Samsung Galaxy SII review | Phone Reviews | Price | Specifications

The Samsung Galaxy S II is a touchscreen-enabled, slate-format Android smartphone designed, developed, and marketed by Samsung Electronics. It sees additional software features, expanded hardware, and a redesigned physique than its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S, and was succeeded by the Samsung Galaxy S III in May 2012.The device was launched with Android 2.3 "Gingerbread", updates to Android 4.0.4 "Ice Cream Sandwich",and will update to Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean".

Samsung unveiled the S II on 13 February 2011 at the Mobile World Congress It was one of the slimmest smartphones of the time, mostly 8.49 mm thick, except for two small bulges which take the maximum thickness of the phone to 9.91 mm. The Galaxy S II has a 1.2 GHz dual-core "Exynos" system on a chip (SoC) processor,1 GB of RAM, a 10.8 cm (4.3 in) WVGA Super AMOLED Plus screen display and an 8-megapixel camera with flash and 1080p full high definition video recording. It is one of the first devices to offer a Mobile High-definition Link (MHL), which allows up to 1080p uncompressed video output to an MHL enabled TV or to an MHL to HDMI adapter, while charging the device at the same time. USB On-The-Go (USB OTG) is supported.

The user-replaceable battery gives up to ten hours of heavy usage, or two days of lighter usage.According to Samsung, the Galaxy S II is capable of providing 9 hours of talk time on 3G and 18.3 hours on 2G.

Samsung Galaxy S 2 I9100 (Noble Black) Price: Rs.25900 

Key Features

• Android v2.3 (Gingerbread) OS
• 4.27-inch Super AMOLED Plus Touchscreen
• 8 MP Primary Camera
• 2 MP Secondary Camera
• 1.2 GHz Dual Core ARM Cortex A9 Processor
• Full HD Recording
• Expandable Storage Capacity of 32 GB

Features

Software and services

The Galaxy S II was launched with Android 2.3 "Gingerbread". American variants began shipments with the slightly-updated version 2.3.5 installed.Version 2.3.6 was made globally available on 12 December 2011.On 13 March 2012, Samsung began to roll out upgrades to Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich" through their phone management software KIES to users in Korea, Hungary, Poland and Sweden. Russian users received the update on 5 July 2012, while the rest of Europe received it on 1 August 2012.The Galaxy S II will receive the Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" update, along with Samsung's new TouchWiz Nature UX software.

Hardware and design

The Galaxy S II has a 1.2 GHz dual core ARM Cortex-A9 processor that uses Samsung's own 'Exynos 4210' System on a chip (SoC) that was previously code-named "Orion". The Exynos branded SoC was the source of much speculation concerning another branded successor to the previous "Hummingbird" single-core SoC of the Samsung Galaxy S. The Exynos 4 Dual 45 nm (previously Exynos 4210) uses ARM's Mali-400 MP GPU. This graphics GPU, supplied by ARM, is a move away from the PowerVR GPU of the Samsung Galaxy S.

The Exynos 4210 supports ARM's SIMD engine (also known as Media Processing Engine, or 'NEON' instructions), and may give a significant performance advantage in critical performance situations such as accelerated decoding for many multimedia codecs and formats (e.g., On2's VP6/7/8 or Real formats).

Variants

Galaxy S II LTE variants - Models GT-I9210/T, SHV-E110S and SHV-E120S

Announced on 28 August 2011, the Galaxy S II LTE, Galaxy S II LTE EU (GT-I9210, Samsung Celox) and Galaxy S II HD LTE mobile phones are part of the Galaxy S II family. They run on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, have 16 GB of internal memory, and feature a Snapdragon APQ8060 1.5 GHz dual-core processor. The S II LTE has a 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display. The S II HD LTE features a 4.65-inch high-definition Super AMOLED display, offering a screen of 720x1280 pixels – 720p HD resolution. Both of these variants have NFC enabled.

Galaxy S II - Model GT-I9100G

The Samsung Galaxy S II GT-I9100G was released in late 2011, and is usually sold instead of the original GT-I9100 in certain markets (mostly Asia and some parts of Europe). An overview of the Samsung Galaxy S II GT-I9100G can be seen on Samsung's official website. It features a Texas  Instruments OMAP4430 SoC instead of the Exynos in the GT-I9100. It is visually identical to the GT-I9100, as well as having the same 1.2 GHz processor speed and dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor technology. However, the CPU processing core is of a different design and the GPU is replaced by a PowerVR SGX 540 graphics processor. While practically equivalent, the different SoC makes this variant incompatible with custom ROMs intended for the I9100. It has gained support for aftermarket firmwares such as CyanogenMod 9.