Samsung Galaxy S3 Review (AT&T and T-Mobile)

by Antonio Wells Jun 20, 2012 9:36 AM – 14 Comments

Samsung Galaxy S3 gets reviewed thoroughly AndroidTapp.com style! We’ve had our hands on what’s considered the best Android phone of 2012, the U.S. variants for AT&T and T-Mobile. We examine many of the new NFC and Wi-Fi sharing features, camera quality, phone speeds, 4G Internet speeds, overall user experience and more. So take a seat, get some popcorn (as there’s plenty of HD videos to support this joint review between your editors Jason Norment and myself) and experience the SG3 in a GSM face-off!

Price: $199-$249 with 2 year agreement, (Int’l) Starting ~$729
Availability: (Int’l) May 29, 2012 (U.S.) June 21, 2012

AndroidTapp.com Android Phone Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

Super fast phone with fast 4G Internet!
4.8″ Super AMOLED Screen!
Super slim & light!
8 megapixel rear camera with advanced camera software, plus 720p front camera!
Android 4+ (Ice Cream Sandwich) with minimal TouchWiz 4!
Somewhat longer battery life (plus removable battery)!
NFC-enabled to allow for creative touch to share or touch to pay interaction of the future!

Cons

Many of the extras features are gimmicky and/or are unreliable in practical use; unintuitive to find & remember how to use.
In our tests as heavy users the extended battery power did not make much difference. But it must be noted, as a light user, there is a considerable difference.
Has Gorilla Glass yet I managed to scratch the T-Mo blue version by it simply being in my pocket with wallet.
Faux metallic blue is unappealing in comparison and attracts plenty of smudges.

Video Unboxing

Watch on Mobile | Watch in HD

Design

Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Slim Side Profile Design

There is no doubt about the Galaxy S3′s sexy slim and light design are key selling points. Maybe it has been my gradual acceptance of larger screen Android phones, even though this phone has one of the largest screens (regarding specs at 4.8 inches diagonally) it alludes me to feel that way. For those with small hands, you may notice it as one hand operation will require some shifting the phone around to complete common tasks. The technology behind the screen, HD Super AMOLED, makes for vivid and high contrast imagery. The screen sometimes can be the phone’s Achilles’ heel as it is difficult to see in bright sunlight and is the largest source of battery drain.

The Galaxy S3 is very minimal with only 3 buttons; power, volume rocker and central home button yet flanked by two responsive soft buttons for Menu & Back. No dedicated mini HDMI or MHL port but Samsung intends you to go wireless and incorporate this into your DLNA setup for streaming & sharing media. The back cover is easy to rip off and put back on, which is convenient, to reveal a standard sized-yet removable 2100 mAh battery (more juice to last you the day!)

Inspired by nature, but if you’re like me, you’ll find all the nature sound effects & wallpapers annoying and opt for more personalization via other Android apps. The phone comes in white and metallic blue (the faux brushed metal variant I’m personally not a fan of) which the latter clearly shows the smudges. So if you have sweaty palms like myself this summer be prepared for a smeary treat… all minor compliants though.

Features

Samsung personally invited myself and a small group of media to New York and San Francisco to further understand many of the SG3′s NFC & Wi-Fi sharing features that may have been missed in the London unveiling. I think the gesture was great to get us influencers in the media to understand these features and in turn educate you the consumer, however, I found this was a necessity as many of them are quite gimmicky and/or are unreliable in practical use; unintuitive to find & difficult to remember how to use.

S features (S Voice, S Beam plus other voice & motion controls)

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S Voice

Samsung answered Apple’s Siri with S Voice, a virtual voice assistant that can accomplish things like setting appointments, tell the weather, make a call, send text messages, search, navigate and more all by voice. In the video above we have some fun with the capabilities but our overall opinion, just like Siri, the technology still needs a lot of work to be more useful.

The overall issue with many of the advanced features is the user experience. First, you have to know where they are buried in various settings menus spread throughout the phone. Second, you have to know how and when to apply them to the situation. Hey Samsung, take a play from Apple’s book and just make it easy & seamless!

Many of the features I read about or had a personal demo for just didn’t work on the device I lived with. Namely Smart stay, the kick ass feature that uses the front camera to watch your eyes and doesn’t allow the screen to dim if it detects you’re still reading the screen. I wanted to enjoy this feature but it just never worked for me. You can tell when it tries to activate as there will be an ‘eye’ icon checking in the top notification bar when the screen is about to dim. I’m not sure if it was lighting or the angle I held it… it was a no go. There is a cool feature in the camera that allows you to take a flick by saying “Shoot” or “Say Cheese”, but again, these were unreliable and sometimes snapped on random words (I have plenty of floor shots to attest for that.)

The feature to call a contact from the text Messaging app is neat, but I found it will properly work only if the screen has not rotated when you swing the phone up to your ear… so watch out for that.

