Not that this is any surprise given the massive leak of photos and impressions that preceeded today’s big Mobile World Congress event, but Samsung has officially pulled the trigger on an impressive reboot of the Galaxy S.
The unsurprisingly named Galaxy S II arrives in a thinner form factor that its predecessor at about 8.49mm thick. The thin shell hosts a large, crisp AMOLED Plus display, measuring 4.27 inches (800×480).
As for the insides, earlier reports that Samsung had opted for an NVIDIA Tegra 2 core turned out to be incorrect. Instead, they’re reportedly going with their own Exynos chip, which is slated to go into production next month.
Software-wise you’ll be seeing Samsung’s preferred TouchWiz 4.0 stacked on top of Gingerbread. A download option using a new Game Hub feature will purportedly allow users to bypass the Android Marketplace’s app size-restrictions, although that has yet to be confirmed or denied.
Expect more information on this smartphone, Samsung tablet news and a full hands-on as our own Kat Hannaford reports from the MWC throughout the day. [Engadget, Image: BGR]
Sam
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 8:32 AMWow, this thing looks so close to an iPhone 4 (which I admit is a very nice design).
Sam Cook
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 11:19 AMYeah, but hardly surprising when the original Galaxy S was a 3GS clone. While they’re not bad looking, external design wasn’t a huge selling point for them.
Regardless of that, I get the feeling that the SGSII will be THE phone to have (unless HTC can knock it off top spot with the Desire 2).
Tim Mead
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 12:07 PMHopefully they’ve sorted the screen out this time.
StevoTheDevo
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 12:45 PMErr, what does that mean? The SGS screen is amazing!
In my eyes, the best screen available to date!
Tim Mead
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 3:10 PMThe SGS’s screen has a number of problems:
1. The sunlight visibility is hopeless.
2. The PenTile sub-pixel arrangement of the Super AMOLED screen makes small text unreadable, and vertical lines appear distorted. It’s a cost-saving measure that supposedly cannot be viewed by the human eye, but it’s very obvious, and looks terrible.
3. The over saturated colours look good for menus, but bad for images.
Don’t get me wrong… OLED-based screens are a good thing – they’re just not quite ‘there’ yet. A good quality LCD looks significantly better and really only falls down in the contrast department.
Brian
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 3:31 PM@Tim Mead
I use by Galaxy S outside nearly every day of the week. The sunlight readability of the screen is excellent, so much so that I very rarely have to use it at full brightness, even when out in the midday sun.
Don’t know what screens you’ve been looking at, but the super AMOLED screens are some of the best on the market atm.
Tim Mead
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 7:50 PM@Brian
I got that idea from my Samsung Galaxy S that now gathers much dust. After using it for a short while, I couldn’t understand why the screen looked good at displaying horizontal lines, but poor at displaying vertical. A little bit of research revealed the Super AMOLED screens use the PenTile RGBG matrix sub-pixel arrangement (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nexus_one_screen_microscope.jpg), as opposed the conventional LCD RGB sub-pixel arrangement.
This doesn’t make the image _terrible_, but it’s definitely not as good as a good-quality conventional LCD. I’ve got an iPhone 4 and a Motorola Droid 2 sitting here at the moment, both with high-resolution LCDs that have far greater clarity than the Galaxy S.
Micha Wotton
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 11:33 AM@Tim Mead
Admittedly, I don’t use my SGS with a microscope, but having 20/20 vision I have no issues with vertical lines, nor with usage in direct sunlight. The difference in pixel density is more likely to be the source of improved image on the iPhone 4 and Droid 2.
David Anderton
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 12:12 PMget rid of touchwiz! Also does it have an external memory card slot?
Sam Cook
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 1:23 PMThat’d be the the big con for me in owning a Samsung android phone. Though I get the feeling it wont take long at all to start seeing custom ROMs springing up for the SGSII.
Micha Wotton
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 11:26 AM@Sam Cook TouchWiz lasted less than a week on my SGS. LauncherPro (and 20-odd other home screen alternatives) are available. The con is not really a con.
Sam Cook
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 12:31 PM@Micha Dude, I hear ya, didn’t take long for me to root my HTC and put CyanogenMod + LauncherPro on instead – and SenseUI isn’t a damn bad interface at all!!
Having said that though, not everyone has the desire to root their phone.
Brian
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 2:29 PMThis is a fairly big let down.
Basically it’s the same phone, new processor.
Screen is slightly larger, but resolution is the same, and they couldn’t find anything else worthy to tell us about it, so it’s a safe bet to assume Ram and storage will be on par with the current phone.
I bet my current phone with a custom rom will run faster than this new version, once touchwiz screws it up and slows it down.
Joeyjoejoe
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 10:33 PMFollow the link to Engadget, and you will discover you are totally wrong. It has 1Gb of Ram and a Dual Core 1Ghz processor. Son, this phone is going to crap all over your current one. Deal with it.
JT...
Friday, February 25, 2011 at 2:04 PMStill don’t see a LED for notifications? Boo!
But yay! they moved the micro usb port to the bottom.