[Galaxy S II General] Athar Mansoor:
Moving over from Desire HD to Galaxy S2

Yesterday, I bought my self an S2 and put away the Desire HD, here are my few cents..

Indeed, the Galaxy S2 is a pure powerhouse/beast or what ever you may call.

The S2 lacks on the intergration front which the sense has been pioneering. And after you have used sense, the touchwiz feels so bland.. And then the question do you really need that much power. and memory and the HD recording..etc..

You are not able to select contact pictures to be displayed for a contact (for e.g. if you have the same contact on google, facebook, twitter, and linkedin, Sense gave you the option of selecting which picture can be displayed. Nothing like that on the S2).

The integration of facebook and corporate calendar is great on HTC sense. the S2 is just.. lacking.. (You example on the calendar on sense for a birthday you are prompted to send a greeting from the calendar itself)

Being a user of Corporate mail (using Lotus traveller) I am required by the device administrator to have a password lock on my phone. HTC had the option of enabling the lock after a specified time of inactivity. On the S2 everytime the screen goes off you need to unlock it with the password (Yes, I can increase the time of the screen turn off, but would not be a wise option if I am not sitting next to a power plug to charge my phone)

1GB of Ram?, well only some 800 Megs is available for use. Out of which don't know why almost half shows as used everytime. (I checked the task manager no applications were running)

If you frequent facebook and twitter, then you are sure to miss the friend stream app. For tweets with picture, videos and links it opens them up in without leaving the application. The Social Hub on the S2 is no where close. Infact its so stupid. I had to turn if off and go back to the apps by facebook and twitter.

Games, eh ? I really didn't find any difference playing Modern Combat 2, both Single Player and Multiplayer, on the two devices. May be future game "can" make use of the processing power of the S2.

Stocks yes, it better on the S2, especially on the graph front. It updates all the graphs in one go.. Sense you have to manually update them. Though the update frequency can be set to smaller intervals on the Sense. S2 has the lowest of

Weather. Sense is much Better, any one would agree..

World time: Looks like S2 has limited cities that can be set. For e.g. I was able to set Fort Lauderdale on the weather but not the world time

When you are in a rush, and need to dial a number, You would want that when you press phone it should bring up the dial pad, not the logs or contact as S2 does depending on what was used.

Smart dialing I feel is more intuitive on the Sense. On the S2 if multiple contacts meets the criteria entered a counter is indicated an you have to click that to get the list. Sense just displays them as you go along.. Save finger movement, Which I feel is the smarter way to go..

And some more lil nifty things, keyboard, you might argue that S2 has swype, but other wise the default keyboard of the HTC is way better.

I am already having second thoughts and plan to return the S2, go back to the Desire HD.

Regards,

Mansoor