Australia’s first Samsung Galaxy S3 review

There’s even a few issues with software. Oh sure, there’s the odd bug here and there – gallery images that aren’t rotating properly, the screen not waking up as quickly as it should be – but more than anything, we’d say that Samsung hasn’t quite nailed the balance between the S3’s complexity and controlling that complexity.

It’s true that the Galaxy S3 is loaded with power and features, but the settings to control these technologies are buried in layers and layers of complexity that you need to get adjusted to.

For instance, there’s an automatic brightness setting you can turn on and off, something we switched off because we thought the auto setting was too dim. But even if this is off, the web browser has its own automatic brightness setting with multiple power settings, and you need to switch this one off too, otherwise your brightness will change the moment you start surfing the web.

Another example can be seen in the S Voice tool, Samsung’s version of Apple’s Siri.

By default, you can speak to your Galaxy S3 using S Voice and everything will be fine, but the moment you use anything regarded as vulgar language or profanity, you’ll find it censored. Asterisks will replace letters, and if you’re sending a message to a mate, taking a memo, or searching for something using these words, your requested word will be censored.

That’s fine, and you can switch it off, but the settings for this functionality aren’t actually in the “Language and input” settings as you expect, but rather in the settings of S Voice directly. Mind you, Language has its own setting for hiding offensive words, so you’ll probably want this switched off here too.

Both of these examples show the native apps on the Galaxy S3 doubling up on settings, when it should really be just working from the one place. Samsung probably sees this as offering more user control, but this level may just be overly complicated in the long run.

Conclusion

While there’s more hype here in the S3 than we ever could have imagined, Samsung has managed to live up to much of that hype, providing a handset that offers so much technology, we’re sure Apple can’t wait to really start the fight.

Sure, it’s not without its bugs and random little issues, but the experience is a solid one. We still wish the battery would be better, but a day’s life seems to be par for the course when it comes to 720p screens and quad-core batteries, so it’s hard to argue too much.

Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S3 is an easy recommendation, offering more than enough technology for anyone after a phone that should survive a good two years.