[Galaxy S II General] NIK516:
Hi all im going to be giving my personal review / comparison ( ip4 ).

I hope you all enjoy.

Style/ Look / Feel

When i first picked up the phone i was in shock and disappointment, the gs2 feels light, cheap and weak, ( compaired to my ip4 ) however it has been almost a month now with the phone and i can say the phone still feels cheap but i like the weight when watching movies and browsing the web. However i dont like the weight when taking video and pictures i tend to shack a little more with the phone in my hand were with the ip4 it just had that extra weight to hold of the small shakes .( but thats a problem with me i guess not the phone ).

Speaker ports and holes are all normal with a flash of chrome around some parts breaking up the constant black , the speaker cuts are very bad in my honest opinion , they are to deep and sharp ( i worry dirt can get in after time ). The band around the screen also has a gap and ive already found that dirt falls in there and has made a home. The button feel for the home button is nice and solid same as the ip4, volume rockers and switch off buttons also feel good and are easy to access.

Overall the phone feels a good 3.5/5

Hardware

Speaker sound is really exceptional i would say just as loud as my ip4, however the placement of the speaker port blocks sound when it is placed on a bed or flat surface also another thing is that the sound is a little flat when listening to high bass music. I hardly use headphones for listening to music but i did use them for talking on the phone and they are very good and loud.

Call clarity is fantastic on speaker or on loud speaker, and ive asked people if the sound is clear on the other end and they did hear me very clearly.

Ok so the screen super amoled plus well what can i say the positives are 4.3 inch size big positive for moves and browsing and viewing pictures/movies also another plus is the colour looks amazing very rich but not over saturated.

Now the negatives of the screen and there is only one thats the resolution when viewing youtube hd videos it is just not as sharp as the ip4 and when viewing text on the web i find it very poor compared to the ip4.

overall speaker 5/5

call clarity 5/5

screen 4/5 ( watching streams and web are big part of my usage )

Camera

So this phone is amazing with taking pictures and video it is 95% perfect at it, now that 5% it does bad is auto focus and the lack of touch to focus in 8mp and 1080p hd video. Coming from an ip4 i guess i took this amazing feature for granted. Now if you are an artistic photographer like i am having the option to touch focus is very important so that you can pic were you want your depth of field and in focus areas. ( is there and app for this i would love to use it ? )

As for video touch to focus isnt as important but the auto focus does need to be fixed, it is very jumpy in low light and in direct light, also in low light it finds it very hard to focus sometimes taking 2-3 seconds ( the ip4 would focus really smoothly and accurately ).

One thing i will mention is that video recording outside in low like just after dusk you will get alot of noise and loss of detail, i dont consider this a problem because i can understand the limitation of such a small sensor, i just mention it so other that have not yet brought the phone will know.

Some crops and shots with the gs2

pic outside grass

outside sunset

crop 100% outside sunset

crop 100% inside flash

crop 100% macro outside sunset

pic outside bush

Note : these pics look to have been doped in size by flikr but the detail is still there.

Video test at 1080p showing focus times and colour representation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=409whx1SjFs&feature=player_profilepage

Note: there seems to be some colour lose and detail lose in the youtube upload process but it still shows focus times.

Software

I can only talk about software that i use most of the time, i dont use the hubs or touch wiz, the first day i got the phone i put launcher pro on the phone the reason for this was because personally touch wiz looks like an iphone with the bottom 4 square icons and i just dont want to be reminded of the brain dead apple os ( sorry apple fans :( )

ok so wifi, for me wifi is stronger then on my ip4 it loads pages, videos on youtube and streams faster. ( this could also be due to the software on the gs2 ) but it still feels faster to me. Blue tooth on the other had is not as strong as the ip4, i use bluetooth in my car to listen to music and make/ receive calls and it has dropped out on three occasions were my ip4 did not drop out once.

GPS and 3g are all dependent on how close you are to towers , i have poor 3g in my area But in good areas my 3g is just as fast as my ip4 ( keep in mind i do view full web pages most of the time ).

One thing i have to mention is why i moved to android since it seems the ip4 was so good, and that is customization and OS i love the os and i love the customization.

Screen shot of my homescreen, could not do this with the ip4.

One thing i dont like about the youtube app is the subs menu? why isnt there a all subs option? and when i go to individual subs it doesnt show me thumbs? im a very visual person and i miss that.

Browser is superfast i love it, very responsive and i can do almost everything i want. It is not total flash support some sites i can not click on text boxes but that is just a small thing, over all very good.

And lastly i got to mention battery usage, Now i am one of many that have HAD yes i say HAD the os drain problem, but i said stuff it im gonna use and abuse my phone and now the battery is amazing the phone is lasting a good day and a half with heavy use ( video stream over wifi , youtube , web , camera/video shots ) to give an example i watch a 50 min stream on tv shows stream app and i loose around 10% ive done a side by side with my ip4 and it chews around 8% , so in saying that i would say its nearly there :).

OVERALL

Well i love this phone, sure it may feel a little cheap and the res isn't as high as the ip4 or have the touch to focus, but you can do so much with this phone from watching streams of tv shows to taking fantastic 1080p video. the customization of the launcher is so much fun and the support you get from people on xda is amazing, who needs apple support when you can have xda support?

Thanks everyone for reading my review i hope my honest review has helped some with similar usage patterns with there decision on purchasing this amazing device.