The Samsung Galaxy S II is the one of the best android smartphones available for T-Mobile. See why in our review.
Hardware & Design
The T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II comes with a design similar to the Epic 4G Touch for Sprint. You have a 4.52” Super AMOLED Plus which makes viewing video, pictures and just looking at the device a joy for your eyes to see with sharp and vivid colors and clarity. Buttons are minimal on the device with just a power and volume button on the sides. The menu controls are your standard touch sensitive buttons for menu, home, back and search. Above the screen is a 2.0 megapixel front facing camera for video chat and on the back there is a 8 megapixel camera with LED flash and 1080p video capture. Image and video quality from the rear facing camera is great quality with solid audio quality while recording. Check out our sample video and pictures at the bottom of the review.
Inside is where the T-Mobile Galaxy S II differs greatly from the rest of the Galaxy S II phones. For processor it comes with a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The reason for this change from the Samsung Exynos processor is due to the HSPA+ 48 Mbps data chipset which isn’t active in our market yet so we can’t test it. While the phone is still fast and responsive with Snapdragon processor you can tell it’s not as optimized as the other Galaxy S II devices and has some lag at times. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS 1850 MAh battery, 1 GB of ram and 16 GB of internal built-in storage round out the specs on the rounded corner beautifully designs T-Mobile Galaxy S2.
Software & Usability
The software running on here is Android 2.3 gingerbread with Touch Wiz 4.0 implemented on top of it. Much of Touch Wiz is what you have seen before but with some improvements to performance and user experience. Navigating through desktops is easier now with being able to hold down on the desktop number row and slide across between desktops to reach the one you want faster. This same feature is also used in the application tray as well which is useful for when you have a lot of apps installed. You can now resize widgets as well and a ton more widgets to choose from .
There isn’t an option to go to stock android experience as you have in the Epic 4G Touch for Sprint and there is a good amount of pre-installed T-Mobile bloatware that you can’t uninstall which is another disappointment. They’ve include the Photo Editor but the Video Editor is missing in action. Gaming is also good on here even with the different processor. Still fast and fluid gaming action.
Battery life is actually on the disappointing side with it just getting about 8 – 10 hours max. I tested it with 2 e-mail accounts, Twitter, Facebook and phones calls. Probably the change it processor could be the cause of the lower battery life than from other Galaxy S2 phones. Call quality is good with clear audio coming from both ends of the call. Overall the software package is still solid with just a tad bit of lag that is only noticeable if you have used other Samsung Galaxy S II phones.
Overall
Even with some minor gripes the T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S2 is one of the best Android smartphone on T-Mobile With its great hardware package and solid software offerings there isn’t much competition out there for it besides the HTC Amaze 4G. Plus when HSPA+ 42 Mbps comes to your area you’ll have one of the fasted smartphones for data in the market.
Comments