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Why I’m Not Buying the Samsung Galaxy S III

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You may have heard. Samsung has announced its latest Samsung Galaxy smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S III. I can say, without any doubt, that many people will end up buying this smartphone. However, I can also say, without any doubt, on day one, that I will not be one of them.

There are several reasons why this decision came so easy to me and I’ll get to those in a second.

First though, I wanted to touch on some of the things I do like about the Galaxy S III.

Why I'm Not Buying the Samsung Galaxy S IIISamsung got it right with the storage space. It’s going to be offering three different variants. A 16GB model. A 32GB model. And a 64GB model. The Galaxy S III will also come with 50GB of free DropBox cloud storage space.

So, if I were to buy the 64GB model, I’d be getting a phone with 178GB of storage space, at least for the two years that I’d have DropBox. That, as our own Shawn Ingram points out, is a massive amount of space for a smartphone.

I like that.

I also like the fact that it will be 4G LTE capable. It’s impossible for me to think about buying a phone that doesn’t have 4G LTE data speeds. Seriously, once you make the switch from 3G, it’s impossible to go back.

It’ll also have a fantastic processor inside, either the quad-core Exynos from Samsung or a Snapdragon S4 from Qualcomm. The dual-core chip hasn’t been confirmed but I suspect it will be the chip found in the 4G LTE models.

Both are good in my book.

So there are some things to like, but in my opinion, there are way more things that I dislike about the Samsung Galaxy S III.

First of all, a 4.8-inch phone is massive. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus display is way too big for me and it’s 4.65-inches. I can’t imagine owning a phone with a screen size that’s bigger than that. To be clear, my ideal screen size for a smartphone is 4-inches.

Read: Five Things I’d Change About the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The display is also PenTile Matrix in nature. Yes, I get it. It saves battery life. But it also makes things appear less crisp and clear on-screen. It also can’t handle the color white very well which is bothersome.

Second, Samsung hasn’t sold me on any of the bells and whistles that are coming embedded with the software. S Voice and S Beam and Stay Smart all sound nice but I doubt I use any of them.

I own an Android 4.0 smartphone and I’ve never used Android Beam with another Android user. And if I owned an iPhone 4S, I know for a fact that I’d rarely use Siri. S Voice is Samsung’s equivalent of Siri.

Stay Smart, which is Samsung’s eye-tracking solution which shuts the phone off when your eyes are taken off the display sounds cool, but it also seems gimmicky.

It’s not like these are just small pieces to the puzzle either. These are big components in the Galaxy S III experience and quite frankly, it just doesn’t get me excited.

I also found it interesting that Samsung didn’t say anything about TouchWiz. This leads me to believe that it hasn’t done much with the user interface it puts over Android. That’s a shame because I do not care for TouchWiz at all. I don’t like HTC Sense, HTC’s custom user interface either, but Sense is far and away better than TouchWiz.

Third, the Galaxy S III is plastic. Disliked the plastic on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and I will dislike it on the Galaxy S III.

Fourth, I would have loved for Samsung to have pushed the bar camera-wise. The camera on the Galaxy Nexus sucks and I get the feeling that the camera on the Galaxy S III will be so-so. It’s clear that they focused on the social aspect and not the hardware aspect.

I take tons of photos and video on my phone and I can’t buy into anything less than a stellar camera. That’s what intrigues me about HTC’s One X, the camera.

Why I'm Not Buying the Samsung Galaxy S III

Read: Why I’m Buying the HTC One X Instead of the iPhone.

Overall, what I am getting at, is that I just can’t bring myself to be excited about this phone. There isn’t anything here that floors me, that makes me go, “I really want that device.”

Samsung needed something big with the Galaxy S III. Something that would make me look past both iOS 6 and a 4G LTE iPhone, both of which will likely be out later this year.

And I can tell you that just mere hours after seeing the phone and its features that it didn’t.

Do you feel the same way or are you picking up a Samsung Galaxy S III?

14 Comments

14 Comments

  1. MItch

    05/03/2012 at 4:38 pm

    I’d much rather a plastic phone then anything else. If you drop it, nothing happens, just keeps on working. Drop an iphone on the other hand…

    • Danielle

      05/09/2012 at 9:26 pm

      People just need to be more careful with their phones whether they’re cheap plastic or not.

  2. Chris

    05/03/2012 at 4:51 pm

    Definitely. Ive dropped my galaxy so many time and still looks new. Im buying the s3 because it offers the best processor and screen. Once you go amoled you cant go back. This is indeed the most powerful phone ever made.

  3. Hamxa Wasim

    05/04/2012 at 2:22 am

    I got it Check The First Hands On Review Here:
    https://www.mycybertricks.com/Hands-On-sIII

  4. Fernando

    05/04/2012 at 4:40 am

    Personally, the 4.8 inch screen is a great size for me. I have the Galaxy Note now and it rocks!

  5. Renee

    05/04/2012 at 10:31 am

    “…erent variants. A 16GB model. A 32GB model. And a 64GB model. The Galaxy S III will also come with 50GB of free DropBox cloud storage space.

