Sony Xperia S

Sony Xperia S Sony Xperia S Lt 26i 32gb 4.3" 1.5 ghz 12 mp Black Android 2.3 Factory Unlocked Black
The new Xperia S was announced at CES 2012 in Vegas sporting an dramatic new design and offering a visual feast letting you enjoy all its features in glorious full HD. Take snaps of your mates or surroundings with the 12 MP camera and view them on the gorgeous 4.3 inch crystal clear LCD HD screen which has Sony Mobile Bravia Engine technology for an enhanced contrast, rich colours and a crisper image. And thanks to the screen having reduced light reflection, the picture stays clear when you're outdoors too. The 12MP camera can be snapping pictures in just 1.5 seconds from standby, and you can share them or you can watch your HD videos straight on your HD TV thanks to the Xperia S's easy to use connectivity. The 1.3 MP front facing camera means you can also stay in touch with friends and family via HD video chat. The Xperia S comes with a powerful 1.5GHz dual-core processor beating underneath for faster performance, smoother web browsing and lag-free use. CPU speed: 1.5GHz dual-core processor Platform: AndroidTM 2.3 Network: UMTS/HSPA: 850/900/1900/2100 MHz / Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz / (Band frequency, HSPA availability, and data speed are operator dependent) Memory: Internal phone storage: 32GB / RAM: 1GB Display: 4.3" Reality Display with Mobile BRAVIA® Engine / 16,777,216 colour TFT / 1280x720 pixels GPS: aGPS Connectivity: Bluetooth® / Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11b/g/n / 3.5 mm stereo audio jack / Standard micro-USB / DLNA for wirelessly streaming media from the phone to your TV or computer Camera: 12.1 megapixel camera with F2.4 lens, LED flash / 1080 HD video recording / 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera (720p) MicroSIM and fixed battery Weight: 144.0 grams / 5.1 oz Dimensions: 128.0 × 64.0 × 10.6 mm / 5.0 × 2.5 × 0.4 inches

I consider my self a veteran of Sony Ericsson phones dating back to the X10 to the Arc and now the S. I was waiting and waiting for the Ion promised by Sony and At&T but they decided to ignore the US so since this was available now as an international phone and further investigation revealed this phone would work fine on At&T networks, I decided to get it. I could not bring myself to give this phone 4 stars but I also feel there are a couple real drawbacks from making this a perfect phone but there are no options for 4.5 stars so I have this phone 5 because I love it so much.

First off, the design is classy and can only be rivaled by the IPhone. This phone blows away Samsung phones in terms of design. This is Sony's first phone without dedicated physical buttons for home back and menu. This adds to the physical beauty but unfortunately the touch keys are not as responsive. With practice it almost becomes seamless and unnoticeable but it may become annoying if you don't get the hang of it, luckily I did.

The bar at the bottom of the phone is clear and serves a dual purpose. It serves as an antenna for the phone and also lights up with a light blue light when the phone is activated. This does help because it gives you an indication of where the home, menu and back keys are. Otherwise it is nearly impossible to touch the right spot in the dark. Unfortunately, I feel like Sony missed out a 3rd more useful and fun purpose. The bar could have lit up different colors to show notifications. Instead, the notification light is on the top left hand corner exactly like the X10. Blue is a text message, green is an email. This would have been awesome if there was an option to use the clear bar as notification not just for the pretty aspect of it all but because you could tell if you had a message from any angle. I feel like this flew over Sony's head as being an obvious great use for the bar.

The screen is beyond amazing. Full HD in all it's glory and blows away Iphone's Retina display and Samsung's OLED display. How do I know? My brother has the Iphone and my wife has the Samsung. Comparative views showed no contest people. This is truly the best phone display I have ever seen. I also heard on the internet that the pixel density was better but seeing it is believing it. Trust me, this screen is beautiful.

The camera was quite a disappointing. Megapixels mean absolutely nothing. Sony's 12 megapixel camera lost out to the iphone with my comparative tests. Iphone manage to beat this phone with pics. Not by much but enough for me to tell that Iphone's camera is better. Which is ironic because Iphones camera lens is made by Sony. Anyway, it takes fairly good pictures but certainly wont replace your professional camera. Furthermore, the focusing is excruciatingly slow. It takes a very long time to focus. I also didn't like that there was no option to silence the camera as in prior phones like the arc. The annoying sound could not be muted. The video camera tests fared better and it takes great video.

