New S3 Owner: First Impressions

jimbo1mcm · May 30, 2012

Of course I don't have one yet! I am waiting on you lucky people to start posting. We need your posts and thoughts on your new S3

jackdubl · May 30, 2012

So, nobody has one yet?

rigarella · May 30, 2012

I have mine. I do love it. But then I loved my s2. Have not had a good chance to try everything out yet but I am wondering if we are spoilt now and just expect all the functionality there

forza2020 · May 30, 2012

I've got mine! It's great. Screen is amazing.
Can't seem to get people's facebook photos in my contact list though. Even though Facebook is synced and Facebook friends listed in contacts.

Tommydaniel · May 30, 2012

forza2020 said:
I've got mine! It's great. Screen is amazing.
Can't seem to get people's facebook photos in my contact list though. Even though Facebook is synced and Facebook friends listed in contacts.

You could try Friendcaster for FB contact syncing. You can sync HQ photos that way too.

partchimp · May 30, 2012

Awesome, awesome, awesome!

Coming from my last phone an HTC desire, this is light years ahead. Screen is super-clear, ics is lightening fast. Not really scratched the surface of what it can do.

To all those people who think it looks a bit cheap and plasticy from preview videos, fear not. Feels solidly built and actually looks pretty sweet "in person"

Only real negative is the smart stay function doesn't really work. Perhaps the lighting in my house isn't great!

I also can't seem to add phone numbers to synced facebook contacts but there probably is a way to do that.

jimbo1mcm · May 30, 2012

If Smart Stay doesn't work: I used an app called Spotlight, I believe, when I had my Droid. It voided any screen time out functions while you had an app open. I liked it. You could select the apps you wanted to have the spotlight feature on. I have an IP4 now, but will get a S3 just as soon as it is available on Verizon in the US.

forza2020 · May 30, 2012

forza2020 said:
I've got mine! It's great. Screen is amazing.
Can't seem to get people's facebook photos in my contact list though. Even though Facebook is synced and Facebook friends listed in contacts.

Just to add, mine is on 02 via Tesco and it has no O2 bloatware at all. Not even the lockscreen. Out of the box, the screen dimmed when on the internet, but you can change this in settings. Battery life amazing compared to SGS1.
Music player superb quality. Camera and video fantastic .
And fear not...this looks and feels like a high end device. It feels great in the hand.

hajimeabc · May 31, 2012

I read that the S3 is faster than the Note. However, when I tried the S3 in a store in HK today, I did not see any noticeable difference especially when I scrolled through the screens. In fact, I felt that it was kind of slower than the Note. Is it just me?

Also, when I took the video using both the Note and the S3, the image quality of the video taken by the S3 was not as good as that of the Note (i.e. darker, less vibrant). Can existing users test the video recording quality under the highest and 2nd highest resolutions?

Because of the above two issues, I was not impressed by the S3. I want to know if it was just the device I was testing.

Michael George · May 31, 2012

I got my S3 on the 30th and so far everything works really good, like someone mentioned the Smart Stay doesn't seem to work most of the time, but it is very dependent on a well lite area

Sandroidfan · May 31, 2012

Can you turn off features like S-voice, smart stay? If so, does it give you more battery life?

Lord Melbury · May 31, 2012

I got mine Yesterday and I will be taking it to bed with me again tonight its that hot.

greggebhardt · May 31, 2012

I wish some of you people in the UK would get them listed on eBay so we can share!

forza2020 · May 31, 2012

hajimeabc said:
I read that the S3 is faster than the Note. However, when I tried the S3 in a store in HK today, I did not see any noticeable difference especially when I scrolled through the screens. In fact, I felt that it was kind of slower than the Note. Is it just me?

Also, when I took the video using both the Note and the S3, the image quality of the video taken by the S3 was not as good as that of the Note (i.e. darker, less vibrant). Can existing users test the video recording quality under the highest and 2nd highest resolutions?

Because of the above two issues, I was not impressed by the S3. I want to know if it was just the device I was testing.

Image quality is great. Better thsn SGS2.

