Samsung Galaxy S II
The Samsung Galaxy S II is a touchscreen-enabled, slate-format Android smartphone developed and marketed by Samsung Electronics, as the second smartphone of the Samsung Galaxy S series. It has additional software features, expanded hardware, and a redesigned physique compared to its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S. The S II was launched with 2.3.4 "Gingerbread", with updates to Android 4.1.2 "Jelly Bean".
Samsung unveiled the S II on 13 February 2011 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. 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 processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 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, 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 is supported, allowing users to plug an external storage device, such as a USB flash drive or a portable hard disk drive. 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.
The Galaxy S II was popular and a huge success both critically and commercially, selling 3 million units within its first 55 days on the market. It was succeeded by the Galaxy S III in May 2012.
The S II currently has the largest number of known Android releases, shipping with Android 2.3.4 and being upgradable to Android 13.
Release
The Galaxy S II was given worldwide release dates starting from May 2011, by more than 140 vendors in some 120 countries. On 9 May 2011, Samsung announced that they had received pre-orders for 3 million Galaxy S II units globally.Some time after the device's release, Samsung also released a variation of the phone known as the Galaxy R, which uses a Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset.
Another variant of the S II, called the Galaxy S II Touch Epic, was announced in August 2011 and was released on September that same year. The phone was available via Sprint, and has a bigger capacity battery than the original S II. It was heavier than the original S II, at 130g.
Samsung also reportedly donated Galaxy S IIs to several developers of the custom Android distribution CyanogenMod.
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 South 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. In February 2013, Samsung began rolling out an update to Android 4.1.2 "Jelly Bean" for the device.The S II employs the TouchWiz 4.0 user interface, following the same principle as TouchWiz 3.0 found on the Galaxy S, with new improvements, such as hardware acceleration. It also has an optional gesture-based interaction called "motion" which allows users to zoom in and out by placing two fingers on the screen and tilting the device towards and away from themselves to zoom in and out respectively. This gesture function works on both the web browser and the images in gallery used within this device. "Panning" on TouchWiz 4.0 allows the movement of widgets and icons shortcuts between screens, by allowing the device to be held and moved from side to side to scroll through home screens. This gesture-based management of widgets is a new optional method next to the existing method of holding and swiping between home screens. The Android 4.1 update backports the TouchWiz Nature interface and other features from the Galaxy S III, such as Direct Call, Pop-up Play, Smart Stay, and Easy Mode.
Four new Samsung Hub applications were revealed at the 2011 MWC: Social Hub, which integrates popular social networking services into one place rather than in separate applications, Readers Hub, providing the ability to access, read and download online newspapers, ebooks and magazines from a worldwide selection, Music Hub an application store for downloading and purchasing music tracks on the device, and Game Hub an application store for downloading and purchasing games. Additional applications include Kies 2.0, Kies Air, AllShare, Voice Recognition, Google Voice Translation, Google Maps with Latitude, Places, Navigation and Lost Phone Management, Adobe Flash 16.7, QuickOffice application and 'QuickType' by Swype.
Before launch, it was announced that Samsung had taken steps to incorporate Enterprise software for business users, which included On Device Encryption, Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN, device management, Cisco WebEx, Juniper, and secure remote device management from Sybase.
The Galaxy S II comes with support for many multimedia file formats and codecs. For audio it supports FLAC, WAV, Vorbis, MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, MID, AC3, XMF. For video formats and codecs it supports MPEG-4, H.264, H.263, DivX HD/XviD, VC-1, 3GP, WMV as well as AVI ), MKV, FLV and the Sorenson codec. For H.264 playback, the device natively supports 8-bit encodes along with up to 1080p HD video playback.
Unofficially, the Galaxy S II can run Android 13, which is the last version of Android to support the ARMv7 architecture.
Hardware and design
Chipsets
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 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 Galaxy S. The Exynos 4 Dual 45 nm uses ARM's Mali-400 MP GPU. This graphics GPU, supplied by ARM, is a move away from the PowerVR GPU of the Galaxy S.The Exynos 4210 supports ARM's SIMD engine, and may give a significant performance advantage in critical performance situations such as accelerated decoding for many multimedia codecs and formats.
The Mali 400 GPU in the Exynos 4210 SoC is one of the only, if not the only GPU powering Android devices, that does not support GL_RGB Framebuffer Objects, only GL_RGBA. A revised Galaxy S II, based on the PowerVR SGX540, does not exhibit the issue.
At the 2011 Game Developers Conference ARM's representatives demonstrated 60 Hz framerate playback in stereoscopic 3D running on the same Mali-400 MP and Exynos SoC. They said that an increased framerate of 70 Hz would be possible through the use of an HDMI 1.4 port.
The Motorola Atrix advertised in June 2011 that it was "the world's most powerful smartphone"; in August 2011 the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the Atrix was not as powerful as Galaxy S II due to its faster processor.
A newer Galaxy S II variant uses a 1.2 GHz dual core TI OMAP 4430 processor with PowerVR SGX540 graphics.
Storage and RAM
The Galaxy S II has 1 GB of dedicated RAM and up to 32 GB of internal mass storage. Within the battery compartment there is an external microSD card slot capable of recognizing and using a 32 GB microSDHC memory card.Display
The Galaxy S II uses a WVGA Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen that is covered by Gorilla Glass with an oleophobic fingerprint-resistant coating. The display is an upgrade of its predecessor, and the "Plus" signifies that the display panel has done away with PenTile matrix to regular RGB matrix display which results in a 50% increase in sub-pixels. This translates to grain reduction and sharper images and text. In addition, Samsung has claimed that Super AMOLED Plus displays are 18% more power efficient than the older Super AMOLED displays. Some phones have display issues, with a few users reporting a "yellow tint" on the left bottom edge of the display when a neutral grey background is displayed.Audio
The Galaxy S II uses Yamaha audio hardware. The Galaxy S II's predecessor, the original Galaxy S, used Wolfson's WM8994 DAC. User feedback on Internet forums as well as an in-depth review at Clove, have expressed the Yamaha chip's inferior sound quality compared to that of the Wolfson chip featured in the original Galaxy S.Camera
On the back of the device is an 8-megapixel Back-illuminated sensor camera with single-LED flash that can record videos in full high-definition 1080p at 30 frames per second.It is the first mobile phone by Samsung that is able to record videos in full high-definition.
There is also a fixed focus front-facing 2-megapixel camera for video calling, taking photos as well as general video recording, with a maximum resolution of 640x480.