As far as software goes, Sony in a rare event for them; hit it out of the ball park on the software side. Normally Sony is renound for their hardware beauty but software has always been a weak point for Sony. I'm happy to report they have only improved on their software. Sony has learned it's lesson and did not mettle too much with the Android operating system. The only thing they did was ad a gorgeous skin over the android operating system. I can tell you, this is the best android skin out there without a doubt. Simple and classy. That's it, all they did was make this phone look pretty and with this display, they did a wonderful job. Even the stock screen savers included are gorgeous.

The common apps were also wonderful. The music app is much improved. I used to have a bought dedicated music app no more with this app. It finally has equalizer ability and the sound is Sony quality. they also added a wonderful convenient feature by allowing you to play pause and skip from the lock menu. So you don't have to go through steps to get to the app for these functions. Simply turn on the screen and touch from the lock screen. The other wonderful aspect is the video player. When you plug in your phone to your pc it recognises the phone as an Xperia S and brings up a menu for options such as transfers. I would suggest ignoring that and using your phone as a simple hard drive. All files are there for you to simply drag and drop if you want to add files. When you add video, the phone automatically converts the video to a format playable by the player. Prior SE phones did not have this capability and more importantly it plays HD video! I downloaded an HD movie and it converted the video for play back in all it's HD glory! WOW. Love it!

The phone is also fast. Significantly so thanks to the dual core processor. Comparing my SE Arc with this phone proves that speed has increased significantly thanks to the dual core processor. Web surfing is also quicker. Not much to say about the browser other than it does the job, no wonderful news there.

At this point I would say the phone is perfect but aside from the prior gripes with the camera and lack of dedicated home keys; there are some downsides to the phone. One is that this phone does not have an SD card slot for memory expansion. It already comes with a generous 32 gb memory but the potential to expand another 32 gb for total of 64 would have been awesome. The Sony ION had that capability but It is not as attractive as this phone and I got sick of waiting for a good Sony phone. So for those that want that ability, be prepared to wait. It also has a built in battery so there is no ability to swap batteries or have extras. Luckily, the battery life on this phone is pretty good lasting pretty much all day with normal use. Those are the major draw backs. It also is only capable of 3g speeds no LTE as the Sony ION is expected to have. For me, these are things I can live with.

Another aspect that had me asking a lot of questions is the ability for this phone to even work as it is an international phone. Rest assured, this phone works perfectly fine with 3g on AT&T's network. The nice thing about AT&T is that their network is universal so the phone works great. The bad news is that I don't think this phone works perfectly with any other network. I heard it does not work with verizon at all and T-mobile only works on 2g. If you have AT&T it will work perfectly. The other thing is that this phone only takes Micro Sim cards. That's an easy fix, just cut your regular sim card so it fits. The best way to do this is to get a sim card cutter sold on amazon. It's like a hole punch for sim cards.

I've had this phone for a month and waited to review it so that I would be very familiar with all functionality and report any and all problems I have had with it. This phone is truly awesome and my brother extremely envious after our comparative display tests. It's a shame Sony phones do not have traction in the US but at least I have one of the most unique and pretty phones out there. Plus no contract! You have to pay a pretty penny for it but if you can, it's totally worth it.

****UPDATE***** Well, I dropped my phone in the water. It miraculously survived with the only exception of the speaker. The call speakers still work. The reason I am writing this is because I bought the ION through AT & T at 99 dollars and realized how good the unlocked international S is after trying out the ION. I will not go into a review of the ION but what I will say is that AT & T has a habit of ruining good phones. I was so dissatisfied with he phone and experience that I decided to return it. At 99 dollars it is a bargain and if you don't have the money to buy an unlocked phone I would not blame you but that's how good the S is. I decided to keep a crippled phone.

Nokia 808 PureView Unlocked Phone with a 41 MP Camera with Carl Zeiss Optics--U.S. Warranty

This phone is nothing short of a dream come true for any remaining Symbian fans -- all 3 of us! As soon as it was announced at MWC last February, I started drooling, and have not stopped since. Every time I came across a picture, promo or review, my computer screen would literally get wet. So, I simply could not wait for the official US release of the black version here on Amazon, and instead purchased it from an importer - warranty be damned!
Of course, more sane individuals will want to get the US version here instead. :)

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Camera, Camera, Camera!
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The camera is obviously the main attraction, and is in itself is worth the money! It is as simple as that. If the 808 were sold as a standalone camera, it would handily beat just about every point-and-shoot camera in nearly every way. Even when shooting at 5MP or 8MP, it easily outclasses even more "pro" compacts such as the Canon G12.

