samsung galaxy s3 – a short review

I got my hands on a Samsung Galaxy S III (or SGS3 or I9300) recently and I must say, it is a very impressive piece of technology. However it also has its flaws that pop up occasionally and which should not be present in a smart phone carrying this price tag. Before you consider of getting an SGS3, you should be made aware of these bugs which are hopefully only software bugs and can be fixed by future updates. Till then the proud owner of an SGS3 has to live with the workarounds provided here. Hopefully Samsung does not drop its premium customers like a hot potato as it happened with the Galaxy S1. It took around a year before Froyo came onto the S1, which was already outdated by that time.

Currently there are three flaws:

Battery charging

To adapt my solar charger to the new phone, some changes were necessary to make the phone to believe that it gets charged by a wall charger. After the modification, the phone drew only 60mA at 5V from the charger. Assuming the battery is very low and considering the capacity of the battery of 2100mAh, it will take 35h to charge the battery not including the power that is required for normal operation. This is unacceptable. However after checking through the charger assuming that something went wrong, I switched off the phone and suddenly it drew 900mA through the charger. This is probably a software bug which will be fixed in an update. In fact on the same day I updated the phone and since then, this problem did not occur any more.

If you have the same problem, shut down or reboot your phone. According to posts in forums this fixed the slow charging issue.

[Update 28/07/2012] Since I updated the software of the phone through the official Kies, I have not encountered this problem any more.

Missing Mass Storage Media Mode

It is most convenient to plug in the phone into the USB port of a host machine and to copy some files such as songs, documents, etc. onto the newly detected drive. However with the SGS3 plugged in, no drive, not even a partition shows up. A search revealed that the so called UMS  (USB mass storage device class) mode ahs been removed by Google to give priority to the MTP  (Media Transfer Protocol). Why Google chose to go for a literally proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft for an Linux based Android phone is mysterious. Since I am running Debian Stable, support is not be expected for the next few years. Fortunately there are two solutions to this problem:

1. Using a software such as AndFTP  allows me to transfer files easily through the WiFi connection. However the software becomes buggy and slow, if some 500 files need to be transfered.
2. Using ADB  from the android SDK which allows to push and pull files to and from the phone. USB Debugging needs to be activated to do that. ADB also supports the file and directory transfer recursively. Unfortunately the whole SDK needs to be downloaded just to acquire the command line tool.

“Network disabled. Poor connection”

While connecting the SGS3 to my WiFi card in my laptop which can act as an access point does not pose any problem, hooking up the phone to a proper WiFi hotspot needed more effort. After authentication and acquiring an IP address from the DHCP server, the phone marked the connection as not usable, since the connectivity was too poor. The distance between the AP and the phone was less than a meter and everything else such as SGS1 and laptops, were able to connect to it. Playing around with the settings such as Fragmentation or RTS Threshold or the different intervals (DTIM, Beacon) did not lead to any improvement. However I figured out, if the access to the network is configured in such a way that only a static IP address is required, the phone connects to the same AP effortless. Maybe the reason is that I am using a private network starting with 10.X.X.X/24 instead of the usual 192.168.0.X.