You and I both share in that we don't own the phone yet. Where we differ is that you've clearly formulated an opinion of the SGS3 based on nothing but other people’s comments where I haven't. I
have formed an opinion of the One X because I've been using it for a month. If I'm being positive about it it's from my personal experiences. But I'm flattered that you put my humble and amateur opinion in the same league as Engadget's
Based on what, reviewer’s spending a couple of hours with pre-production units? And then you deciding its true based on reading what they wrote? The true test of the SGS3 is what the front page looks on June 15 after people on different networks, with different needs, different expectations, and different uses for their phones have had time to use it doing the things they normally do.
It browses the web better - True
It takes better photos - The jury's still out. I want to hear what XDA'rs think before victory is declared. The SGS2 had a bunch of camera problems that the reviewers never picked up.
It has better battery life - True
It has a better call quality - Unknown until people actually using it compare it to their existing phones on their networks.
Better speakers - OK, I'll take your word for it.
More storage - True
More features - I want to see which are useful based on people's real world experiences. Beats is a "feature" but one I could care less about.
Better internals - Exynos and Mali, yes. The Wolfson DAC, yes. The rest of the components like the cellular, GPS and Wi-Fi radios are still unknown.
What "guys" am I a part of? I had a i9100 for almost a year and a 3G UK G-Tab 10.1 that I've had for about 7 months. Both of them IMHO are/were fantastic devices. I’m still getting a SGS3, but because I like another brand of phone I'm now a Samsung "hater?" And yes, I question why Samsung wouldn't have resized TW to take advantage of the larger display area and at the same time made it look more contemporary in keeping with ICS and advances in h/w and s/w being introduced on the SGS3. Sense 4.0 is completely new, TW 4.0 is at best a remodel. It just strikes me as lazy on their part. And 25% less information displayed equates to 25% more scrolling. If the situation was reversed I'd consider it a strike against HTC and the One X too. And I’m not saying it should be important to you or anyone else if it’s not, it just seems odd to me.
And here's Engadget's take on TW 4.0. I can't agree or disagree until I get the phone but based on my experience with the ICS upgrade for the i9100 it sounds eerily familiar.
“It's understandable that Samsung wants to make its own mark on Android and differentiate itself from the competition, but did it really need to mess with Android 4.0 so brutally in the process? When you look at how much effort Google puts into improving its open source OS, it's actually unforgiveable for Samsung to come along and give us a skin that makes it all feel like old-fashioned Android 2.3. The phone doesn't even follow the latest button conventions: it has 'back' and 'menu' capacative buttons on either side of the physical home button, and thus omits the 'multi-tasking' button that came with the ICS. This means you have to press and hold the main home button for a second or so (honestly, it feels like an eternity), just to move between the apps that you're running. It's backwards and it's wrong.”
If you consider Engadget's review
professional, then our choice of reviewers don't match at all.
First indication -- the length of the review. Though
I agree that quantity can never replace quality, but in case of tech reviews, a detailed review is always the best option (hint: Anandtech, gsmarena, nordichardware etc.,) Everything in that review looked like written within 24-hours.
Engadget made every possible attempt to make SGS3 look bad in terms of benchmarks. Seriously, which moron uses 2 different versions of NenaMark and when you know that it's restricted by VSYNC, how can you decide a winner between numbers like 60 and 60.8?? Did they even consider that One S resolution is only qHD and it affects the numbers?
Also about Linpack numbers - they are way off from other websites (like gsmarena).
I have never seen such bad quadrant scores from GS3 in any website.*
Check CNET review / GSMArena review / PhoneArena review / TheVerge review. It's a totally different debate whether quadrant is useful, but the point is that they seem to be trying best to put SGS3 in a bad way.
Look at Vellamo numbers -- Engadget numbers shows much less compared to Anandtech preview and Verge review.
SunSpider -- Again GSMarena / Anandtech / Swedroid / Nordichardware shows that much better numbers for SGS3 compared to HTC One X (both international and AT&T)
I can understand few numbers being skewed one or other way. But here we see that Engadget showing numbers for SGS3 totally different from what other reviews reported in almost all tests. It's as if they had an agenda from start.
It appears that the review was done in such haste. They list 7 features (at the end of the review -- drop box, smart stay , social tag , s voice etc), but they don't actually review them. What's the point of a review if you don't review each and every aspect of a device? It's upto us to decide whether the feature is useful - but they
must atleast test whether these feature works.
There is also no mention of many feature (
forget about reviews, you didn't even mention them):
1] AllSharePlay Youtube link: HRgYwWROC7A
2] Kies Air (Kies via WiFi)
3] Buddy photo share
4] RGB notification LED
5] You did not mention anything about partition, or how much space is available for installing apps.
6] Usable RAM
7] Nothing about Audio quality or that it uses Wolfson DAC
8] No information on codecs or bit rate supported
9] Pop up play feature
10] exFAT support
11] USB OTG support
12] Gestures (there are tons in SGS3). youtube link 6prVw-nVozY
13] Video player functionality
14] Audio player quality and equalizer functions.
I can list a few more, but I am already bored by list of important feature that they
completely ignored to mention in the review. How is that possible that they didn't mention a single line, forget about properly reviewing them?
In essence, was this a review of Galaxy S3 or a comparison article between SGS3 and HOX?
They mentioned One X 21 times in the whole review. But they forgot to mention tons of features in the device that they are reviewing, but they mention One X 21 times in the review!
Someone had an axe to grind!
N.B. This was my comment to the Sharif Sakr (Engadget editor), but he did not bother to reply me in the comment section.
