Samsung Galaxy SIII review: King of the pack?

Direct Call, Smart Alert and MotionWiz

Direct call will let you call the person on the screen by just bringing the phone to your ears. You will need to activate motion control for this.

Smart alert lets you know of missed calls and messages when you pick up the phone.

MotionWiz uses the motion feature to perform certain functionalities like tap to scroll to the TOP of the Contact List or E-mail List, refresh & Update contents, scan other devices, just shake 2 times, see everywhere on the screen in Zoom-in status by panning, zoom in/out by double tapping the face etc.

Social Tag, Group face tag and Buddy photo share

You can quickly tag your contacts on a photo and can quickly share them through mail and social sharing.

It can then automatically arrange photos into albums based on your contacts.

You can also share the photos to your contacts (the ones on the photo) automatically.

Browser

Not much has changed in the browser except it has become much faster thanks to the quad-core processor. It is in true sense a desktop-class browser with effortless renderings. It supports full HD flash playback out-of-box.

Camera and Video recording

The Galaxy S3 has a brilliant 8mp back camera with an LED flash that can shoot 3264 x 2448 pixels photos with its 1/2.6 lens with a focal length of 3.7mm and. There is a burst mode that lets you click 20 simultaneous shots (all 8mp photos) and also lets you keep the best shot and delete all else – all automatically. Images come out really sharp with deep colors and great black depth. The exposure compensation is better than that of the S2 as well. The menu has a host of effects and filters to prep up your photos.

The front camera has a resolution of 1.9mp and sports a CMOS sensor.  There are geotagging, touch focus, face and smile detection and digital image stabilization.

The back camera records full HD 1080p videos at @ maximum of 30fps and the front camera – a maximum of 720p videos @30fps. While recording you can take snap. The full HD videos are very smooth and blur-free. Good thing is that when you move the phone it doesnot reduce the frame-rate or reduce the speed. The maximum frame rate of 30 is not exactly fit for high-speed sport but for everything else and specifically for movie style recording – it’s absolutely smashing!

It records better than the S2 in low light.

Gallery, audio and video playback

Samsung chose not to tinker around with the gallery so you’ll find almost the stock ICS interface. It lists all the albums with a representative photo. You can share either an album or a single or a number of photos. The gallery also supports slideshow.

The music player sorts the music in usual ways but adds something called Music square that looks like a GE matrix and also does something like that – it distributes the tracks in a matrix of twenty squares with Exciting, Joyful, Calm and Passionate being the axes. Sound output is great either with or without earphones. We are particularly fond of the Galaxy S3 earphones quality. There are a big collection of equalizers including a virtual 7.1 channel mode!

The video player is the best by Samsung till now. It arranges he videos in live thumbnails, has three view modes and gives you basic editing features right from there. There are also chapter thumbnails preview available. Biggest strength of the player is that it supports almost all codecs including .avi, .divx, .xvid, .mp4 and H.264.

There is an innovative feature called Pop up play that lets you reduce the player to one part of the screen and then lets you do something else while watching it – really cool!