Michael George · May 31, 2012

My battery is at 67 percent and I've been using it for 9 hours internet and watched a video made and received several phone calls and sent 30 text so battery is better than my old HTC Desire. I guess turning off the feature that keeps the screen awake and S voice might save a little more power. Though I haven't used S voice today, But have used Google voice search a few times

lpb · Jun 1, 2012

Loving the phone so far and battery life has been good, on the first full charge got 7am - midnight with 4 1/2 hours screen time, coming from a desire hd its so much better. Does anybody know why some games are missing from the play store? I was looking for Modern Combat 3 and Nova 3 and noticed that most of the Gameloft games are missing and some ea ones too, Real Racing and Dead Space. Any info would be great thanks.

davoid · Jun 1, 2012

I tried to install real racing from the play website, not the store on the phone, and it told me it was incompatible with my phone (GS3).

jimbo1mcm · Jun 1, 2012

A forum member on another forum found that he could download an incompatible S3 game on his S2 and transfer it to his S3 and it worked fine.

Juddz · Jun 1, 2012

I must admit the first time i seen the screenshots of the new SIII i thought the shape was going in the wrong direction compared to the SII, now that i have finally got the SIII i have realized how wrong i was, the SIII in my opinion looks/feels loads better than the SII, I have spent a couple days with it now tweaking it and personalizing it to my liking and straight up this phone is on fire, I love it.

One thing I'm still trying to figure out though with the SIII is how to use gallery pictures as home screen wallpapers, on the SII you had the option to crop vertically for lock screen and horizontally for home screen, only seem to get the vertical crop tool for home screen on the SIII, this is probably a fault of my own, something I just haven't figured out yet, other than that this phone gets a 10/10 from me.

Lord Melbury · Jun 1, 2012

Now that my initial excitement is over as in my previous remark below.

Lord Melbury said:
I got mine Yesterday and I will be taking it to bed with me again tonight its that hot.

I find the memory(RAM) is running quite high over 400 meg even after I remove all desktop widgets and close all apps to free up ram.
On my SGS2 with ICS, I used to run at around 280 with widgets loaded, its now on 600/870 without heavy usage and only the weather widget loaded.

Does any one else notice this ?

Every other part of the device I love.

Juddz · Jun 1, 2012

I find the memory(RAM) is running quite high over 400 meg even after I remove all desktop widgets and close all apps to free up ram.
On my SGS2 with ICS, I used to run at around 280 with widgets loaded, its now on 600/870 without heavy usage and only the weather widget loaded.

Does any one else notice this ?

I'm getting 232 mb on SII, 642 mb on SIII ?? : /

jerofld · Jun 1, 2012

Juddz said:
I find the memory(RAM) is running quite high over 400 meg even after I remove all desktop widgets and close all apps to free up ram.
On my SGS2 with ICS, I used to run at around 280 with widgets loaded, its now on 600/870 without heavy usage and only the weather widget loaded.

Does any one else notice this ?

I'm getting 232 mb on SII, 642 mb on SIII ?? : /

I would imagine that the new TouchWiz with all of the gestures and extra features that improve user experience is what is consuming so much RAM. But that is little of concern. Android/Linux is built around more effective use of RAM than Windows is. So don't let the available RAM number concern you.

I'm in the US, so I haven't had the chance to play with the device, yet. But I imagine that, even with widgets and apps in the background, the device still runs smoothly. If that is the case, I wouldn't worry about a RAM number.

disconfigured · Jun 1, 2012

Coming from HTC Desire HD -

The look and feel is amazing- it's so light, it's as if you're not actually holding anything. It also doesn't feel as big as it actually is.

I've only been playing with mine for a few hours now so not had a chance to check Smart Stay.

S voice seems slightly dodgy - I said "Hi Galaxy" and although it knew what I said, it didn't know what to do. However it brought up the weather for me quickly

Camera is amazing - but my DHD camera was also good. The front facing camera is also good.

Battery wise I can't really comment. It's only been fully charged once, and only off that charge for the past 20 minutes - with continuous use for those 20 minutes it's down to 96%. And after 5 minutes screen off it's down another 5% - this could be an average for the phone though. I'll recomment in a few days when I've used it more during a whole day.

Other than that, it seems like a lovely piece of kit.
Now I just have to keep reminding myself of the

New S3 Owner: First Impressions

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