    So, if I were to buy the 64GB model, I’d be getting a phone with 178GB of storage space, at least for the two years that I’d have DropBox.”

    How did you come up with 178 GB of storage space? 64 + 50 = 114 GB

    • Xephyr

      05/07/2012 at 12:53 pm

      64+64gb Micro SD + 50 gb cloud storage.

  6. Jorge Arturo

    05/16/2012 at 11:59 pm

    I also agree with more than 4″ is too big, I want a flagship phone that I can carry in my pocket not being noticed, and that not covers entirely my face

  7. steve jobs

    05/31/2012 at 8:11 pm

    Too bad you didn’t wait for reviews to come out to release your opinion on this.

    The S3 according to all 3rd party reviews has the better camera than the one x.

    Touchwiz is also much more intuitive, fluid, and feature packed than Sense is.

    The plastic on the S3 is the SAME as the plastic on the one x.

    On top of all your misinformation, the S3 has the faster processor, better battery, and larger storage.

  8. Sam Worth

    06/04/2012 at 11:51 pm

    I totally do not agree with most of the points mentioned above. The only reason i won;t be buying the Samsung Galaxy 3 though, is the price. I am in india and they have listed the price ridiculously jigh as reported here: https://phonearenaindia.com/3458/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-arrives-in-india-with-a-price-of-rs-43180

  9. bigyaz

    06/13/2012 at 10:45 am

    Shorter version: “I haven’t seen it, and I don’t have a lot of facts to back this up so I’m really just guessing about a lot of the features, but I know I won’t like it.”

  10. 3dSoftology.com

    07/04/2012 at 2:09 pm

    Great phone, Love the apps, speed and multi-tasking on top on a high res screen. Could not have asked for more.

  11. Pai

    08/27/2012 at 1:21 am

    You are not the only one to have problems with Scamsung products.
    I bought a GT P1000 galaxy tab in april last year. I wish I knew the G stands for Garbage.

    So far, the device has corrupted two SD cards, reset itself on it’s own every second day, rebooted dozens of times per day on it’s own. It used to overheat (~70°C at the threshold of pain to hold it), drain it’s battery while off, wifi problems, call quality issues. . . just about everything.

    The service center experience was terrible. An uneducated lala kind of person operating it, acting like he is doing some charity. I had to call the call center again, ask for a supervisor and verbally threaten him that I would go to consumer court.
    All this just to get my firmware updated?

    Did not solve the problem.

    Neither him nor the call center were ready to take the device back or repair or exchange it. Such cheap bstrds.

    This year, I installed Cyanogen Mod9. This totally fixed all but the wifi and SD card corruption problems.

    Yesterday, Sunday Evening. Enough was enough. It took a screwdriver with a 3 pronged tip, and two credit cards.

    So I opened the device and I was shocked to see that solder job was all corroded in several places. SEVERAL PLACES. Not one or two but several places where the solder is corroded and crumbling away.

    But what can you expect? I guess there are little children sitting Korea or China assembling these in a sweatshop somewhere, committing suicide every now and then.

    So I tossed this device into the garbage truck and never looked back. It is simply impossible to fix such a poorly made device.

    If this were apple, I would have received a replacement at my second complaint. (my ipod classic)

    I also own an iphone 3gs, ipod classic, two laptops (Acer and Asus), and a plethora of other digital devices. This is the first time that I have seen such shit quality of manufacturing. I mean dry solder/loose solder is one thing. But your soldered joints corroding and cumbling away is in a league of it’s own.

    The bstrds had the audacity to take 24Grand from me for it. And could not even manufacture it properly.

    One and a half years of ownership and today I feel better having tossed it in the garbage. Money down the drain. Heartbreaks and frustration over lost data. Embarrassment before friends.

    **********************
    Fun incident that happened to me courtesy of Scamsung :-

    On a flight to the US, the device suddenly overheated after I switched it off before take off.
    Fortunately, the flight attendant was kind and did not think that I am a terrorist. She asked me to keep an eye on it if it starts smoking or melting.
    The guy sitting next to me introduced himself as a professor of management studies, and told me that he has students placed in Samsung. The feedback he has received from them is not positive and he would not recommend that company to any of his students again.
    He thought Nokia makes great products and will be on top soon.

    *********************

    Personally, I love andriod, hate windows mobile, and my iphone “just works” as long as you don’t expect much from it.
    I will buy andriod again, but not samsung.
    Samsung will never get another buck from me.

  12. Sohaib

    01/09/2013 at 3:07 am

    I am never buying a samsung again, simply because my GS3 died 3 weeks ago (Sudden death Syndrome) and I agree with Pai G stands for Garbage
    I owned iphone and HTC before and switched to GS3 just few months ago, and it was a mistake.
    I lost all my data, which it will be very hard to get back,
    I know some smart phones including HTC and apple have some problems, but I have never seen or heard a phone that goes totally off without a warning. What makes it worse, is that Samsung in not even acknowledging the problem. I am not sure what kind of idiots are running their marketing policy. If they don’t respect their costumers in acknowledging their grief how would they expect to survive in the smart phone market?

    I am selling my GS3 as soon as I get it back and switching to HTC

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