[Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] itm:
I'm thinking of buying a GS2 and was curious when I read the review below on Amazon. In particular, the comments in points 1 and 3 regarding CPU/battery usage are a little worrying. Does anyone here agree/disagree with this?

**** 8 WEEK UPDATE ****

Having had this phone for two months now I thought I'd update this. There are several things now about Android and the GS2 in general that are now apparent to me and may be deal-breakers for some of you, though it should be noted that most of these are applicable to all Android phones, and not just the GS2:

1. If you use your phone as your primary music player (e.g. like an iPod) then this is NOT the phone for you - it (as far as I can determine) has no dedicated hardware to decode audio and so it uses a lot of CPU power to play music. The phone will get very hot in your pocket from the CPU heat and within 4 hours the battery will be completely dead. This turned out to be a deal breaker for me as I use my phone extensively for music playback, and the iPhone is still the only phone I know of that gives 40 hours playback.

2. Gapless audio playback is not supported by Android, though some players buffer the next track to simulate the feature (e.g. PowerAmp) if you're willing to pay for them. Gapless playback may be supported in future Android versions, though I don't know how or when one could find out exactly what version of Android will support it.

3. There is a very common bug in the GS2 whereby an application called 'Wifi Sharing' will randomly start itself in the background and consume a huge amount of CPU power (doing nothing) and drain your battery SEVERELY. Your battery will be dead in 6 hours if you don't 'force close' the application. The only solution at the moment if you have this problem is to install something like WatchDog Lite and set up an 'alert' to warn you when Wifi Sharing starts to overtake your CPU so that you can 'force close' it.

4. For all of Android's beauty and the Touchwiz inteface Samsung has put on top of it, I've become aware of some quirks of Android, especially relating to the (VERY) inconsistent use of the menu button. Many applications use this button differently (or not at all), showing different menu items on this button depending on what screen/section you are in on the application. It's definitely not intuitive in this regard compared to iOS, though some applications do use it appropriately and in a logical manner. On the other hand, the 'back' button is fantastic and I think Apple should employ one in their phones, too.

5. Screen burn-in. I've not seen many posts about this around the intertubes, but there is what can only be described as burn-in visible on the notification/status bar of the phone when you are using an application that hides the bar (e.g. having a white section where the status bar would otherwise be displayed). It looks exactly the same as burn-in looks on a plasma television; a slightly dark/grey area where the reception indicator, clock, and other indicators normally display. I suspect this is related to the super AMOLED plus screen technology though most people will probably never notice it - if they did it would be discussed in forums all over the internet.

6. Complications with applications are frequent. Unfortunately it would seem the Android market is severely fragmented due to the shear variety of different Android hardware (i.e. handsets) available. Almost every app you download will have comments attached saying things like 'won't work on HTC Desire... ' or 'If you get the so-and-so issue then uninstall, reset and reinstall' etc., etc., Coming from iOS, this is rather jarring and definitely does not fly on a 500GBP product. Furthermore, with the exception of the very common/popular applications, you are very likely to encounter flakey apps that consume too much battery power or randomly crash/force close (or 'FC' as it's commonly called in the Android community)

7. Speaking of battery power... In my initial review (below) I mentioned how awesome it is to have widgets on the home screen. This remains true, but generally at the expense of battery life. This, combined with the battery drain experienced when using the phone for audio playback will very quickly drain your battery. You will be lucky to last the working day if you also use the phone on the road to receive and respond to emails in addition to your music, surfing, widgets, etc. This may be considered an acceptable trade-off, but no one warns you of it beforehand (at least I wasn't aware of it, and just assumed I'd still get at least a full day out of the battery). I've since learned Android phones have a horrible reputation for poor battery life. Expect to last around 12 hours with medium-light use.

With all the above said, this remains an outstanding phone and by all accounts one of the very best phones available on the market. It is super-fast - faster than my laptop - and the physical design is beautiful. For any existing Android user this phone is a dream. For people coming from iOS, I hope the above update has warned you of some of the limitations on this otherwise outstanding product.