The one seeming deficiency that the 808 PureView would have when compared to those dedicated camera is a lack of optical zoom. This, clearly, has to do with size - there is no way to fit in the optics required, especially when considering the sheer size of the photo sensor included with this phone. To give you an idea, the sensor is twice the size of the G12, whose 5x optical zoom already gives it a 2-inch thick body when retracted. And compared to most "ultra-zoom" cameras (such as the Canon SX IS series), the sensor in the 808 is 3-4 times as large!

Enter the genius of Nokia's "PureView" technology. This gives you, among other things, "Lossless" digital zoom. (Yeah there are quotes, I'll get back to why).

At full resolution, pictures taken with this phone consist of 34 or 38 megapixels (in 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios, respectively). At that resolution, the size of each pixel is equivalent to that of recent 8MP smart phones such as the iPhone 4S or the Samsung Galaxy series. Obviously, photos from those phones can be a bit... meeh... especially in low light conditions. So yeah, scaling up from 8MP of random noise to 38MP of random noise is not really the value proposition Nokia was going for here.

Instead, in "PureView" mode, you will be capturing 8MP, 5MP or even 3MP photos - and you will be amazed! Amazed at how much information is available despite the lower resolution, at the color "depth" that comes with a much wider dynamic range, and amazed at why the world still thinks more MP == better. You'll truly appreciate how it's not the pixel count that matters, but how you use them.

The idea is that by "binning" several pixels (photo cells) together into larger "super-pixels", each resulting pixel receives more light (signal), whereas most of the noise associated with shifting and reading the signal from the CCD remains constant. In turn, this means less noise per pixel, shorter exposure times, less blur. Less noise also means more efficient compression, resulting in even smaller file sizes (despite the cleaner picture!).

So why not simply use a cheaper 5MP or 8MP sensor then? So long as the total sensor area is the same, wouldn't you get the same benefits?

There are at least two reasons for this. First, would you even be looking at this phone it it was marketed with a "5 Megapixel Camera"? For all that we decry the marketing race for higher megapixel numbers despite the resulting deterioration in image quality, we are still allowing ourselves to be fooled by it. By placing a "41 Megapixel" label on this thing, Nokia is essentially using metrics that give you a faily accurate representation of its camera performance vis a vis other smart phones in the market today.

The second reason is that this allows for the aforementioned "lossless" digital zoom. In other smart phones (with the exception of video recording modes on the Nokia N8, Sony Ericsson C905a, and a couple of others), once you start to zoom in, you are in effect "scaling up" an image from its native pixel resolution, just as you would if you enlarged a picture in an image editing program. You are not adding any detail, you are only blurring the original.

In contrast, the 808 digital zoom works by reducing the size of each "super-pixel", down all the way to its native resolution. So at the far end of the zoom range, you are essentially using only the center portion of the sensor, cropped such that 1 photo cell corresponds exactly to 1 pixel in the resulting image. In simplified terms, you could say that you reduce or eliminate the "oversampling" that PureView otherwise provides.

This, combined with the phone's aspheric lens design and other ingenious solutions, allows for optical performance way its physical size would normally indicate. In fact, in a side-by-side blind test conducted by GSMArena.com, it went on to score higher than the Olympus PEN E-PL2 DSLR camera with its humungous "four thirds" inch photo sensor (about 2.5x larger than that of the 808). Granted, these were mostly daytime/outdoor photos at the wide range etc etc -- but the fact that this can even happen speaks volumes!

One thing I have not yet mentioned is the awesome video and audio recording quality of this phone. Unless you have professional video recording equipment usually reserved for movie studios and broadcasters, there is nothing else no the market that matches the richness in both video and sound (frequency range, dynamic range) that this thing gives.

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The perfect travel companion
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If you are traveling, this is really the one gadget you want to bring with you! Some reasons:

* The camera - obviously! You can safely leave your dedicated camera or camcorder at home.

* Nokia Maps. Free navigation, phenomenal map/POI coverage. Unlike Google Maps, map data is stored in vector format, so it is much less data intensive (both for download and storage). In fact, data can be stored offline beforehand, so you don't need any data connection at all to use it.

