At last the wait for our much hyped and anticipated Galaxy S III is over. It finally hits the Indian shores and in fact sooner than expected. It undoubtedly is a great phone providing some of the latest technology known to man-kind. The S III has a humongous 4.8 inch Super AMOLED screen with a HD (1280X720) resolution and is powered by Android’s latest OS (4.0.3). To top the icing on the cake it also comes with S-Voice which is a siri doppelgänger (at least is trying to be one for the time-being).
But here comes a truth that we all have to accept, this piece of gadget costs a fortune. At Rs 43180 ($ 775) it is the costliest Android phone available in the market. True that in India we don’t have the conception of contract prices and other deals which makes devices 2.5 times to 4 times dearer in our country when compared to the US. So here comes a very natural question to the mind Is it really worth the price? (We answer this question towards the end of this post.)
It is the flagship model from Samsung competing with the likes of HTC ONE X and iPhone 4s. To start off a comparison let us choose the HTC One X first. The One X is a very similar phone to the S III in many aspects.
The One X is also powered by Android 4.0.3 sports a 4.7 inch IPS display and also dawns a quad-core processor which is clocked at a slightly higher speed than the S III. (sIII features a 1.4 GHz processor while the One X sports a 1.5 Ghz version).
Here are some of the pros and cons of both the phones:
PROS of One X
- One X costs much lesser (Rs 36000/$645)
- Has a beautiful design.
- Sports premium build quality.
- Comes with an amazing UI (HTC Sense 4.0)
- Brilliant burst mode.
PROS of S III
- Wonderful features like the S-beam, S-voice and the beautiful work of the front cam which keeps track of your eye movement.
- Intelligent way to switch on the camera app from sleep mode.
- Much better benchmark ratings compared to the One X in most fields.
CONS of One X
- Loses out to many benchmark tests when compared with the S III.
- Less battery life (as compared to S III)
CONS of S III
- Terrible build quality- cheap plastic all over.
- Oddly placed capacitive buttons which are very unergonomic to use. (In fact it is irritating to know that while scrolling down a web page or a list, one ends up hitting the back button on a regular basis.)
- Some of the features are useless and only increase confusion.
- UI is not very imaginative.
Samsung still provides us with cheap quality plastics and gets away just because it supposedly provides high performing hardware. Well to be very honest rarely any one of us actually take the hardware usage to its limits (even the so called power hungry gamers do not take the juice out of such powerful devices). Samsung products are mostly cute on the paper but on reality are cheap products that neither are a looker nor are confidence inspiring.
There is not much point in including the iPhone here as it is hosts a completely different OS and if hardware utilization is of key essence then one should learn from Apple. The SIII uses exactly the same camera sensor as the iPhone does, so if Samsung starts claiming about great photography, well it is already a known fact which has been tested and taken from Apple.
The iPhone doesn’t lag a bit even with its dual-core A5 processor and doesn’t heat up a bit, plays every game imaginable with no nonsense behaviour at all.(Who needs Quad cores if there aren’t apps that can take advantage of them, just leads to unnecessary heating and battery consumption).
If you are looking for an Android alternative then clearly the One X is a much smarter choice as its way cheaper and provides a fantastic performance with a premium feel to its product. (Bench marks mean nothing as they only provide bragging rights). The One X in most cases is very close to the SII, so striking out the HTC warhorse makes no sensible choice.
So is the Galaxy SIII worth the price??
The Answer is a BIG NO.
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