Samsung Galaxy S III Review

Samsung launched the S III under one name on every US carrier at once, from $199.99 on contract and $549.99 outright, and that decision, backed by an advertising budget aimed squarely at people queueing for iPhones, is how it sold more than fifty million. The phone earned it. The Exynos 4412 quad core made the international model the fastest Android of 2012; the US got a dual core Snapdragon S4 with 2GB of RAM for the sake of LTE, and lost almost nothing.

The 4.8-inch 720p Super AMOLED was a PenTile panel, and against the HTC One X's LCD it looked coarse up close, but the contrast and the size set the template for everything that followed. The 8 megapixel camera had zero shutter lag and a burst mode, and in daylight it matched the iPhone 4S. The gimmicks, S Voice, Smart Stay, Pop up Play, were mostly filler, but S Beam over NFC and Wi-Fi Direct actually worked.

Two things dent the record. Early 16GB international units suffered the sudden death bug, an eMMC firmware fault that bricked phones in their sleep until Samsung patched it in 2013, and the Android 4.3 update was so broken it was pulled and reissued. The 1GB international model stopped at 4.3; the 2GB US models reached KitKat. Removable battery, microSD, 'designed for humans'. It was the peak of plastic Samsung, and the hardware never felt as good as it worked.