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The Galaxy S2 is currently available from Amazon at discount price.

Introduction

Samsung has already had a fantastic year in 2010 with their Galaxy S model, which is by many considered to be the holy grail of Android phones at the moment. Less than a year after the Galaxy S’ great success, Samsung has already created its successor: the Galaxy S2!

Samsung’s goal is, ofcourse, to expand further into the mobile market. The result of Samsung’s efforts is a phone that manages to incorporate pretty everything that is currently possible.

And since Samsung itself is one of the world’s main mobile component manufacturers (chips, processors, screens, memory, etc.), it’s no surprise that Samsung once again manages to deliver a advanced and high tech phone to Android fans world wide.

Appearance

One aspect that did not change with regards to the previous model, the Galaxy S, is the appearance of the phone. The Galaxy S2 is about as large as the Galaxy S, but still the S2 has a slightly bigger screen. It’s 0.3” larger than the Galaxy S’ screen. Every little bit helps.

The S2 is a very thin phone. At almost 8.5 millimeters, the S2 is the thinnest phone that is out on today’s mobile market. Other than that, there are no big changes to the appearance. Except ofcourse for the one on the backside. Where the Galaxy S was smooth as the skin of a new born baby, the Galaxy S2 has a rougher backside. This is to make it easier to hold in your hand.

Screen

Let’s be honest… the screen is the first thing you look at when you’ve got a Galaxy S2 in your hands. The screen is 4.3” diagonally, which is a pretty decent size. The screen offers enough space to view everything you’d want to view on a phone screen. Watching movies was never more fun to do on a mobile than it is on the Galaxy S2.

The screen is a Super Amoled Plus screen. Mind the ‘Plus’. Super Amoled Plus is slightly more brighter and sharper than the non Plus version of this screen technology. The resolution, however, is still 800×480. This seems to be Samsung’s standard for the time being.

Noteworthy is the fact that the Galaxy S2 makes use of a new chip that renders images in extremely high quality, specifically for the Super Amoled Plus screen. You won’t notice this when looking at standard menu items and icons, but you’ll definitely notice when watching movies or playing games.

Technology

Most Android smartphone aficionados will be curious to learn what’s under the hood of the Galaxy S2. I’m sure you will be glad to learn that the S2 runs on a 1GHz dual core processor. It is the Exynos 4210 processor, manufactured by Samsung itself.

The Exynos 4210 is not just any processor. The first few comparisons have already been made with Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip and the Exynos 4210 wins it every time. Not only is the Exynos 4210 very fast all by itself, it also has an integrated quad core GPU onboard.

Not only does the Samsung Galaxy S2 possess an enormous amount of computational power, there is also plenty of working memory available to be able to handle many applications running in parallel. With 1GB RAM memory, most people will not complain. There is also 16 or 32 GB worth of permanent storage space available.

Samsung has also not neglected to incorporate the latest mobile data technology into their new high end smartphone. With the Galaxy S2, it will be possible to have HSPA+ connections, provided that your provider supports these connections. In theory, you could achieve download speeds of 56 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 22 Mbit/s.

Software

The software on the Galaxy S2, will be the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system. You might be asking yourself why Samsung hasn’t chosen to run Android 3.0 Honeycomb on this phone. This is because the Honeycomb operating system is meant to run on tablets and not smartphones. When it comes to smartphones, Android 2.3 is where it’s at.

Android 2.3 Gingerbread is a big improvement with regards to Android 2.2. At the surface (graphically), not much has changed. However, there have been made significant improvements under the hood. Android 2.3 uses a smartphone’s hardware much more efficiently.

This results in a more responsive interface and less of a burden on the battery. This directly translates to fewer recharges for the consumer. The battery life of the Galaxy S left much to be desired. Thankfully, the battery life has been extended quite a bit with Android 2.3 on the Galaxy S2.

Samsung has provided its own interface on top of Android 2.3 for the Galaxy S2 smartphone: TouchWiz 4.0. TouchWiz provides the user with all sorts of connections to music services, social media, etc.

In practice, the combination of a dual core processor with a quad core GPU and Android 2.3, the Samsung Galaxy S2 is, beyond the shadow of any doubt, the fastest phone we here at Your Mobile Site have ever seen.

No matter which applications you are trying to run, no matter how many browser tabs you are trying to open… everything responds right away! And we mean ‘right away’ quite seriously. There is no measurable delay in the responsiveness of the Galaxy S2. It simply responds… right away!

Camera

The backside camera has a very decent 8 megapixel and it comes with a LED flasher. For a smartphone camera, 8 megapixel is just fine. There are other smartphones out there with 12 megapixel, but it really doesn’t make a big difference. Smartphone cameras can’t be compared to stand alone digital cameras anyway. But that’s quite alright.

For most people, an 8 megapixel with LED flasher smartphone camera will be more than sufficient to make a few pictures of friends when you are going out and having a good time. It works best when taking pictures up close. For taking photos far away, get a digital camera.

Thanks to the TouchWiz 4.0 software, it is possible to edit the photos you take in all sorts of ways. The resolution of the photos you can edit is up to 3264 x 2448 pixels. We can’t really think of a reason to edit images at higher resolutions than that. So we’re fine with that.

Games

Everybody that owns a smartphone will eventually play a few games on it. As I’m sure you’ll understand, with the Galaxy S2’s elaborate graphical prowess, any game you throw at it will look gorgeous and run at unprecedented framerates.

It might take a while before games come out that will make use of the Galaxy S2’s powerful hardware. In the meantime, you can have a ball with one of the many thousands of games that were built for smartphones with slower hardware. They are guaranteed to run smoothly on the Galaxy S2.

Check back for more news reports on Galaxy S2 gaming later at Your Mobile Site!

Speech Control

Android comes with its very own speech recognition software these days. But still, Samsung has decided to provide the Galaxy S2 with speech recognition software of its very own: Vlingo.

With Vlingo, you no need to type in order to perform searches, send emails, or what have you. Just fire up Vlingo and start talking. Vlingo does a really good job at understanding voice commands. Vlingo can be very handy when you are trying to send a longer than average email.

Samsung has demonstrated Vlingo and as you would expect from a set-up demonstration, it all went perfectly perfect. In practice, speech recognition software sometimes produces unpredictable results. But one thing is for sure: constant advances in this technology are a given.

Vlingo might very well be really good at understanding voice commands. We will have to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Conclusion

In summary, we think it is very clear that Samsung’s new high end smartphone, the Galaxy S2, is going to blow the competition out of the water. The S2’s computational power is something the world has never seen. And it’s not just for show either… it really makes for a user friendly interface.

There are other dual core smartphones out there, so that’s nothing new. But other dual core smartphones just don’t perform like the Galaxy S2 does. And that’s even without software that has been specifically built to make use of the S2’s hardware. Things can only get better.

It is hard to compare Samsung’s Galaxy S2 to other smartphones. There simply isn’t anything like it on the market at this moment. If you’re the kind of smartphone aficionado that has to have the latest in high tech gadgetry, then the Galaxy S2 is the phone for you!