Samsung Galaxy SIII

Samsung SIII Unboxing/Review and an introduction from a new Mob!ler.

Once upon a time, gentle readers, I almost lapsed into Geekdom.  I worked for Vodafone and then for Orange (and after that for a whole series of fixed telecoms providers).  I knew the difference between POTS and PANS *(and no, that has nothing to do with cookery) and I was the proud owner of one of the first GSM phones in the UK.

That seems like a million years ago.  I remember vividly running a set of consumer research groups, just after the CEO of Vodafone had resigned because he didn’t believe there WAS a consumer market for mobile phones.  The younger research groups talked about ‘personal communications device’ ,  the older ones saw mobile telephony as a necessary and sometimes rather intrusive evil that let their kids get hold of them.  But, at that time the internet was in its infancy.  We COULD connect a laptop to the internet via a mobile phone, but only someone working for a telecoms company would do it…because it was slow, expensive and really not particularly useful. Now, there’s a generation of users who simply don’t remember the world without the internet and who DEMAND something that matches the performance of their laptop on a mobile phone.  They use Apps to find their way around, to check the weather and to play games.  They watch the TV on their phones, download films and books and check their email on the go.  The term ‘personal communication device’ that was so special 15 years ago has become a de-facto norm.  And everyone’s doing it.

Am I back to where I belong?  I don’t know – I’m really thrilled to have been appointed a Samsung Mob!ler – which means I get to know Samsung and their agency in order to feed back about their mobile products and services – but slightly in awe of the technical knowledge and expertise of some of my fellow Mob!lers.  Well, at least I will have people to ask when I get stuck!

So, earlier this week an exciting package arrived in the post.  It was a new Samsung Galaxy SIII and I’ve been checking it out.

Immediate impression; I really like the packaging in a classy dark blue box with silver type. When you break the box seal and get inside, the first thing you see is your new Samsung Galaxy SIII all stickered up to tell you a little bit about its amazing processing capability.  My model has a 16GB storage with a slot for a micro SD card to save more stuff and a Exynos 4 Quad (1.4GHz) processor.  I am guessing it’s the processor that means when you switch the phone on, it boots up really quickly.  I tested it against my year old blackberry bold and it was about 4x the speed.

The Samsung Galaxy SIII is quite large and slim but seems very light (133g)  The pebble blue one  which  I have has a muted metallic blue back and a black frame to the screen on the front.  If you prefer there’s a white model too.

Lift the phone out and you will find a quick start guide and warranty book covering a set of headphones and a micro USB cable that slots into a power plug to charge the phone.  Now, I haven’t yet worked out if it is possible to get that back to being a simple cable, but I have a spare micro USB cable so, I can hook the phone up to my laptop that way, or use the Bluetooth connection and synch my phone properly.

Thankfully, for me at least, the quickstart guide for the Samsung Galaxy SIII is just in English.  That makes it easy to navigate and work out how to get started.  I did defer to google to find a you-tube video to help me remove the back.  I get just a little nervous when a brand-new-very-expensive device guide says ‘take care not to damage your fingernails’ – not because I am worried about my nails, but because the implication is that you have to force things.  In fact the back  is quite flexible and so I suspect it’s unlikely to break.  Other than that, it was very easy to get the phone up and running, bar one little issue.

The Samsung Galaxy SIII uses a micro sim, so I couldn’t just take the sim out of my old phone.  In fact, you CAN just cut a full size sim down to micro size, but, I didn’t fancy my chances doing that…if you get it wrong, you end up without a workable sim.  Once I got my hands on a sim that I could use, the phone was very easy to get to grips with.  I really like the user interface, it does seem intuitive and helpful and the phone comes with some of the ubiquitous apps preloaded for your convenience (facebook, you tube, google places etc).

The touchscreen seems really very good.  As someone who deliberately bought a Blackberry with a keypad because I didn’t like the touchscreen on the Nokia I owned before that, this one actually seems to work.  I suspect it is partly the size of the screen and partly the responsiveness of the device.  It is all super-quick.  Watching TV online works brilliantly, the screen is like a miniature of my TV and the sound is scarily good. I could get addicted to this.

Of course there are still things which are causing me angst (I can’t work out why all the free books on amazon are not available in my region!).  But, for me, this phone has managed to make things simple.  My view is that good technology should have an intuitive user interface.  You shouldn’t need to check the manual, you shouldn’t need to press ‘help’, there should be a logic built into the device that helps you get where you want to be seamlessly.  And the SIII does just that.  It knows when you are using it and doesn’t go into standby mode, the menu structure is helpful and everything seems to work very fast and smoothly.  Thumbs up for that.  By contrast, my camera (not Samsung) is quite complicated – and the video I thought I’d shot of the unboxing appears not to have worked!  Obviously I need more Geek training – or to use the video function on my new phone in future!;)

Signing off and proud to be a Mob!ler using the new Samsung Galaxy SIII.

*Plain Old Telephony Services and Pretty Amazing New Stuff

Disclosure – as a Mob!ler  I was sent the SIII free of charge.  All views expressed here are my own and I was not obliged to post a review.