The Samsung Galaxy S2 A Contender for Phone of the Year?

Processor

Succeeding the Galaxy S the S2 was always going to have its work cut out, and Samsung were all too aware of this. They set out to release the fastest Smartphone on the market and as the late spec changes proved they were determined to do so.

During the lengthy wait for its release, some 2 months after its unveiling at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Samsung announced it would be upping the processor speed from 1.0Ghz dual-core to 1.2Ghz, fuelled largely we believe, by the rumoured 1.2Ghz HTC Sensation.

The result is a pretty powerful beast with its Exynos chipset featuring a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU and Mali 400 GPU. What that all means to you and I is a phone that does everything faster, Games, Apps, you name it, its quicker.

Display

Samsung already had a pretty good screen with its own Amoled screen technology as seen on the Galaxy S and indeed the Super Amoled screen is one of its best features. So have Samsung managed to improve on this already great screen?

Yes they have, the Super Amoled+ display makes colours vividly more beautiful, it makes viewing images, playing games or browsing web pages physically easier thanks to the clarity of the Super Amoled+ display.

Design

The overall design of the S2 is impressive to look at Samsung really have the styling of this phone down. Given the size of this phones screen and the size of its specifications you would be forgiven for thinking it would be a bulky heavy phone. Well you couldn’t be more wrong the SII weighs in at a mere 116g and a tiny 8.4mm thick (at its thinnest point).

Housed in smooth black plastic, which is textured on the back to help prevent slippage the Galaxy S2 doesn’t quite have the quality feel of the iPhone or a HTC handset, but this is a really small gripe in the grand scheme of things.

Camera

The camera one word should sum it up awesome, it has to be one of the best mobile phone cameras we have seen. Crisp colour rich images are ten a penny, the over picky may say in bright light the pictures can be a little over exposed but that’s up to them – we love it.

The lack of a physical button to start the camera however can feel a little alien, but then you forgive it when you remember the quality of your pictures and the multitude of camera options and features – 8 mega-pixel rear-facing camera (3264×2448 pixels), with autofocus, LED flash, face and smile detection, Geo-tagging, touch focus and image stabilization to name a few.

When it comes to video recording we are just as spoilt 1080p recording @ 30fps with a max res of 1920×1080 the results are impressive especially when you remind yourself it is a phone. Finishing up the camera’s we have a front facing 2 mega-pixel camera making video calls possible.

Operating system

Run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread phone – Android 2.3 makes this super fast Smartphone, well super fast and smarter err.

Setting up email is a fast and pain free, even more so if your using Google mail, flicking through the home pages is quick and easy. Anything and everything web, map or app is perfect, as you would expect from a Google operating system

Android has certainly made some improvements in its 2.3 Gingerbread form. More efficient, less wasteful – saving processing and battery power. Four hubs – Games, Reader, Social and Music – make finding what you need very simple.

Overall, while Android may be not quite as fluid as iOS or Windows Phone 7, but it is without doubt the most functional of all.

Battery life

Daily charging is a chore, which is why we were particularly happy to get nearly two days out of a single charge, with Wi-Fi enabled, a little gaming action and the odd call here and there we can safely say the battery life is absolutely fantastic.

Summary

Appealing design, Powerful processor, big screen, plenty of memory, long battery life, great camera and video.