Buddy share photo is a good idea just implemented wrong. You must specifically turn the feature on in the camera settings, snap a shot, tag the person from your contacts, then future shots will automatically and questionably be tagged. The problem is… this feature has to be enabled prior for it to detect and tag future pics versus the software automatically detecting and tagging the same person across your gallery of pictures… kinda like iPhoto.

In my field, we have made a staple in the Android community by giving plenty of screenshots with our in-depth reviews and the hand gesture swipe to screenshot feature only worked for me after plenty of toggling with the settings. I almost had to go back to the old tethered way of capturing screens as Samsung disabled the ICS method of holding power button plus down volume button. Oh, tap the top of the phone to jump to the top of the list was a crap shoot too. The good news is, I know these features work as Jason’s SG3 performed them mostly without hitch.

Lastly, two advanced yet useless features are the phone face palm to pause a video and picture in picture video floater… shall I digress?!? Well, the former feature only works for video saved to the phone, so not on YouTube, etc plus is only pauses and doesn’t play again and the latter… well let’s move along!

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S Beam has some potential as it is essentially an enhancement on Android Beam, which uses NFC to open Wi-Fi direct between two SG3 phones and share data; be it photos, videos, maps, webpages and more.

Sharing

Samsung wants you to know more about the phone’s sharing features and there are plenty, again, you just have to know how to access them and how to apply them to your situation.

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Shareshot is a feature specific to the SG3′s camera; once enabled, Wi-Fi Direct is turned on, and of course you have another Galaxy S3 to connect to, you can snap a pic on one phone and it automatically sends to the other and vice versa. The best use case is, say you’re at a party and have all of the aforementioned criteria satisfied, a group up to 6 can snap away and all receive each other’s photos from the party without any extra work. Again, we found the send/receipt of photos to not be so reliable.

Groupcast is a feature apart of Samsung’s AllShare Play app. With the app you can add 5 gigs free SugarSync storage, your device and connect to any DLNA television or devices you may have. An impressive example I witnessed was the live stream of a presentation and video over the Wi-Fi network to a TV, and the group can control the presentation (even write notes) or video playback.

TecTiles were announced recently to help consumers and businesses utilize NFC touch-to-share technology. With the Samsung proprietary app you can program the TecTiles to launch convenient phone features, for example use it in the car to tap to turn on Bluetooth and open a hands-free app like S Voice or Vlingo.

Camera

I don’t think people will buy this phone for the advanced features ripped above, however, for the fact that the photo and video quality is damn good!

The camera hardware is awesome sauce! Crisp 8 megapixel rear camera capable of full 1080p HD and 1.9 megapixel front camera capable of 720p HD video recording and calling. One added bonus mobile photographers will appreciate is the focus lock feature in the video recorder, which eliminates that annoying focus jitter all smartphone recorders are guilty of doing. I don’t think people will buy this phone for the advanced features ripped above, however, for the fact that the photo and video quality is damn good! (See sample 1080p HD video and picture quality below.)

Watch on Mobile | Watch in HD

Sample Galaxy S3 Photo 1

Sample Galaxy S3 Photo 2

4G

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In our 4G face-off of the AT&T (4G LTE) and T-Mobile (HSPA+) versions we have, big pink was clearly faster in download speeds while big blue had faster upload speeds. It didn’t come as much of a shock, now, as we have seen this activity in a past 4G face-off we held.

TouchWiz + ICS

I’ve personally never been a keen fan of TouchWiz but like how it is kept to a minimum and works mostly in tandem with Android 4. There are a few niggles that annoy me with the Samsung keyboard, lack of default alarm app (I guess they desire you have S Voice create your alarms) and a need for separate Samsung account to use AllShare Play.

Call Quality

Update: in using the SGS3 as my personal daily flyer for some time now, I can attest to the call quality being extremely well. Whether you have the provided earbuds in or not, the recipient callers cannot tell the difference between the two as I have experienced with other phones. The speaker phone volume could be a bit louder in my opinion but it’s doable. It has excellent background noise cancellation so the speaker phone sound to the recipient still sounds superb from my callers’ feedback.

Performance and Battery life

Quandrant and Antutu Benchmarks for Galaxy S3

The phone is wicked fast, and we have a few benchmarks to back it up. Us westerners are always fretting about being shunned on the quad core phones not hitting the states and native to Europe, however, the U.S. SG3′s have two gigabytes of RAM versus one in the international version. According to Quadrant and AnTuTu the Galaxy S3 is faster than the HTC One X and ASUS Transformer Prime tablet, both with quad core processors!

Battery life is absolutely phenomenal if you’re a light to moderate user, on one device we cruised through 25 hours with 25% battery left. Yet on the other device as a heavy user we were able to get an average of 8-11 hours battery life. This still is impressive for a device more than twice as fast and larger screen than most competitors. So depending on the type of user you are, it is something to take into consideration.

