsung Galaxy S II will begin in late May. Recommended price for 16 GB version: 29,990 rubles.
Today I would like to provide to your strict court a review of Samsung’s flagship mobile phone model, which will burst onto the shelves of Russian stores at the end of May - the Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) . This will not be a trivial point-by-point review, a la “design-screen-control-interface-platform-impression”, but a kind of experiment. For one working office plankton day, I decided to set aside laptops, all-in-one PCs and PCs and work using only Galaxy S II. Under the cut is the sum of my works in the form of many photographs, several videos and a story about how it was.
10:00 The working day has begun. But I have not reached the office yet, so there is nothing to tell about.
')
10:17. I'm at the office! What are you doing, having overcome the grind of crowds in trains and buses, crowds of zombie penguins in the subway and, finally, getting to the native workplace? That's right - go drink tea with cookies in order to somehow restore the non-regenerating nerve cells after the morning rush hour. This important morning ritual was successfully completed, after which it was time to take my workhorse for the day - the new Samsung Galaxy S II. When you first look at the phone, it seems that this is not a smartphone at all, but rather a microplate, since The model is impressive in length and width: 125.3 x 66.1 mm with a thickness of only 8.49 mm and a weight of 116 g.
"A very wide screen diagonal, the thinnest body, quite light on weight" - these were my first thoughts when I took the Galaxy S II in my hands. The front surface is covered with a special high-strength mineral glass "Gorilla Glass", which differs in that it is quite difficult to scratch or break it. According to its specifications, it is about two to three times stronger than ordinary glass reinforced with chemical materials. An interesting history of the creation of this technology can be found here . You can also look at the ruthless attempts to break a similar screen in the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
The phone screen (Super AMOLED Plus with a resolution of 480x800 pixels) is one of the key differences from the previous model: the diagonal has increased by almost a third - to 4.3 inches. Stated that it consumes 18% less energy than Super AMOLED (for example, its predecessor - Galaxy S) or IPS-matrix used in monitors.
In the upper left corner there is a front 2 MP camera, which will be very useful for video calls and as a mirror for girls.
The “OK” button is recessed down the center in the case, there is the “Menu” button to the left of it, and the Back / Cancel button to the right.
The back cover is made of embossed plastic, quite pleasant to the touch. Above is a digital 8 MP camera with autofocus and a set of useful features, and a speaker at the bottom right.
The ends are extremely concise: a button to adjust the sound volume on the left, a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack at the top, an on / off button on the phone on the right and a microUSB connector for recharging and connecting to a computer - at the bottom.
Actually, this is the whole review of the appearance - then we include it and start it.
10:35. To work normally on this device, of course, it was necessary to shove a sim card into it. "Under the hood" it looks like this:
Battery - lithium-ion at 1650 mAh. You can insert a SIM card into the slot without removing the battery, which is convenient. To insert an additional memory card, you still have to pull out the battery. You can expand the storage capacity with microSDHC cards up to 32 GB.
10:37. After Simka fell into place, the phone was turned on. The device is loaded for 15 seconds, which is very good. Works on Android 2.3.1 (Gingerbread).
The first thing I tried was to look through the desktops. We have 7 of them at our disposal, and we can switch from one to another in three ways: “scrolling” left and right, choosing the right one at once, “tapping” one of the seven numbering points that are lined up in one navigation line below the screen equator, or delaying finger on this very line and wind the desktops by moving your finger from side to side.
The Samsung Galaxy S II features a proprietary TouchWiz 4.0 interface, which now understands new two-finger multi-touch gestures: you can move widgets around the desktop in edit mode by simply shifting the device in space to the right and left, or you can scale the image using the so-called Motion Zoom by deflecting phone back and forth is a very funny thing . For avid sms-ers and amateurs working with text editors and mail on a mobile phone, there is an output technology called SWYPE (drawing monograms on the screen with your finger, which are then converted into readable text). Having played enough with the tacho functionality, I decided to climb through the applications.
