TouchWiz

Android 4.0 may underpin every interaction you have with the Galaxy S III, but Samsung has diligently skinned almost everything about the operating system. The only break from the norm is that I don’t actually mind that fact. TouchWiz, particularly in this latest iteration, is the only Android OEM skin that I feel I can live with over the long term. As excellent a device as the HTC One X is, Sense 4 pretty much forces you to install Apex Launcher in order to restore some of Android’s sanity and visual consistency. This Nature UX-branded version of TouchWiz doesn’t invite such feelings of dread. I wouldn’t describe it as pretty nor particularly efficient — the space saved by moving the soft Android keys into the bottom bezel has been taken up by vast spaces between icons on the home screen — but plenty of its changes are actually for the better.

Samsung has clung on to the Android menu button, which turns out to be a good thing

The primary advantage here is a somewhat counterintuitive one. Samsung has broken with Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich not only in replacing the soft Android keys with its tried and trusted combination of capacitive and physical buttons, but also in its choice of functions. Instead of a dedicated multitasking key, the Galaxy S III retains a context-dependent menu button. Multitasking has been relegated to a long press of the home button. In regular use, I found this to be the most sensible way to arrange those keys, better than even Google’s own solution. Moving the multitasking thumbnails from left to right is also helpful to right-handed users, who can now reach them more easily.

Other improvements over stock Android 4.0 include a set of quick toggles in the slide-down notifications tray plus the aforementioned trash icon shortcut in the gallery app and quick access to granular volume control. The app launcher is refreshingly sparse, carrying no aesthetic baggage and giving you total control: you can hide unwanted apps, rearrange the grid to your liking, or switch to a list view. It does help that entering and exiting that menu is done with scintillating fluidity thanks to the excellent processor inside the Galaxy S III. That power is also harnessed on the lock screen, where the default unlocking animation is a water ripple — pretty much the only evidence I could find of Samsung’s supposed Nature UX, that really is a soulless branding exercise.

Some old TouchWiz favorites are still here, such as swiping a contact’s name one way to call and another way to message. You can do that on the contacts list or from within the messaging app. It’s not entirely consistent with Google’s effort in Android 4.0 to make lateral swipes the central method for dismissing items — as witnessed in the multitasking overview and notifications tray, both present on the Galaxy S III — but I find those shortcuts useful to have anyway. Getting to grips with them just might not be as quick and intuitive as a thoroughly coherent UI.

On the topic of intuitiveness, I’m sure there’s a way to alter the four quick-launch icons present on the lock screen, but after two full days with the Galaxy S III, I’ve still not managed to dig deep enough into the configuration menus to figure out how that’s done. That’s not helped by Samsung customizing the entire settings menu.

Underneath all the Samsung spit-polish, you’ll still find the core strengths of Android’s latest version, including the updated Gmail client, compatibility with Chrome for Android, detailed data and battery usage charts, and simply all-around better performance. The Calendar app has been eschewed in favor of Samsung’s own S Planner, which I consider a move in the wrong direction.

Two other aspects of the user experience are troublesome. Firstly, there are still bugs in the UI that have not been ironed out — when waking the phone, you’re sometimes greeted by a quick glimpse of the last home screen you were on before the lock screen appears, and at other times you have to wait for a weirdly long time for anything to show up. That detracts from the otherwise very quick navigation on offer from the Galaxy S III. The second pain point is that you can’t create folders by dragging icons atop one another — you have to pick up an app from the app launcher, drag it to a dedicated "Create folder" link and only then place that folder on your home screen. Don’t ask me why that is the way it is.

Added functionality

Although the lock screen is bereft of any music playback controls, it can be used to pause anything you’re listening to — just by placing the palm of your hand over the display. The same action works when playing back video as well, while a lateral swipe of your palm across the screen will take a screenshot. Both are part of Samsung’s deluge of motion controls, though they’re arguably the only ones that will get any consistent use after the initial surge of curiosity.

One truly unique feature to the Galaxy S III is the introduction of a picture-in-picture (Samsung calls it "Pop up play") option. It’s available with any video you have on the phone, allowing you to keep watching it in a small, repositionable window atop the usual phone interface. I still haven’t made up my mind whether I consider this a gimmick or not, though there’s no denying that it’s highly impressive in technical terms.

