AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II review

Is the Samsung Galaxy S II the best of the bunch? And can it compete with the iPhone?

The Samsung Galaxy S II (GT-I9100) is a smartphone running under the Android operating system that was announced by Samsung on February 13, 2011 at the Mobile World Congress. It is the successor to the Samsung Galaxy S, with a different appearance and significantly improved hardware. The Galaxy S II was one of the slimmest smartphones of the time, mostly 8.49 mm thick, except for two small bulges of 9.91 mm.
This time, things are a smidge different. Whereas Sprint opted to enlarge the screen and add in a few other select design tweaks, it appears that AT&T wanted to keep its variant appropriately named the Galaxy S II, The question every manufacturer of a non-Apple smartphone on AT&T has to answer is “why buy this over an iPhone?” For Samsung and most other Android handset makers, the answer is a big, bright screen, fast speeds, and all the Google integration you could want. Manufacturers are flooding the carrier with similar phones, hoping to catch buyers’ eyes with something. As close to the international smash hit as possible, opting for the same display size, squared corners and battery (albeit, with a twist).

The Galaxy S II has a 1.2 GHz dual-core "Exynos" system on a chip (SoC) processor,[7] 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 full 1080p high definition video recording. As it turns out, the tweaks are much more subtle than they were on last year's Samsung Captivate, which arguably looked almost nothing like the original Galaxy S. Samsung’s original Galaxy S was one of AT&T’s best smartphones, and managed to attract a lot of buyers — and now the Galaxy S II ($199.99 with contract) is here.

The phone employs the latest proprietary Samsung TouchWiz 4.0 user interface. It follows the same principle as TouchWiz 3.0 found on the previous Galaxy but adds new improvements, such as hardware acceleration. It’s got a big, 4.3-inch screen, connects to AT&T’s HSPA+ network, and has a super-fast Samsung processor. But is that enough to compete with the iPhone? Is it enough to be the best Android phone on AT&T, or even Samsung’s best? Read on to find out.

Additionally there is another new optional gesture-based control called 'panning' on TouchWiz 4.0 for 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.