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For a start hardware, a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, beautiful 4.3-inch screen and an 8megapixel camera are crammed into a form factor so light that the first few days of ownership saw me constantly checking my pockets thinking I’d lost it.
Next up, performance. One of the things I love most is the camera, thanks to a dislike of carrying a camera and a phone I have two years worth of family snaps at crappy iPhone resolution. With 8 megapixels the S2 has the same resolution I enjoyed on my i8510 two years ago but now I can shoot video in 1080p too. And I have been…. a lot.
Thanks to that processor the phone is lightening fast and can handle an awful lot in terms of multitasking, thinking about it I haven’t actually used App Killer now for a couple of days, it just runs everything I’ve throw at it.
Which brings me to one of the minor gripes I have about Android… Apps. Most of my favourite apps from the iPhone are available on Android and I downloaded Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds asap. The first casualty was the Sky Sports Football app which I lived and died by during the last season. I have found some football apps for Android but, to be honest, they’ve been poorly put together and scruffy looking.
Hipstamatic was replaced by Vignette which gave better results but was harder to use, and it still didn’t make me a good photographer as you can tell from my pics here. As functional as the Android apps are few of them live up to the aesthetics of the iPhone apps. While some people bemoan form over function I like things to work well AND look nice too. Too much too ask?
Thankfully the fantastic hardware and performance outweigh the apps and while many people claim that Samsung stole a page from the Apple design manual, in the case of the Galaxy S2 they tore it out, rewrote and shoved it right back at them. I’m converted.
