[One (M7) General] BarryH_GEG:
So you’re on a call using either the phone’s inbuilt speaker or a BT headset. If you were able to record a video your half of the phone conversation would end up being the video’s soundtrack. If you’re on a call and want to watch a video the audio from the video would either be picked up in your phone call or the playback would have to be muted which, unless you’re watching a silent movie, isn’t really watching a movie. Same thing for playing a song. I have a N2 and didn’t know about the restrictions you described because I can’t imagine playing/recording video or listening to music at the same time I’m in a call. Can you give some practical examples where you use these features (and how often) and where not having them would be an issue? I’ve never heard your specific complaint on XDA before.

GSMArena disagrees. So do I. The N2 (which uses the same camera as the SGS3) runs circles around the Teg3 One X it replaced in both stills and video; especially in low light settings. The One (as will the SGS4) has a totally different camera set up so it’s kind of dumb making historic comparisons anyway.

The 1080p videos are impressively smooth, noise-free and with plenty of detail and good colors. The video container used is mp4 and it creates clips with a bitrate of about 17-18Mbps, which is enough to encode the video with no traces of compression. The framerate stays pretty solid at 30fps. The same goes for the 720p videos, which have an average bitrate of 12Mpbs. Unlike the S II, the Galaxy S III camera has the same field of view whether you're recording 1080p or 720p videos. Both 1080p and 720p videos are recorded with stereo sound using the AAC codec with a bitrate of 134Kbps and sampling rate of 48kHz.

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I know everyone gets a boner about the new 1080P displays. Here are some interesting facts about why it truly doesn’t matter from a discussion in the DNA forum.

I bought the N2 in spite of its size because of the S Pen/S Note features. I don’t understand why people would want a device that big just to use it as a basic smartphone. The problem with Sense is that it lacks functionality compared to TW and it hasn’t been corrected in Sense 5 because people on the DNA forum have been playing with it. Sense is beautiful compared to TW and it’s very polished and HTC’s apps are better integrated with each other. TW on the other hand hasn’t changed much aestheticaly since the SGS1 and still looks cartoonish in comparison to Sense. But as overlays go, Sense is huge and the HTC Framework it’s built on was causing lag even on the DNA.

People use their devices differently and I question whether some use them for anything other than ROM flashing and benchmarking. Here’s a list of non-S Pen related productivity features in TW that aren’t in Sense. If you don’t use them, cool. I do and would miss them if I went back to Sense. HTC added ZOE which I don’t understand yet and an interactive FlipBoard-esque home screen as the “new” features in Sense 5. The former could be a kick-ass feature once people figure it out while the latter is just a reformatting of the feeds currently available in both Sense and TW that can be displayed on the lock screen. So bottom line is Sense is behind TW in functionality, especially for productivity users, and with the release of the SGS4 will probably fall even further behind.