Right, unboxed my Galaxy S3 in pearl white this morning (late) and blasted it till till near shut down.
First impressions, well having had the chance to play with a friends HTC ONE X yesterday, which untill that point was the best device i had ever used, this Galaxy S3 has exceeded that..just.
I must say i though the HOX was very well built and felt quality, compared to GS3 i would say they are equal, the GS3 is razor thin, i mean thin, this is more pronounced because of the generous size of the thing and also because i already had the lowdown on the internals.
Cracking the back of reveals the very wide and thin battery, and the micro SD slot,the back is made from a thin high quality polycarbonate, it doesn't feel cheap and tacky as i had feared, it snaps on and off with ease without anyfear of snapping, like previous Samsung devices, the whole phone feels razor thin and premium.
The phone didn't seem as massive to me as i was expecting, im not quite sure what i was expecting too be honest, but having researched into this for months as well as the Galaxy Note i was thinking it was going to be massive..it wasn't. In fact its about the perfect size for a multimedia device, bearing in mind i have large hands, and i do struggle to reach the top left side of the phone with one hand only, certainly this is the biggest you would want a phone.
On starting up i was pleased with how fast it booted, seriously it couldn't have been 20 seconds from first pressing the power button..impressive.
The UI is 'airy' and light, they have toned down the touch whizz and clutter, the software runs very fast and smooth, in fact about 30 seconds into using it i completely forgot about processors and graphics/ram all that jargon, its the first time Android became an Apple like experience, no slowdowns, no juttering, no crashes, no nonsense.
The screen is perfect, there is no other word for it, i played with the HOX the day before and was amazed at that screen which was the best i had seen untill this point, this just edges it IMHO, response time was a little bit better, colours were more saturated for the 'wow' factor (there is other colour temp settings which can be set to natural), and Contrast was awesome, it was bright and clear, i opened up the web browser and zoomed in to some txt, bringing my eyes as close as they could get till they ran out of focus, and i could very very slighty see a non perfect lettering, just. thats being harsh because i couldn't really see alot wrong TBH.
There was no 'blue tinge' i heard about with AMOLEDS, sure i bet holding the HOX side by side would show the whites up, but as it is its perfect.
On using that web browser through wifi, i was shocked at how fast that thing operates, seriously it loads up 5 times faster than my Atom netbook at the same resolution, pages scroll perfectly, flash loads up brilliant, just for some reason couldn't get HD flash playing smoothly on youtube, i had messed around with the settings before that on Opera mobile browser, so it could have been that, i tried other Flash sites which loaded high quality flash full screen, as did the on board you tube app, i also tried out BBC iplayer which was faultless.
I was pleased to see i had the best phone and 3g signal i have ever had at my house, usually you have to walk into the garden, i downloaded speed test through the play store and tested performance through my wifi and 3G, amazingly they both pulled the around the same score 4-5mbits 512k upload, which isn't blazing fast by todays best standards, but considering i couldn't even get reception before that im very happy.
Like i said i was not concerned with performance at all when starting up, it did everything i asked it to without a hiccup, multitasking galore no worries, it chewed through everything i threw at it, so i wont bother with benchmarks.
I fired up a few games and they also played perfect.
I had a blast with the camera, again brilliant, loads of options that have been covered at tech sites, quality and speed was awesome, i can't fathom why anyone would want any better, especially if that involved a handset that was twice as thick and much heavier, no chance.
Batterylife; Well this was one thing i was curious about, its so thin and the screen so big,bright and colourfull that you have to have some doubt whether it can last a day, When i put the battery in straight from the box it had about 58% i think, from that point onwards i gave it a heavy workout for the next 3h;50m, and by that i mean wifi or 3G on the whole time, downloading exactly 35 apps!, an hour of spotify(at full volume either through on board speaker or through stereo via 3.5mm jack, 20 minutes of 3d gaming( angry birds space,drag racing,commando), quite a few video clips, you tube, BBC i player etc, messing around with the settings Google earth for about 15 mins and almost constant web browsing, i put the screen brightness to maximum and the DNIe image preset to maximum saturated colours, i had smartstay on constantly and i changed the wall paper to a elaborate 3d one for about half the time.
I also shot 2 1080p video clips and about 20 pictures, so you could say that was not a typical usage scenario.
After all that i plugged in the charger at 4% batterylife...
The battery profile showed 53% screen, so that was sucking the juice at full brightness through web browsing, curiously though the standby section showed 8%? some early reports have picked up an issue with standby time, with GSMARENA saying that it is worse than the GS2, and a user at XDA noted similar..sounds like a simple early fiemware issue to me.
Even so, judging by the fact it was straight out of the box, started from cold with no bed in time for the battery and some vigorous usage, i think the above was fairly impressive.
Niggles; Honestly, there aren't many, one thing that has annoyed me and which was picked up by phonearena is the capacitive buttons on the bottom, they are VERY sensitive, and curiously put right near the edge, so you keep touching them with your palm, it knocked me out of 2 stages of the original set up and quite a few apps, the rear speaker is pretty decent, but really on a high end media device like this you would expect slightly better.
Summary, Assuming the battery life doubles after a full charge and a good week of solid bedding in, with maybe an OTA firmware fix for that pesky standby issue, then really this is the perfect Android device, it replaces your netbook, portable games console, PMP player, notebook, and likely for many people dedicated camera, all in a slick package with no fuss, oh yea did i mention it has a removable back and is only 8.55mm thin??
EDIT; Android seems to be a right RAM hog, bringing up the task manager it say curiously that i have only 750mb or so of ram, and almost 400 of that is used up doing very little, still no amount of mulitasking has slowed me down yet.