Galaxy S2 Review Part 1

This is my first android phone and first real 'Smartphone' Before this phone I had a variety of 'dumbphones' and 2 iPod Touch's. It is around 5 months after I got this phone and this is my review of the software, performance and battery life. My family owns many apple products including two iPhones 4s and 4, 1 iPad 2nd gen, 3 iPod touches so comparisons will inevitably be drawn

Ice Cream Sandwich

This is the latest and greatest of Google's android software (4.0). I flashed it about a week ago thanks to the great help over at XDA Developers. So far it is a marked improvement from Gingerbread (2.3), the uniform menus and minimalistic feel really improves over the slightly random assortment of menus and colours in Gingerbread. Performance is also much smoother with everything now being GPU accelerated, this leads to a truly enjoyable experience. Don't get me wrong, Gingerbread was great but this really is a step up and in the right direction. The experience is butter smooth on the S2 and the increased screen size compared to 'i' products is very welcome.


My Set Up

Personally I run a decently customised Go Launcher EX screeshots are below. I find that it feels more intuitive than touchwiz and gives me much more customizability.

Performance


I used to run an overclocked and undervolted version of Gingerbread with a custom kernel but stock rom. This gave me some pretty incredible results in benchmarks.


Browsermark (ICS) 140698
Browsermark Gingerbread 80000
Antutu 7502
Smartbench 3586, 2069
M3D benchmark L.R.V 36.50 average, 42.35 current
CF-Bench 15343, 4569, 8878
Vellamo 1234
Quadrant (Non dual core) 7071
Linpack Multi thread 127.104
Basemark 2.0 Taiji Free 58.10

I haven't had a chance to run any stock ICS benchmarks (Apart from browsermark) so far and I can't overclock until Samsung releases the sources.

Battery Life


In Gingerbread I managed to get great battery life from the phone averaging around 20 hours of use with the phone. That consisted of around 4 hours web browsing, 2 hours video, 1 hour youtube, 12 pictures and some music listening. This was great as I have two batteries so one is always charging as the others are in use. This is better than the battery life that my family members achieve with their various iDevices that are constantly seeking a socket to be plugged into (Excluding the iPad).

Wrap Up


So this is a great phone and I would highly recommend purchasing it, however I would advise you to wait as a whole slew of new android devices are soon to hit the market including the rumored successor to this model. However if they turn out to be far too expensive this phone will be a great cheaper alternative. Look out for the next part of this review on the camera and hardware!