Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III review - Hardware

Hardware

You are on Guru3D, so we do tend to look at hardware at the very least a little bit. Samsung used the new Exynos 4412 quad-core processor for the S3, it is clocked at a frequency of 1.4 GHz which is high alright. The Exynos 4412 quad-core processor comprises of Cortex-A9 CPU cores with Mali GPU co processors and is offered with 1GB RAM and 16GB of internal storage (our tested model), this can be further expanded to another 64GB via a microSD card.

The S3 sports a rear-facing 8 megapixel flash camera with 1080p video playback and a secondary front-facing camera. OS wise the latest Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) is used. Our review sample has ICS 4.0.4 installed.

Weight then, we measured with the help of a good old professional kitchen scale, weight in Grams is 134 grams including the battery. Overall dazzling specs of course, the phone will certainly be able to run all modern apps and hopefully with the new 2.100 mAh battery also has a little more lifetime in it.

Much like the release of the initial Galaxy S and Galaxy S II Samsung has once again introduced a new SOC. In tech land we call it an SOC, system on a chip.

Where the Galaxy S had a single core SOC, the SII had a dual-core SOC and as mentioned in the 1st paragraph already with model III comes a quad-core SOC, the 32nm fab based Exynos 4412 to be precise. The Exynos 4412 has a lot in common with the dual core 4410 that the Galaxy S II is using -- both based on the A9 Cortex processor design. Both products also come with a Mali 400 graphics processor.

The 4412 as used in the Galaxy S III has its four processor cores running at 1.4 GHz. The four Mali 400 graphics cores tied to them are clocked at 400 MHz. In bold comparison graphics wise that means the GPU should be roughly twice as fast as the Galaxy S II which had two Mali cores running at 266 MHz.

Once you play around with it for a minute you'll be convinced, it is among the most smooth smartphones you'll have fooled around with. Really, you'll notice it straight away. Swiping between home screens and launching apps feels faster and smoother than any tablet I've ever had my hands on.

Games used on the Galaxy S III actually run really good as well thanks to the quad Mali cores running at 400 MHz. Obviously, you are going back into time games wise, say going back ten years when gaming just started.

So all in all the S III should be about twice as fast as the S II, but that's all relative of course. Video playback wise you can play back Full HD media (1,080p). The video decoder supports Divx 3, DivX 4, DivX 5, DivX 6, DivX HD, h.263, h.264, Mpeg 4, xvid file container formats.