* Other preinstalled Nokia applications, such as Nokia Guides (city guides, restaurant guides, etc) and Nokia Public Transport (very nice and useful if looking for public transit options near you).

* Worldwide 3G coverage. This is one of very few phones, like the N8 before it, that has penta-band UMTS network support, meaning it works on any GSM carrier's 3G network worldwide (including both AT&T and T-Mobile USA).

* Multiple tethering options. You can share your phone's internet connection with a laptop or tablet over USB, Bluetooth or WiFi (ordered from most to least power efficient).

* Multiple ways to connect to TV sets to share photos, videos, etc, including HMDI, DNLA, and plain old RGB output for analogue TVs. A dedicated "Nokia Big Screen" application provides a nice media centric interface, and can be paired with and controlled by Wii or PlayStation remote control.

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Symbian is Dead - Long Live Symbian!
====================================

In 2010, Nokia's Board of Directors hired Microsoft puppet Stephen Elop in order to kill Symbian, and turn Nokia into little more than a tool in Microsoft's own last-ditch effort to make their own Windows platform again relevant on mobile phones. So why, then, did they now resurrect Symbian from the grave, only to release their newest flagship phone on it!? This seems utterly confusing, even considering Nokia's typical schizophrenic personality.

The bottom line is that Symbian was their only OS that could handle the massive amount of processing required for decent camera and especially video recording performance. They have spent 5 years on developing PureView, exploiting every advantage that the lightweight Symbian OS offers; it is not trivial to get this working on other platforms, let alone Windows Phone.

Now, they have in fact indicated that while they WILL eventually relase the PureView technology on their Windows Lumia phones - however these will initially NOT have the same pixel resolution and optical performance as the 808. Until processor speeds catch up a bit more, this is likely to remain the case.

So much the better for us Symbian fans. In fact, I'll stick my neck out a little: Symbian is the greatest (mainstream) mobile operating system created so far!

Part of the reason is technical, as described below. But just as important, all of its main rivals (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, even BlackBerry) carry with them somewhat uncomfortable tie-ins to their vendor, whether it be:

* excessive coercion and control of what you can and cannot do with your phone (looking at you, Apple!)

* excessive dependency on vendor-controlled services to transmit and store your personal data. Are you comfortable with the way that Android leads to you to use Google services for contact synchronization, emails, and even implicit uploading of photos (often without your explicit knowledge or consent), especially given Google's ever-more aggressive marketing focus?

Among these, Symbian remains the most open system, where you, the user, remain in control of your device and the data on it. To me, this is just as important as any technical reason.

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Connectivity
============

Symbian has always been ahead with regards to connectivity options. For instance, as previously mentioned, it supports TV connectivity via HDMI, DNLA or plain old TV-out. It also has the most complete Bluetooth stack found anywhere:

* When playing music to your car stereo, track information is also shown (if supported by your stereo)

* Bluetooth HID for keyboard and mouse support since the N95.

* As soon as you pair with your computer, you can instantly browse the phone's filesystem just like any other storage volume.

That said, the 808 brings with it a couple of disappointments compared to previous Nokia phones:

* Dwindling Mac support: Since Apple have removed the iSync application from Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), Nokia no longer builds iSync plugins for their phones (even for those of us who run older versions of OS X). Also, Nokia Multimedia Transfer does not seem to receive updates anymore, and so does not recognize this phone. This means that synchronizing your phone with the Mac Address Book, Calendar, iTunes and iPhoto is a bit more cumbersome than before. Workarounds exist, but they are a bit klunky - similar to how you would do it on an Android device.

* WebDAV support has been removed from the File Manager. This means that you need 3rd party software (e.g. PaderSync FM, myExplorer, or Davi) to access remote file shares.

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Stuck in Time
=============

Since Nokia are putting less effort into Symbian these days, we cannot expect to see much in the way of new features in the OS. For instance:

* No 4G (LTE) network support. In fact, this phone only supports speeds up to 14.4 Mbps (HSDPA), not even the 22 Mbps HSPA+ technology that T-Mobile USA (misleadingly) labels "4G". Then again, everything about this phone is less data intensive than on Android: Offline maps/navigation, map data stored as vector data and not images, no automatic (and unwilling?) synchronization of photos with Google+, etc.

