That heavier backplate should provide some extra protection for rear impacts, but it doesn't wrap around the silver edges of the phone itself, which are most likely to be at risk should the handset be dropped. It's here that the S3 still beats modern budget phones. The resulting images are still excellent by smartphone standards today, with natural colours and plenty of detail in bright light. The phone takes pictures almost instantly, but we found the thin screen bezel meant we would nudge the touchscreen sometimes and activate an option when lining up a shot. There are several different ways to take a photo, including a 20-shot burst mode, HDR and the fun Panorama feature. The well-designed camera app makes it simple to get the best out of the phone's eight-megapixel camera. We were able to make the phone open Google Navigation with "Navigate to Guildford", call Dave with "Call Dave", but trying to dictate a message was pretty hopeless, leading to garbled rubbish every time. The phone also has Samsung's S Voice control, which is meant to perform functions such as sending people messages or dialling them, Siri-style. However, we found it sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. ^ Thanks to Smart Stay the BBC homepage won't fade to black while you're reading itĪ particularly interesting addition is Smart Stay, which is meant to use the front-facing camera to stop the screen turning itself off when you're looking at it - great for reading text-heavy webpages. All the motion controls are grouped together in Settings, so you can tweak them later. Whenever you launch an app for which a motion control is available a help screen pops up telling you about it and asking whether you want to enable the feature. Samsung claims the Galaxy S III is "designed for humans", and to this end the handset has several different motion controls that are meant to make it particularly intuitive to use.
We found it very hard to find fault with the Galaxy S3's screen if you look really closely the text isn’t quite as sharp as on the iPhone 4S's and iPhone 5's displays, but it's really splitting hairs. It's a PenTile screen with just two rather than three coloured sub-pixels per pixel, but there's none of the colour cast we sometimes see with PenTile displays, such as the slight green/yellow tint on the Motorola RAZR MAXX.
In contrast to most smartphones, which have IPS LCD displays, the Galaxy S3 has an AMOLED screen. ^ It was once a big phone, but now it feels very reasonable next to modern monsters It would be wise to pick up a replacement battery - it shouldn't cost more than £20 online and it should have a longer lifespan than the one that originally came with the phone. If you're picking up a handset second hand, you'll probably find the battery won't even last this long if the phone has had some serious long term use. We did find, however, that the new version had slightly worse battery life than the old - we're not sure whether this is due to the new operating system or the chipset, but in our continuous video playback test we saw 9h 19m from the Galaxy S3 LTE, compared to 9h 57m from the Galaxy S3. Occasionally the 2GB handset would open and close apps slightly faster, but the extra RAM seems to make little practical difference in everyday use.
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We struggled to see what difference this made to the handset's performance compared to a previous-model Galaxy S3 which we had upgraded to Android 4.1, and the handsets managed an identical 1,771ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. The new handset has an identical chipset to the non-4G Galaxy S3, with its quad-core 1.4GHz processor, but has 2GB instead of 1GB RAM. This 2GB version is currently upgradeable to Android 4.4. Samsung has officially ended support for the phone though, so you won't be getting Android 5.0 by any official means.
The original S3 is a 3G-only device, but the Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE is an updated version with a new wireless chip to support 4G networks here in the UK. There are a couple of other tweaks too: the LTE phone has 2GB rather than 1GB RAM, and is available in a smart Titanium finish as well as the standard Galaxy S3 white. The handset has been updated since launch, and currently uses Android 4.3 or 4.4 (depending on the exact model), so how does the old flagship match up to today's budget handsets? Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE Edition You can currently pick one up for around £50 on eBay, although we'd advise getting a new battery for it too, they're under £10. That means there's lots of Galaxy S3 handsets around, and with the removable battery they're still going strong as well. The Samsung Galaxy S3 was a big hitter when it was first released back in 2012, establishing Samsung as arguably the market leader for flagship Android handsets - and unarguably in terms of sales.