First Few hours with the Samsung Galaxy SIII

For the first time, Samsung has managed to create a lot of hype around its flagship smartphone launch.

As soon as we unpacked the box, we were face to face with a device sporting a huge display. But despite that acreage on the front, the Samsung Galaxy SIII is actually a slim beauty. Once again, Samsung has gone for plastic at the rear but the silver bezel running around the corners makes the phone look good. The power key on the right panel makes it easy to lock/unlock the phone.



The SIII, an Android Ice-Cream Sandwich phone, uses Samsung's Touch Wiz user interface. We were keen to check the 'Intelligence' features as claimed by the company. However, before reaching the settings, we came across the revamped notification bar that had many new shortcuts to add to the regular ones. The ones that mattered to us were the notifications, sync, power saving and drive mode. The first thing we did was to activate the S Voice, the Korean company's parallel to Apple's voice assistant Siri. Using S Voice did not leave us too impressed. We also tried using the smart stay feature that claims to use the front camera to track our eye. The phone has gesture controls and other features such as Direct Call, etc. that are worth exploring.

The big display made it easy to type and zoom in and out while browsing the web. The 8 MP camera, despite our initial doubts, delivered crisp images in daylight. The one thing that worried us was that the bottom of the SIII heated up slightly after 20 minutes of usage.

Likely to be available in 16 GB and 32 GB capacity in India, Samsung has priced the SIII at Rs 43,180.

Read the full review in the next issue of Gadgets & Gizmos