A Super Phone Contender No. 2

THE FLASHBACK

Ever since the entrance of the Apple iPhone on the smartphone market, it already had the lion’s share of everything- from the monumental hype, the advertising blitz, up to the massive sales. It owned the lock stock and barrel of airtime, and relevant statistics: The Apple iPhone was not merely another smartphone: It was THE phone of the millennium.

Inadvertently, this is certainly bad news for a heap of smartphone manufacturers in the industry. Apple- they know- is the tech juggernaut to prepare battle for; all others could only assemble the armada for the main enemy vessel, the antidote for the poison, and the epoxy clay to the leaking pipes. But the entire landscape becomes a solid terrain of iterative blows to and from each company, yet in the end, it is still the Apple iPhone which always emerges victorious. It is an action-packed movie which fixates on one story denouement alone- Apple’s longstanding success!

The filmography is fairly recurrent: Apple releases a new iPhone model, and other companies will ramble and scurry to create the next resisting force against it- a gizmo with equivalent style and chutzpah. The buzz can be intense, but after the hype doesn’t leer long enough, it will just gather a collective cold shoulder from the consumers and media. It will serve as ‘white elephants’ that fill the downcast shelves of the local electronics stores.

The challenge has gone up, and surprisingly, not one company ever said, “Die!”

True enough, after the gigantic survival success of the Samsung Galaxy S II, the company had enough courage to assume a higher altitude than the downward spiral or a tragic nose dive it must have led itself to in the past. Samsung fully anticipates good scorecards by following it up with another whack to Apple’s unprecedented feats.

THE FORESHADOWING

Lo and behold, the Super Phone contender no. 2- the Samsung Galaxy S III!

For starters, the initial verdict mostly lies on its size. Galaxy S III garners an A+ in the Hefty Phones Department. Though it isn’t necessarily big and heavy, the first thing that hits you is its ‘ginormous’ (a portmanteau of gigantic and enormous) 4.8 inch screen. Mind you, this feature automatically supersedes the ‘3.5’ benchmark for wide-screen smartphones. It has an HD Super AMOLED screen- much like the iPhone 4S- which offers resolution and viewing experience beyond expectations.

Samsung is confident that people will be open to the idea of superb web-browsing and video-watching experience in exchange of a little portability. Juxtaposing it with Galaxy S2, S III adds 12mm in height and 5mm in width more to its body. Nonetheless, its ergonomics wouldn’t suggest you are holding Samsung’s Galaxy Note.

Camera-wise, it’s not yet achieved a beefed up version of the current industry standard of ‘8-megapixels’. So far, only one smartphone has reached this zenith of photographic hyperboles- and that’s the 41 MP Nokia 808 Pureview. And so far, we have no news about what happened to its existence.

Its processor is also something not to trifle with. It packs the same quad-core processor found in the phenomenal HTC One X. You can also choose from different storage capacities: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. A perk that the purchase entails is a free 50GB online storage in Dropbox for two years (iCloud obviously has some tough rivalry).

Then again, the Samsung Galaxy S3 isn’t all glitz and glamor: It also has some thorns- a ‘catty whompus’- among its petals: the 1GB of RAM that was a little bit neglected since the S2. However, it is still at par with the HTC One X- the only other quadcore phone on the market to date.

Apart from these sterling qualities, Samsung has finally made a counterattack against Apple iPhone’s Siri. S Voice isn’t as competent as Siri because it alternately functions as a way to launch and control the apps. It definitely does not undermine Siri’s place, but it is as nifty as one expects it to be.

For sure, Samsung Galaxy S III will be a hit. We sure hope that Samsung will translate the resplendence of its new ‘Super Phone’ to something interpretable to the people who seem too disobedient to pivot their heads for equally competitive smartphone around.