* No multi-core CPU support. However, Symbian is very lightweight when it comes to resource use, and unlike Android, does not really NEED any more CPU cores to be usable. Certain tasks, such as video recording, are aided via a dedicated DSP.

* Screen resolution is WVGA (640x360 pixels). Most people won't notice, but it does not look good on phone reviews where the reviewer (literally!) puts the screen under a magnifying glass.

* The standard web browser is getting a bit long in the tooth, and not really performing by today's standards. You can get some speed boost by installing Opera Mobile or Opera Mini, but in that case you loose support for Adobe Flash.

That said, the UI has undergone quite a bit of polish leading up to Nokia Belle (the version of Symbian that's included here). Similar to Nokia's own Maemo/MeeGo OSes as well as Android, home screen widgets are now resizable; a notification panel can be dragged down from the top, etc.

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Dwindling Application Support
=============================

As you would expect, once Elop announced the end of Symbian, and moreover, that the Qt application environment would NOT be ported to Windows Phone, he also completely removed any remaining incentive for application developers to support this platform.

Some example of how lackluster developers have become:

* There are 3 flavors of Angry Birds, but despite being a Finnish company that initially developed for Nokia, ROVIA could not even be bothered to deploy Angry Birds Space on this platform once Elop had made his announcement. There is 1 flavor of "Cut the Rope", not 2 as on iOS and Android.

* There is no Netflix application. There WAS a Netflix Queue manager, but after Netflix changed their API, they could not be bothered to change their Symbian application to match.

* There is no IMDB, Fandango or other application to browse movie listings and show times. Google search works somewhat, but is a bit klunky.

* Skype supports voice calls, but not video. MAYBE this will happen now that Skype is owned by Nokia's new sugar daddy, but I would not hold my breath. Meanwhile, there is always Fring or Nimbuzz.

That said, many of Nokia's own applications are very nice, and often unexpectedly useful. For example:

* Nokia Situations, available from Nokia Beta Labs. This switches your profile, desktop background, sound themes, etc based on conditions such as GPS Location, WiFi access point, calendar entries, time of day. I have my phone set up to automatically turn to "Meeting" mode (muted ring tone, vibrations) while in meetings, and Offline once I arrive at my home.

* Nokia Drop, also from Beta Labs. It comes with an accompanying plugin for web browsers such as Firefox, and allows you to "drop" files, URLs, etc to your phone in one click. If browsing the OVI Store from your computer, for instance, just select "Install on Phone", and it happens automatically.

* Wellness Diary, also from Beta Labs. Once it is installed, it uses the accelerometer and some nifty logic to count your steps, similar to a pedometer, and records a diary for you. In combination with the Sports Tracker application (also originally developed by Nokia, but now available for iOS and Android as well), this provides an excellent way to keep track of your physical activity.

* Car Mode, available in the OVI Store. Makes the phone easier to use while driving. The main screen consist of only 3 large buttons: Call, Drive and Music. Can be set up to launch automatically once connected to your Bluetooth car stereo.

* Nokia Battery Monitor, which among other things keeps track of which applications consume power (when active and in the background).

===============
The Bottom Line
===============

I realize that a lot of what I have been describing in this review is not going to matter to your typical "causal" phone user, the kind that Steve Jobs managed to wean off their RAZRs and into the "smartphone" world (if you could call the original iPhone a "smartphone", that is). For instance, both Apple and Google seem to be deliberately taking advantage of the fact that most users do not care much about privacy, or "power" features such as proper multi-tasking. Most of those users will likely also be "OK" with the camera quality in other smartphones, and are likely to care more about CPU frequencies, screen sizes, application support, etc.

So admittedly, I am likely in a small to moderate size niche for which this device will appeal. Given that, for what it is, I could not be happier with any other device than what I am with this phone today!

There is always room for more of us!

HTC One X with Beats Audio Unlocked GSM Android SmartPhone

PROS: Hardware, screen, ICS, HTC Sense (yes I think it is a pro!), camera
CONS: Battery life, no replaceable battery option, missing dedicated search key
Recommendation: If you are ready to compromise on the battery life then this is a definite BUY from me

To be fair, I knew what I was getting into when I bought this phone. Excellent hardware as long as you don't count battery as part of the hardware!

On very basic usage like talking, texting and moderate browsing and with the screen brightness set to auto, you can probably get about 8 hours of battery life out of this.

