[Galaxy S III General (US Carriers)] eatkabab:
I've actually noticed a similar thing with my SGS3. I'm coming from the original Atrix 4G with Gingerbread. That thing was so impressively fast that it would keep up with my absolute fastest taps (I just know where buttons are and I wouldn't even wait for the next menu to draw on screen before tapping).

I expected the S3 to be at least as fast but then I noticed something; ICS is a BEAST! ICS seems to be very labor intensive to run and this translates to the SGS3 being maybe 15% slower with general navigation. Not such an enormous issue (and Jelly Bean will likely fix that), but it gets worse with games.

Games never had an issue on my Atrix, then again I was never running NOVA 3 with a PS3 controller. The Snapdragon S4's video core just doesn't seem to be that powerful. Many games, even ones that are months old drop (many) frames when settings are turned up. The worst culprit however is NOVA 3 (probably the most advanced game). Maybe the version I'm running just isn't optimized for the Snapdragon, but that **** lags like a little *****! Barely pushing 5-10fps during on screen action. The international SGS3 with the Mali400 video core seems to be so far advanced that even the most labor intensive game can't begin to tax it...

Sad, just our plight. But it gets even worse. The Snapdragon is supposed to be super duper advanced and truly future tech, but NOW. It is amazing that it can even keep up with the most advanced quad-core of today, but it's biggest benefit is supposed to be battery life. Smaller manufacturing process, half the cores, advanced architecture, but only maybe a 10% improvement in battery life. Would you pass up LTE for better local performance? Maybe not. (They used the Snapdragon S4 because it has LTE built in and using the Exynos would mean needing a second LTE chip and SUPER ****TY battery life)

I don't really know much, but I feel like manufacturers should focus more on how to reduce the power consumption of the screen because I'm not sure how power hungry the processor is while I'm just reading an article in my browser (or playing a simple game for that matter). While AMOLED's are beautiful, I would prefer to have just a nice screen that frikin lasts a complete goddamn day at sufficient brightness for me to SEE ****!!(especially in the blasted sun!).

Samsungs quad-core is the processor of TODAY that all high end phones should match (not the case at all though). Dunno how they got the power consumption under control, but they did an excellent job. The rest of the world is very fortunate since their phones probably will not 'feel' slow in a year or two. As for the US? Well if it weren't for the rest of the package being so complete, the phone already feels dated to me. This phone, no, this generation of phones, seems to be more of a sidestep. Just like the SGS2 vs SGS3, there's a lot of the same stuff there, but it's all been a little more refined.

Ultimately, it was time for a new phone. This one should hold out for the next 18 months. After all, it is the undisputed best Android (the OneX is DOA due to it's lack of an SD slot; HTC is just plain stupid). In the next generation, I would really really really like to see some Pixel Q screen equivalent development, increased battery life, performance is a given, and some really clean designs with not so many lines and crap all over the place.

All that being said, the SGS3 is truly a beautiful phone in every respect. The enormous screen is packaged such that it feels so sleek and small and NOT cumbersome, that I actually want a larger screen because the whole phone feels smaller than it looks. I have an extremely high standard and this phone has yet to really annoy me with anything. It's an all around good phone.

Sorry for the long reply, I got a little carried away.