Treading the fine line between feature and gimmick

S Beam is Samsung’s enhancement of the standard Android Beam in ICS. With Android Beam, you can transfer small packets of information NFC-capable devices, but with S Beam you can use the NFC connection to initiate a Wi-Fi Direct linkup between the Galaxy S III and another compatible device to transfer far bigger files. There are two problems with this. Firstly, I’ve yet to see Android Beam work reliably, and my attempts to send an image and a Maps location over from the GS III to the HTC One X were met with resolute failure. I was only able to successfully transfer a contact card between the two phones. The second issue is simply one of scarcity — the only phone you can have S Beam relations with at the moment is another Galaxy S III. Hence, equipped with only one review device, I haven’t been able to test out the reliability of that function.

More tweaks from Samsung include the ability to Direct Call a contact you’re composing a text message to by just lifting the phone to your ear, and a Smart Alert that will vibrate the phone when you pick it up after an extended period of idleness to inform you of missed calls or unread messages. The former has a spectacularly narrow set of legitimate use scenarios, but works, for what that’s worth, and the latter misleads more often than it helps, making me think I only just received a new message or email.

The branding is confusing, but the functions themselves are pretty straightforward

Smart Stay is yet another software feature to be granted its own marketing name. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary — the front-facing camera tracks your eyes and if it identifies that you’re still looking at the handset when not interacting with it, it won’t switch the display off at the usual screen timeout time. Put the phone down on a desk so that it can’t see your eyes directly or try using it in the dark and Smart Stay becomes decidedly dumb. I’m not begrudging the inclusion of this feature, it’s reliable most of the time and has its uses, but Samsung didn’t need to overstate its intelligence the way it did during that dizzying press event earlier this month.

The additions of Flipboard and the bonus Dropbox storage are the only major concessions to third-party software providers, serving to augment Samsung’s in-house solutions. There was a rumor of a Samsung S Cloud only storage service ahead of the Galaxy S III launch, however that hasn’t materialized. At least not yet.

S Voice

Say hello to Siri for Android, as produced by Samsung. If you harbored any doubt as to whether or not Samsung ripped off Apple’s voice assistant, let it go now. That’s not to suggest that Apple invented voice commands on mobile phones — Samsung had the Vlingo-powered Voice Talk on the Galaxy S II — but the look and feel of this application takes so much inspiration from Apple’s effort on the iPhone 4S as to deserve being labelled a clone. Not that any of this matters a great deal — neither Siri nor S Voice is good enough in its present incarnation.

If you have to repeat or correct yourself, you might as well use more conventional means to achieve your goal

S Voice consistently chews up my words when I try asking it questions, although it works better when instructed to schedule an appointment or set an alarm. It can also be used as an unlocking mechanism once you pre-record a pass phrase. That adds to the face unlocking option that’s native to Android 4.0 in being frustratingly unwieldy and planted firmly within gimmick territory — more than once I was stuck repeating "hello" without any recognition from the phone.

The state of these voice control apps reminds of the Hulk movie starring Eric Bana and The Matrix Reloaded — both were released in 2003, during a time when the enthusiasm for integrating computer-generated graphics into action scenes was that little bit too far ahead of the best technology available. Though both films represented the state of the art in their time, they have aged terribly since then and shown the folly of using technology for a purpose it’s not fully ready to fulfill. That’s what both S Voice and Siri are to me — exhibitions of technology that can potentially become central to how you use your phone, but presently too constrained and unpolished to truly perform that role. In short, just because voice control on your phone now has a brand name attached to it doesn’t mean that it’s actually worth using.

Kies Air

If you want to sync up the Galaxy S III with your Mac via a wired connection, you’ll need the Android File Transfer app. Windows is rather easier, though on the Mac I had a problem getting the AFT application to recognize this handset and fell back to an old favorite by downloading Kies Air from the Play Store. This app doesn’t ship on the Galaxy S III, replaced by something called Kies via Wi-Fi that doesn’t work nearly as well, but Samsung gets the credit for creating it nonetheless.

Kies Air requires that your computer and Samsung smartphone are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, then gives you a URL to punch into your desktop browser, and asks you authorize yourself once you’ve tried accessing the phone’s storage in that way. Once in there, you’ve got a litany of options, including downloading and uploading files, checking and updating your calendar, and making changes to your contacts, messages, bookmarks, and ringtones. For extra security, you can lock some of these categories on the phone so that they’re not accessible from the remote computer.

The best method for wirelessly syncing your phone with a computer, bar none

I managed to pull a song out of my music collection and turn it into my phone’s ringtone within seconds. I also used this method to download all the sample photography shot with the Galaxy S III, which happened in the background while I continued using the device. Is there a better way to wirelessly sync a smartphone? Not to my knowledge.

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