But with about 45 mins of Pandora, push email, games and basically the things the phone is actually meant to be used for, you will find yourself charging it twice in 8 hours. My average battery life on fair amount of phone usage come to about 6 hours. This includes about an hour of actual phone calls, some online chatting, about an hour of pandora and few games in between to kill time.

But enough about the problems. The phone has lots of good stuff going for it.

The screen is just brilliant. I will not get into the tech specs of it, but as an end user, I like what I see when it is displayed on this screen.

The camera is fast as promised though I still feel it takes a little longer to launch than I would have liked it to. Once launched, the picture clicking is fast and smooth. As you may have read elsewhere, the camera is good, but don't throw away your SLRs or point & shoots just yet.

The phone is fast and there is no doubt about it. I have done fair amount of multi-tasking on it and it did not seem to have an adverse effect on the performance. But I do like the ability to be able to actually close each app unlike earlier versions of Android.

My one gripe with the design is the elimination of the dedicated search button at the bottom. I don't know why it was done away with as it was really useful and I am not saying that just because I had gotten used to it on my HTC Desire HD.

I like the uni-body design except for the fact that now I dont even have the choice to replace the battery. Not that I did so with my old phone, but that was mainly due to lack of tech support from HTC while trying to get the right battery.

I know people have been complaining about the 'limited' 32 GB of which only 26 GB is actually available with no option to expand. Personally, it is enough space for me. I do not intend to store and watch HD movies on a phone, even if it has a 4.7 inch screen.

I also like that the phone came with a 25 GB dropbox account. It seamlessly connected with my existing dropbox account and simply added the additional space to my existing account. HTC Sense has a lot of integration with drop box, such as the ability to attach files in an email from your dropbox folder by sending a short url in the mail (mind you this is different then the standard option of 'Sharing' your dropbox file via email). However, this drop box integration exists only when you use the native Email app and not the Gmail app (whats up with that google?). Frankly, while google is doing a lot of great things, it needs to get its act together on integration and support of its own products. I have seen a trend that new google products are better supported by third party apps than google itself (for the longest time google docs worked much better on IE than google chrome!).

Face unlock is cool but a novelty and not so much of a utility. I would have called it a utility if I did not need to press the power on button to first wake up the phone, then slide the HTC Sense lock screen to unlock the phone before even reaching the face unlock screen. There is a reason it is featured under the security tab.

I am still playing with the phone and will update this review at a later date with more information.

Update1: HTC released an OTA update yesterday which is said to improve the battery life along with other minor bug fixes. Today was the first day of use with the new update. The phone shows a remaining batter life of little over 50% where as in the past it would be between 30-40% by this time of the day. I will post an update after playing with it over the weekend.

• GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
• 16GB storage, 1 GB RAM
• HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100
• Super IPS LCD2 capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
• 720 x 1280 pixels, 4.7 inches (~312 ppi pixel density)
• HTC ONE X 16GB IN GREY COLOR UNLOCKED GSM16 GB storage, 1 GB RAM

Samsung Galaxy S III GT-i9300 16GB Unlocked Android Smartphone - International Version

This phone simply put is amazing. I like iOS and I now have come to like Android. I don't see one phone as better. They both are great in their own ways. However, if like me you've been using iOS since 2007 or even the last year. The galaxy 3 definitely provides a breath of fresh air.

I won't get into specs. There is no lag what so ever on the device and it is very fluid.

As far as S-Voice. For the person that said it only comes in German. I can kind of see their complaint. When you first turn the device on you can set the language to English. However, when you launch S-Voice. It is still in German by default and you have to click the right arrow through several screens of German text before you can change the language. Typically the right arrow is ok/accept, so I was able to guess my way through it. Realistically though one would assume you only need to set the language once so I don't blame them. Again you can set S-Voice to English as well as other languages.

The 4.8 inch screen is beautiful. Having an iPhone and iPad 3, I find this screen large enough to serve both purposes. I can comfortably browse, watch videos as well as read books.

The browser is great as well. The larger screen again helps and it is nice that you can take advantage of flash.

The rear camera uses the same parts as the iPhone 4S so expect similar quality. However, the camera has a ton of settings. Almost as many as stand alone cameras. The front camera on the S3 is higher quality and very crisp. One thing that I hadn't heard mention of was the LED flash. BE CAREFUL. In a completely dark room I literally temporarily blinded myself. In that respect it blows the iPhone 4S away in my opinion so I did get better night pictures.