[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] cobraboy85:
So I added another line to my account yesterday. Decided (with the 14 day trial period in mind) to try out samsung’s “epic 4G touch” or the galaxy s II as people call it.

First of all, I will say that I went into this with an unbiased motive. I love my evo 3D, but I am always open minded and the fact that my last Samsung phone was terrible (Samsung moment) will have nothing to do with this review. There are pros and cons to any mobile device. There are pros and cons to my 3D. That being said… here is my analysis.

Display – first of all, I will say that the galaxy s II absolutely trumps the evo 3D in the color department on the display. Simply beautiful vibrant colors no matter what you have on the screen. I was immediately impressed by this. Pictures, HD wallpapers, side by side I could see a huge difference in the evo and the sgs2. The touch screen responsiveness, however, was a different story. I was almost annoyed by the sgs2’s inferior responsiveness compared to the 3D. The evo would respond to the slightest tap or flick on the screen whereas the sgs2 required considerably more effort to get the point across to the UI. This was especially obnoxious when texting and trying to quickly back out of the messaging app after hitting send. The evo responds to every touch, and does so immediately, without delay.

UI – a lot of people knock the sense UI. One thing I realized when comparing the two was the evo’s UI is very simple and straight forward/easy to manipulate. I hated touchwiz and the stock launcher as soon as I began to interact with it. I immediately installed zeam launcher to get rid of the obnoxious “iphone look and feel” of the Stock Sammy launcher. I do, however, ABSOLUTELY LOVE the way Samsung implemented the messaging application with the lock screen – simple, straight forward, and very logical. One thing that really annoys me with the sense UI is when you receive a message from anybody and navigate from the lock screen to your messages, it just takes you to your inbox, rather than the actual message. The sgs2 is very efficient for heavy texters such as myself – unlock the phone, bam you are right there reading the entire message. I find the lock screen a little annoying sometimes, however, when simply wanting to unlock the device. I don’t understand why it is necessary to slide the entire lockscreen image off the screen. Sense is better at this. Several times I have had to flick a couple times to unlock the phone. Whereas the “lockring” style of sense is again more simple and straight forward. Also, there is some delay when putting the device (sgs2) to sleep and waking it up. I simply find that annoying and think this should be a simple on and off process. The evo, again, more responsive and simplified with this basic function. And I like having custom shortcuts on my lock screen… which the sgs2 UI does not offer. Overall I would say the two were about even for me… good pros to both, and significant cons to both (for my needs).

Camera and other hardware – the video quality on the sgs2 was better than the evo, not by much, but better. The 1080p video recording was very nice looking on the display and had better quality/color overall when I viewed them on the computer. Last night when I was talking to my fiancé on the phone she said she could hear some static noise. It was faint at first but got louder on her end, I couldn’t hear it, but I called her on my evo and it went away immediately. Seems the microphone isn’t up to par with the 3D’s.

The big one…. POWER CONSUMPTION – so here I am on 6 hours 33 minutes of moderately heavy use with the sgs2 (about 100 or so text messages, a couple phone calls, and a little bit of web browsing, plus the tinkering and fidgeting with the phone that we all do when we are bored, lol.) and I am looking at a battery depleted to 70% remaining… I also work in a location where signal strength isn’t very strong, and 4G is nowhere to be found, but I have to say that I was expecting less. The phone is very efficient when it comes to utilizing power. I am pretty confident that by the end of the night I will still have a little bit left over. To be perfectly honest, it would be hard to get an accurate comparison of the evo’s battery drain because since a few days after I bought it I had the seido “brick battery” in it lol. Maybe somebody else can chime in on how their 3D is doing on a stock battery under similar conditions (with no undervolting, or overclocking… as my phone is 100% stock right now).

Going back to the display, again, I think the evo’s screen size is optimal for me. The sgs2 seems a little too wide when holding it and trying to reach the keys to send a message. Also, the stock keyboard is terrible on the sgs2. But I have always used smartkeyboard pro anyways, so it didn’t effect me, just something I noticed. The buttons were annoyingly tiny and spaced too far… I felt like I was typing on an iphone (oh em gee ***t hits fan nowz)… i suppose that bit about the KB could have been included in the UI review, but oh well.

Software – I personally think sense 3.0 blows this thing out of the water in so many ways. I hate the slowness and bulkiness of the Samsung UI, there is no customization of the messaging app whatsoever, whereas sense you have a plethora of added features such as MMS size, secure box, message forwarding, integration with facebook, etc. The music player on the Samsung is way better, however, and the sound quality is mind boggling. I could not believe the difference between the two it was really night and day. Again, pros and cons to each. Overall, I find the sgs2 to be a lot slower than the evo when it comes to responsiveness and overall tasking. Also, I find that my 3G cuts out and the phone roams a little bit more when I am at work. My evo would rarely jump into roaming mode even in areas where signal was not as strong. Also, my 4G seems to be slower by about 250 kb/s on average, I have not seen the phone download any faster than 1 mb/s as of yet. My evo does this on a regular basis.

Overall, I would have to say that both are good, but key elements in the UI make the evo a better choice for me. I HATE lag and unresponsiveness. The sgs2 lags incessantly when using the home, back, and menu keys on the bottom of the phone. That lag is relayed to tasks you are wanting to execute such as backing out of your emails or messages quickly. I am not the type to take my time when exiting applications, so my phone should be able to keep up. The evo is instantly responding to commands executed via the soft keys on the phone. I am constantly hitting the back key more than necessary to close out of my messages. It is annoying.

Again, overall, the sgs2 has some nice hardware. The camera is absolutely astounding and the screen (although a little too big, even for me) has an amazingly colorful and brilliant display. Difference is night and day between the two. And I am actually impressed with the sgs2’s power consumption. As I said, despite the large colorful screen, inch for inch, I get the feeling it sucks a little less juice than the evo simply due to how much I have been using it and where the battery level is right now.

As of right now, I think I would take the evo and just live with the smaller, less colorful display.

There it is in a nutshell.