10:40. What we have available from standard applications: we will not disassemble any default calendars watch-music-players-browsers - and so it is clear that all this is available. It is much more interesting to delve into the so actively discussed "Hubs", of which there are already four in Galaxy S II.
First I caught the eye of Social Hub , which was most often mentioned in numerous press releases. Having performed simple steps to synchronize my accounts in facebook, myspace, twitter, google and hotmail with a smartphone, I received a single news feed pulling out of these soc. networks and mail services.
YouTalk , after a series of similar syncs, gave me a list of all my instant messengers: icq, msn messenger, gtalk, etc.
About Game Hub and Reader's Hub will tell you a little later.
In addition to the hubs, my attention was attracted by a couple of Samsung's own applications: AllShare and Kies Air.
AllShare is a one - stop multimedia center designed to wirelessly sync laptops, mobile phones and other devices with Samsung smart TVs. It allows you to drive a variety of content from a mobile phone, tablet or laptop on a zomboyaschik or monitor quite quickly and without unnecessary gestures: streaming audio / video signal, viewing tabs, photos, information about calls and text messages - all in real time. By the way, not only Samsung devices are hooked up to AllShare, but also any others that support the DLNA protocol.
Kies Air is a cloud service that allows you to store data on a remote server, accessing it via Wi-Fi via IP and controlling your smartphone via a browser on a PC. I tried it myself: one click to create a link that you can get into the phone from a computer. We drive the link into the browser on the PC - and, voila: the admin panel falls in which you can manage all the content of the mobile phone.
The phone has built-in NFC technology, with the help of which payment systems are created in civilized countries: many purchases can be paid by swiping the screen of the phone along a reading scanner. Such systems will be developed - there will be a holiday on our street in a couple of years, but for now these opportunities can be viewed only as an investment for the future.
Similarly, with Wi-Fi Direct technology, which allows you to directly throw content from the device to the device (like Bluetooth or infrared, only at the wifi transfer rate of traffic). At the moment, few devices can boast of the presence of this certainly useful feature. But in the coming years, things can change for the better.
11:03. So, for the work! For a start, I reached my email to clarify the scale of disasters at the start of the working day. The application for working with mail Gmail is in the package of pre-installed programs.
It’s convenient to work with it: with a good Wi-Fi signal, new letters are loaded instantly (without exaggeration), scrolling down the list at least as quickly. On such a wide screen, typing a letter is very convenient: the buttons of the virtual keyboard are much larger, and therefore, in the process of typing, the buttons are much smaller.
In general, the Samsung Galaxy S II can work comfortably with the “microplate” mail comfortably and, most importantly, quickly.
Unfortunately, on the Galaxy S II, as on the first model, there are no indicators. You can detect a missed call or a new message only by turning on the device. This can be compensated only by installing an additional application (No LED, for example), which, in combination with the Super AMOLED + display, allows you to display alerts for calls and messages on the off screen.
Having examined spam from superiors and colleagues and repaying them with the same coin, we proceed directly to the duties.
11:37. I don’t know about you, but I, as a bright representative of the office-plankton brethren, have quite a uniform range of duties, with rare exceptions. If to exaggerate greatly, my work consists of daily email correspondence and calls, tablets and reports, presentations and press releases. In fact, everything is limited to the default set of office software. It was here that the Polaris Office standard application package came in handy for me. This mini Word, Excel and Power Point in one.
Below you can see the process and the results of my hard work in each of the applications.
In Word, I needed to make those. task to develop several small applications for the Facebook page.
You can work quite tolerably (of course, much more slowly than on a regular PC or laptop with a keyboard): there are many settings for text, document format, the ability to insert photos, links, tables, etc. into the file. You can save the file in the old (97-2003) or new (2007) .doc format - similarly in Excel and Powerpoint. Functionality in different versions of the format is different.
In Excel, I needed to put in a tablet statistics from the social. networks. It was not difficult to form the desired table structure, enter the data and format it. There is a set of basic functions for working with tables: it is even possible to create simple graphs. This was enough for me to report.
In Powerpoint, I put on a draft of ideas for promoting the new Samsung Smart TV series on social networks. The slides came out worthy, though, and here the functionality of the application did not allow to turn to the full.