Pictures

: Samsung Galaxy S3 in Box

: Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Back Profile

: Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Side Profile

: Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Volume Rocker

: Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Power Button

: Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Top Profile

: Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Micro USB

: Samsung Galaxy S3 for AT&T Bottom Profile

AndroidTapp.com Rating

AndroidTapp.com Rating! (4.4 out of 5)

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy S3? Yes! Whether you’re on AT&T or T-Mobile, Verizon or Sprint even including U.S. Cellular in July 2012, this is definitely a phone you will want for: its big & beautiful screen, its fast speed, its fast 4G Internet, its light weight design, a few features that will make your iPhone friends jealous and an amazing camera!

Developer: Samsung

Tags: 4G, 4G LTE, 4GLTE, Android 4.0, HSPA+, Ice Cream Sandwich, ICS, Samsung Galaxy S 3, Samsung Galaxy S 3 AT&T, Samsung Galaxy S 3 Review, Samsung Galaxy S 3 T-Mobile, Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy S III Review

Categorised in: Android Phones, Featured, Featured Device, News

14 Comments

By A subscriber on June 20, 2012 at 10:47 am:

You guys should invest $3 into a clip-on microphone for each of the speakers … your reviews are highly amateurish with the pronounced ECHO and poor audio of your reviews.

Reply
- By Antonio Wells on June 20, 2012 at 12:19 pm:
  
  We actually did, however, we were forced to scrap the all lav audio for camera audio as there was some unknown distortion present, even worse than the echoes. Constructive criticism well received.
  
  Reply
  - By A subscriber on June 20, 2012 at 12:55 pm:
    
    The review itself was fine – but just the audio was painful.
    
    Usually when I hear the pronounced echo of an omnidirectional mic (as opposed to a clip-on unidirectional) I generally don’t listen to the review.
    
    I appreciate the reply.
    
    Reply
By Riley on July 1, 2012 at 3:11 pm:

Great read! I’m anxiously awaiting the arrival of my Galaxy SIII for tomorrow. I’m looking forward to using the new LTE network because my Dish co-workers have told me so many good things about it. I like to watch movies and TV shows on my current phone quite a lot using the Dish Remote Access app. I stream from my Sling Adapter-connected receiver to my phone, and I can’t begin to explain how useful it is while waiting at the airport, which is exactly what I did last week. I can’t wait to get my phone!

Reply
By jazz on August 4, 2012 at 11:32 am:

my s3 (t-mobile, USA)uses a lot of battery, i am a heavy user. it only gives me 5-7 hours, do you think is it just my phone or there are battery issues with the phone?

Reply
- By Antonio Wells on August 4, 2012 at 1:04 pm:
  
  @jazz has this always been that way or after installing specific app(s)? I.e. Apps that constantly get updates like news, weather, social, etc.
  
  Reply
By keyla on August 6, 2012 at 12:13 pm:

which phone service is more affordable monthly, or and which is the best plan to choose when you use the phone for surfing the web and social media. However, mostly use wifi .

Reply
By David St Lawrence on August 21, 2012 at 4:15 pm:

I found the Galaxy S3 to be an excellent upgrade from the Droid X I have used for two years.

The one really big complaint I have is that I bought the phone with its second camera so I could use Skype on it and there is no version of Skype that works reliably on the Galaxy at this time.

One of the big improvements over the Droid is the speech to text feature. I can talk almost continuously and produce usable text for emails even im moderately noisy environments.

Reply
By Mobile Anti Theft on August 30, 2012 at 4:32 am:

No Doubt,now a days people are using Samsung Galaxy S3 in tremendous amount.I also have this smartphone which is having very attractive features.

Reply
By Tony on October 22, 2012 at 10:57 pm:

Highly Attention
This is a note for everyone buying a Samsung S3 online. I recently bought a SAMSUNG S3 on BONANZA.COM web site and the Seller ID is Craterwireless. I paid $389.99 and He first promised me that the phone will be shipped out but I did not received the phone and he then promise me that he will refund me the money but He did not refund me at all and now he donot reply my email. SO be carefull!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reply
By Rick on November 25, 2012 at 4:34 am:

It’s all those iPhone 5s on at&t slowing down their 4g network. Lol

Reply
By Monica on December 22, 2012 at 3:52 am:

If is has At&T can it be use properly in Europe (Romania)?

Reply
By World BEST Mobile on January 2, 2013 at 4:15 pm:

G’Day! Androidtapp,
Along the same lines,, I plan on getting virgin mobile, simply because I don’t want a contract (please don’t try to convince me to get a contract service such as Sprint either). However, with virgin mobile the iPhone 4 is $549 and the Samsung Galaxy s2 Skyrocket is only $369. I’ve done alot of research & looked at a bunch of reviews, and I’m leaning toward the Skyrocket for more reasons than just the price. A little advice, or push in the right direction is all I need. Especially since my parents aren’t helping pay, I want my money to be well spent.
All the Best

Reply
- By Antonio Wells on January 3, 2013 at 8:34 am:
  
  What specifically are you asking help with?
  
  Reply