A lovely customisable phone but useless at the same time

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Samsung Galaxy S2
★★★★☆
3.9
79.0% of users recommend this
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Guest's review of Samsung Galaxy S2

“A lovely customisable phone but useless at the same time”

★★☆☆☆

written by on 13/06/2012

I own both an Iphone 4S and a galaxy S2 and prefer the Iphone by far.
The Samsung is not a bad phone, it is in fact very good. the customisation options are fantastic, the openness of the handset returns me to a day whereby I could happily choose a ringtone myself without buying it for a few quid from some capitalist regime somewhere on foreign shores.
The problems lie in the fact that the Iphone although fascist in nature is also very easy to use as a phone.
The Samsungs texting in particular is awful, it auto adjusts everything to complete nonsense and I spend 5 minutes per text tidying up the mistakes that my Iphone doesn't make. I can reel off a text on my 4S and repeat it on the S2 moments later to an outcome of unintelligible nonsense. I'm is one it loves to mess up with and "I'm running late" always becomes "Important running late" and that's just one example of the rubbish it churns out that the Iphone corrects for me.
Calling people is also a chore, the contacts list is fiddly, and when you make a call the screen turns itself off to avoid you pressing a key by mistake (very clever) till the call ends and you remove the phone from your cheek to be greeted by a blank screen and you then have to press an array of buttons to get to the point of cancelling the call that is still in progress.
The Applications are far less polished than the Apple offerings as well - just look at the auto trader apps on both devices for a brief example.
The android one looks coded by a 12 year old in their bedroom whilst the apple one looks fairly pro.
There was a huge applause for the release of the ICS operating system which in my opinion did pretty much nothing special at all to the handset apart from fill it up with a few hundred megabytes of wasted space.
It also feels fairly cheap and not very well made though the screen is gorgeous and massive.

Overall I do like the phone regardless of the above bashing, I like its open nature and I like the less corpy feel of the device. There are several features though that I really hate - Texting being the major one.

If you are of a certain age then the Iphone is more C64 and the S2 is more Speccy 48k.

I prefer my 4S but I will persevere with the S2 as I still have great hopes for it.




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