Nevertheless, it is quite possible to “finish” some details of the presentation in an emergency manner, when there is only a phone at hand.
13:00 War is war, and dinner is on schedule!
Lazy and sleepy afternoon mini-cinema. Everything works very fast, no additional codecs are required to watch movies (the tradition of pre-installed DivX codecs was also supported in the Galaxy S II).
14:33. Perhaps the most pleasant moment of the day has arrived: a detailed overview of entertainment hubs - gaming and reading.
Game Hub provides us with two tabs with an impressive list of games to choose from: "Social Games" and "Premium Games."
Social games consist of a dozen straightforward online games: from tactical strategies to turn-based RPGs and arcades. It is enough to register once in the system, after which your account will always be available in any of the games. You can invite friends to the games and choke them in the sweet moments of procrastination.
The premium games turned out to be more interesting: there are collected samples of blockbusters of HD quality, transferred to the mobile platform of the infamous Gameloft office: Assassin's Creed, Spiderman, GT Racing, Brothers In Arms, FIFA 2011 and others. True, they are all available only in trial versions of “Try before buy”.
In general, the Samsung Galaxy S II is played in a very exciting way: the dual-core Cortex A9 (XMM6260 + S5PC210) at 1 GHz and 1 GB of RAM do their job. There are no brakes in games, and the graphics level is really impressive, considering that these are mobile games.
Reader's Hub came in very handy in the toilet, where even a can of air freshener could not be found from reading. The hub is a platform for reading newspapers, magazines and books. A paid subscription applies to magazines and newspapers (but 7 days is free for free use), books can also be read only after payment (the cost of one book is from 20 to 200 rubles). The volume of content looks impressive: over 2.2 million books, 2,000 international and local newspapers in 49 languages of the world, as well as 2,300 popular magazines in 22 languages of the world.
16:34. At the end of the working run of the smartphone Samsung Galaxy S II, I walked through the media entertainment: photo and video, music player, radio.
The camera works very fast, pictures and videos are also saved without delay. The settings are intuitive, everything is selected directly from the screen. The quality of the pictures for a mobile phone camera is very good. There are some pretty interesting photo and video editors that provide ample opportunity for experimentation.
The new music player Galaxy S II has a different, more concise interface. Available technology sound processing DNSe and SRS. Music search service remains the same. We were pleased with the sound settings: there are 9 equalizers and 6 effects (besides the usual, a wide range, a concert hall, music clarity, bass boost, externalization). FM radio provides for recording the air (by the way, the radio application has also been updated).
19:49 Everything that you have just read was embedded on the Habr also using the Samsung Galaxy S II.
20:07. PS: tried the navigator on the way home. Everything worked quickly and clearly (these words are applicable to almost every aspect of the smartphone during the review): even using the mobile Internet, the maps are loaded in a few seconds, and the navigator builds the best routes (but Google should thank for it).
Samsung Galaxy S II is a smartphone stuffed with a powerful filling, with a wide range of features and the latest technological innovations that will appeal to even the most sophisticated geek. If you need a fast multi-functional multimedia device, then this model, at least, deserves your close attention and study.
Technical specifications Samsung Galaxy S II
Networks: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS / HSDPA 900/2100, EDGE
Operating system: Android 2.3.1
Platform: XMM6260 chipset, S5PC210 1 GHz dual-core processor (later versions with 1.2 GHz and Tegra 2 will be available)
Memory: 1 GB of RAM, 16/32 GB of flash, microSD slot (up to 32 GB)
Screen: Capacitive, 4.27 inches WVGA (480 x 800), Super AMOLED +
Camera: 8 MP with autofocus and flash, 1080p video 30 fps
Wireless: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, DLNA
Power: 1650 mAh battery
Dimensions: 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.49 mm
Weight: 116 g
Official video release: details about the Samsung Galaxy S II.
In Russia, sales of the Samsung Galaxy S II will begin in late May. Recommended price for 16 GB version: 29,990 rubles.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/118129/
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