The Samsung Galaxy SIII - a phone worthy of the hype
When it comes to media on a smartphone, users are now being spoilt for choice by the top manufacturers – where the Samsung Galaxy S2 was one of the most impressive media mobiles out there, it's quickly been caught by the competition.
That's not to say the Samsung Galaxy S3 isn't a superb effort in the media space – in fact, the biggest criticism of it here is the fact that it's actually trying to do TOO much, which is never a bad thing.
But a quick word of warning to those looking to get the 16GB version of the S3 – the OS takes up a whopping 5GB of space, so you're only getting 11GB capacity in reality.
But that's not a huge issue, thanks to that lovely microSD card slot. Hear that, HTC and Apple? EXPANDABLE MEMORY. It's a good thing.
Plus Samsung has one-upped HTC here by offering up 50GB of Dropbox storage, rather than the 'meagre' 25GB option on offer from the Taiwanese firm. If you run out of space now, you're doing something a little odd.
(Oh, and quick note on the bundled headphones: they're excellent for free options. They're a little lightweight and lack bass quality compared to high-end options, but the in-ear nature and microphone work very well).
Music
The Music player on the Samsung Galaxy S3 is certainly a decent enough effort and offers all the functionality we'd be looking from in a mobile phone - from smart playlists to wireless streaming, it's all there.
For instance, the second you connect headphones to your Samsung Galaxy S3 you get not only the chance to fire up the music player, but look in the notifications pane and you'll see all the apps that are optimised for headphones, be it the music player, FM radio or YouTube.
The notifications pane is actually a pretty pivotal section for the music player, as you can also pause and skip tracks from here - it's something Samsung has offered for years, and we're glad it's still there. It's now flanked by a music widget on the home screen too, which hasn't always been there in times gone by.
But onto the important stuff: the quality of the sound. And yes, it's good. Very good indeed. The tonal quality is very even throughout listening, and the sheer range of equaliser settings is dizzying. Most of them are slightly useless and very similar to one another, but the difference in quality between 'dance' and 'rock' is enough to warrant use.
There's also a virtual surround sound option in there as well, which we were surprised did actually give the impression of 7.1 sound (well, it could have been 5.1. Our ears aren't THAT discerning). It only worked on tracks encoded at a higher bitrate, but it's a good option nonetheless.
In terms of actual use, the Music player is actually pretty standard on the Samsung Galaxy S3 - that's not a bad thing, but there's not much to really talk about. The buttons could do with being slightly larger, especially given how much space the album art is given, but it's not going to cause tears before bedtime or anything.
We were intrigued to try out a new feature from Samsung called Music Square here - it's been done before by other brands and basically works out the intensity of a song and ranks it by mood. So if you want a 'passionate' and 'exciting' track for...whatever you're doing.... then the S3 should have that ready for you. You can even select the level of passion/excitement.
In practice - well, it's a bit hit and miss, as many of these have been. It's good the music is processed from the device itself, rather than calling up a database in the sky, but some of the choices were a little odd, and made us not want to rely on Music Square to really guess our mood.
You can drag your finger across the square to choose a 'progressive' playlist based on your mood - the odd additions aside, this is a really nice way of making a playlist from your tunes.
DLNA is also superbly well supported throughout the Samsung Galaxy S3, and allows easy access to any tracks shared from nearby devices. Well, that's the theory - in practice, it was a little more difficult. Firstly, if you've got AllShare installed on your PC then you'll find two locations popping up on your phone for tracks, and once the list is populated (which takes a long time) then we could play anything thanks to a 'license issue'.
It's not a big deal, but the idea of streaming tracks from a PC to your TV via your handset was a lot easier on the Galaxy S2. We're going to have a little more of a play with this feature to see if there's something obvious we're missing, but it's unlikely the non-technically minded user will want to mess around with it too much.
There are a few other options to talk about here: for instance, dive into the menu and you'll see that if the music file you're playing has embedded lyrics, you can see them on the screen at the same time. It's a shame Samsung couldn't repeat Motorola's excellent trick of being able to call them from an online database, but we can't see too many people missing this as a feature.
You can also set the play speed from within the menu as well, all the way up to 2x. Why you'd want to, and why it's hidden in a menu, we're unsure, but it's there if you want it. We can confirm it DOES speed up songs. Perhaps you want to make your tunes that much more squeaky when annoying others on the bus?
We'd also like to see an option to update the album art without needing to connect to a PC – why is this not included when a multitude of third party apps manage the same trick?
But overall, the music player from the Samsung Galaxy S3 gets a big tick in our book. Sure, we'd have loved to see a super slick DLNA player, especially as the Nokia N900 from many moons ago could do it, but we'll survive and hopefully work that one out.
Another feature is Samsung's Spotify-baiting Music Hub, which is the place to get more tracks on your mobile.
We've since made a short walk-through video so you can see the Music Hub interface
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