Few weeks ago, my faithful phone, HTC Desire-Z got stolen during a commotion in a restaurant. It was late at night and I could not get a replacement until the next evening. I was without my phone for almost 20 hours and life was so meaningless.
Office hour ends and it's time to shop for a new phone. I was in Digital Mall, PJ walking around for look for a replacement. Initially, I wanted to get a phone with QWERTY but the option was so limited. Phone manufacturers are not focusing in making phone with keyboard anymore. The one that caught my attention is the Droid 4 from Motorola but nobody is selling it over here.
After strolling for while and given up hope to get a keyboard Android phone, my choices boiled down to either HTC One X (RM1899), Samsung Galaxy 2 (RM1499) or Samsung Galaxy 3 (RM2199). Obviously, the Samsung Galaxy 3 is the hype and the most handsome of the lot. The 4.8" HD Super AMOLED make it stands out among the competition and it has with a quad core processor! It has 2 more cores than the notebook that I have been using for work. If the iPhone 3 is more powerful than the computers used to launch Apollo to the space, the computing power in Galaxy S3 could send the same shuttle to the far end galaxy.
To cut the story short, I ended up with a used unit of Samsung Galaxy 2 due to budget constraint. In fact, the older Samsung Galaxy 2 is not too far behind the newer Galaxy 3. It has a 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus screen and a dual core 1.2GHz processor with sleeker body design.
It got me quite a while to get comfortable with the soft keyboard. I have tried Swype which is the best soft keyboard but I still prefer to have a QWERTY keyboard. For the first few days, I was having fun navigating the gorgeous screen with tremendous level of smoothness. Then problem came, the phone hung once in a while, overheating and the battery life was so bad. The phone consume half one the juice when I was sleeping for 6 hours!
Life was so meaningless again as I thought I have gotten a lemon this time. Not giving up, I tried to troubleshoot the phone and found an official software update. It is the Ice Cream Sandwich! Ran a last backup and press the "update" button. Everything was done in about half and hour. Hooray!
I observed the phone performance for the next few days and it does not give me anymore problem. The ICS upgrade has fixed the battery life problem, overheating and the stability issue. I have not rebooted my phone for the past few weeks.
There are temptations to get the newer Galaxy 3 but it does not make a lot of difference in user experience at the moment. The Galaxy 2 is still a good all rounder. It is not a big upgrade for somebody that already has a Galaxy 2. Perhaps if you have an older phone and looking for an upgrade, the Galaxy 3 is a good upgrade. The telco company is running a lot of promotion for the S3 and you could get it as cheap as RM699 from Maxis with a 24 months lock in period.
