Samsung unleashed the Galaxy S3 on the world on May 3, the one Android smartphone to rule them all, with its 4.8-inch display, and that super-fast 1.4GHz quad core Exynos processor sitting inside looking so menacingly. Though the Samsung event was lacking energy and excitement from the folks trying to sell the Galaxy S3 to us and everyone else who were watching, we still found the Galaxy S3 to be one hell of a smartphone, a device in our eyes that truly deserves to be called an "iPhone Killer."
One of the features that drew our attention is Samsung's answer to Siri. Samsung calls it S Voice. This covers voice integration and recognition which we believe from what we saw, works pretty well and is right up there with Apple's Siri and Microsoft's TellMe for Windows Phone. Samsung calls its S Voice software a natural language interface that listens and responds in a way the user would expect without too many errors that can potentially spoil the experience.
With S Voice, future owners of the Samsung Galaxy S3 will be able to speak to their phone as if it's a person. Creepy, but we dig nonetheless. Users would be able to get the phone out of sleep mode by commanding it to wake up, initiate a call, say "snooze" to simply cripple your phone alarm, request a song, change the volume, send email and text messages, request the weather and a lot more.
At the moment, S Voice only has support for 8 languages that include English, Korean, Spanish, and German. Hopefully Sammy is hard at work trying to muster up some support for additional languages before year's end. Well, some may say S Voice is basically a rip-off of Siri, but it works and if Samsung can get away with it without a lawsuit, things will be great.
Next on the plate is Smart Stay, another cool feature never before seen in a smartphone. Smart Stay is a face recognition technology, and yes we have seen this type of feature in smartphones before, but not like this. Samsung has taken a concept that never proved to have much use and made it worth a look. With Smart Stay, your Galaxy S3 will never go to sleep nor will the lights ever go dim on you again when reading an e-Book.
Smart Stay tracks the movement of your eyes by utilizing the front facing camera. By doing this, the software can tell by the movements of your eyes if it should dim the lights on the display or make it brighter. Take your eyes off the display and the screen will go pitch black, how cool is that? We agree, extremely awesome. Apple has nothing like this, and if it turns out to be a feature that consumers gravitate towards, the Cupertino giant will be in some deep problems
Apart from S Voice and Smart Stay, the Samsung Galaxy S3 4.8 inch Super AMOLED capacitive display is unbelievably gorgeous. The iPhone 4S' meager 3.5 inch screen pales in comparison. To be frank, there's really no comparison between the two when you think about it. However, while we like the bulk of the display, we can't help but think smartphone screens are getting too large for comfort. Thus there could be a slight chance Samsung could have problems selling this device to some of its fans. Is the time coming where we will require a waste pouch to carry our smartphone? Will the Galaxy S4 or 5 come packed with a 6 inch screen or something? It is better to innovate in other ways than improving on the size of the displays.
However, these are the aspects Apple might want to review what it is bringing to the table with the iPhone 5 or "new iPhone," (that's what we expect it to be called). Samsung is still following Apple in certain respects, but the company is also learning to innovate and before long, Samsung could be the company that every other company follows.
There is no doubt in our minds that the Samsung Galaxy S3 with S-Voice, Smart Stay, and that 4.8 inch display is a true iPhone killer. Your move, Apple.
