s3 rev 5

Galaxy s3

Review

s3 Review

Video player and audio qaulity:

Samsung have put what is easily the best default video player on the Samsung Galaxy S III. It offers several view modes - grid, list, folders and nearby devices (which accesses DLNA devices).

The grid view is our favorite as it is a true quad-core tour de force - the visible video thumbnails (all eight of them) are actually playing the videos instead of being static images. They play at a reduced framerate, but it's an awesome preview and it shows what can be done when you have processing power to spare.

The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. The same SoundAlive audio-enhancing technology is available here too.

The video player lets you squeeze out the best viewing experience from the large, high-res screen. You can adjust video brightness, color tone and enable outdoor visibility too.

Another cool feature that showcases the power of the Exynos chipset is the chapter preview - it detects chapters in the video and shows a rectangular grid, with live thumbnails (just like the grid view above).

The video player had absolutely no trouble with any of the files we threw at it - starting with .WMV, through .AVI (DivX and XviD) and .MP4 to .MKV (H.264). Resolution wasn't a problem either - the Samsung Galaxy S III played FullHD files. Large files worked seamlessly.

The Samsung Galaxy S III also made a good impression when it offered a list of subtitles and let us pick. Most players look for a file with the exact same name as the video file (save for the extension), which means quite often you have to rename the subtitle file to match the video file just so that the player will show you subtitles.

The video player on the S III has a feature called Pop up play - it moves the video in a small floating window and you can use other apps on the phone while still watching the video. It's the only such feature on the phone, there aren't any floating mini apps like Samsung's tablets have.

The Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III turned out to be one of the most talented musicians around and aced our audio quality test.

The volume levels when the S III is connected to an active external amplifier are hardly spectacular, but the output is perfectly clean with no weak points whatsoever.

Stereo crosstalk did spike when we plugged in a pair of headphones, but that was the only significantly affected reading. An impressive overall performance indeed.