Samsung Galaxy S III: Features which make it Unique

The Samsung Galaxy S III has been announced with much fanfare. So what has changed in Samsung Galaxy S III that is different from Samsung Galaxy S II? The Display? The Processor? The OS? Yeah.. Yeah.. All of those have changed. The Galaxy S III now sports a ‘Super AMOLED HD’ display. The processor is now quad-core and the phone now comes with ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ as the default OS.

All of these are fine and yes they represent an improvement over the previous Galaxy. But, the real improvement shows up in the following features:

Smart Stay

More and more smartphones are being manufactured with 4.5+ inch displays that have made many people want to read articles, magazines or books on their smartphones. The Samsung Galaxy S III is no exception as it has a 4.8 inch display that will enable people to read them without any problem. But, how many times have you been faced with the following situation: You are reading an article and suddenly the display turns off. You had to press a button or touch the display each time to wake the screen up. Samsung has taken note of such a situation and has come up with a smart solution. It has put the front camera to work. If you have enabled the ‘Smart Stay’ option, the display doesn’t turn off while you are looking at it

Pop-Up Play

You are watching an interesting video and you just remember that you have to send out a short e-mail urgently but you do not want to stop watching the video. While previously this wasn’t possible, worry not, as Samsung has addressed this situation too with ‘Pop-Up Play’. This feature allows you to play a video in a pop-up window that can be dragged around the screen while you are interacting with other apps. So you want to continue watching a video while you are browsing through that photo gallery, you can happily do it now!

Direct Call

You are sending an SMS to a person and suddenly you feel that it is better to talk to them. Now, how many times has this happened to you, courtesy: Your Girlfriend!! Now, you can just hold your phone to your ear and the phone will automatically dial their number. This makes you avoid cancelling the message, going to the contact list and dialing their number. Pretty handy, isn’t it?

Buddy Share

You have gone on a trip to a place with your friends and you have captured many photos using your smartphone. If your friends want those photos too, you normally upload it on a cloud storage site and give your friends the link to download the photos. But, the buddy share feature lets you avoid that complicated process. When you have tagged your friends in the photos, you can send those photos instantly

Social Tag

You are browsing through the photo gallery and you suddenly want to view what the current status messages of people in the photo. Woah! This is one feature that even many people wouldn’t have even thought about. With the help of the Galaxy S III, it is now possible.

All the above features, which the Samsung Galaxy III comes integrated with now, present an indisputable case that smartphones are increasingly becoming smarter. It now remains to be seen how much smarter they can become in the coming future.

Stay Tuned..!!

Exynos 4 Quad & Tegra 3: The Quad-Core age is here!!

Lo and Behold!!! The quad core devices are here and it's most definitely their year. While 2011 was a great year where we saw the tablets and smartphones graduating from using a single-core processor to a dual-core processor, 2012 will be the year when gadgets will start coming integrated with quad-cores which will perform much better as compared to their dual core counterparts.

ARM has been licensing its designs to companies like Nvidia and Samsung for a while now and these companies have been very successful in manufacturing the processors designed by ARM. This shows in the success of single-core 1 Ghz smartphones that companies like HTC, Samsung came out with and it had got reiterated with the success of dual-core smartphones. Now, Nvidia has started manufacturing quad-core processors with Samsung not far behind.

The HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S III are the most talked about devices currently each sporting a quad-core processor System on Chip, although these do have a different architecture compared to one aonther. The HTC One X sports an Nvidia Tegra 3 and the Samsung Galaxy S III sports an Exynos 4 Quad. While Tegra 3 is an evolution of Tegra 2, the Exynos 4 Quad is an evolution of Exynos 4 Dual.

The major highlight of Nvidia Tegra 3 is that it doesn't have 4 processors but it has 5! The extra 5th core is actually a companion core, clocked at a lesser frequency as compared to the other 4 cores, that takes over in the case of low intensive tasks that doesn't require running the other 4 processors. With this companion core, Nvidia Tegra 3 will make the device consume lesser battery and consequently make the device run much longer. Performance is obviously better than Nvidia Tegra 2 and that is pretty much expected

The Exynos 4 Quad also attempts to differentiate itself on the basis of the battery life factor. It is built using 32nm HKMG (High K Metal Gate) process that allows the device to consume battery at a much lesser rate than compared to Exynos 4 Dual which is built using the 45 nm process. 

What is common to both the processors however is that both of them deliver excellent performance with enhanced graphics and superb processing power (The 4 cores in both the System on Chips are ARM Cortex A9s). Although, the initial reviews have suggested that Exynos 4 Quad has an edge as compared to Tegra 3 due to its 32nm process build. The Eyxnos 4 Quad also allows you to play most of the video formats thanks to the ARM Mali 400 MP GPU unit in it.

The Exynos 4 Quad has also impressed another company: Meizu. Meizu's MX Quad Core phone also uses the Exynos 4 Quad System on Chip and the initial benchmark tests on this device have rated it at the top of the current crop of android devices. While benchmark tests do not necessarily indicate real world performance it nevertheless indicates the level of performance one can expect.

So, going by the initial indications it seems that both the SoCs: Nvidia Tegra 3 and Exynos 4 Quad are highly capable of delivering excellent performance. We'll just have to wait for the devices and see the extent to which we are going to like them.

Stay Tuned..!!