T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II Initial Impressions

T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II Initial Impressions

The FedEx man brought me a lovely little gift yesterday: The T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II. This is the last stateside arrival of the Galaxy S II family. The review will take a bit to get out the door, so until then I figured I'd whet your appetite with some initial impressions.

   

First of all, this thing is big. Really big. I have to say though, I love the design of it. It feels sturdy and very well made. Like Samsung really knows what they're doing. The plastic back has a wonderful texture to it that almost makes it feel like leather. I think I like it better than cold, slippery aluminum. The 4.52 inch screen is bright and beautiful, but the extremely low pixel density means everything is gigantic.

  

The T-Mobile variant (codenamed "Hercules") is the odd man out in the SGSII family. T-Mobile saw fit to swap out the 1.2GHz Samsung Exynos processor for a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, which has moar gigahertz but a crappier GPU. The two gigahertz numbers aren't directly comparable, so I'll have to play attention to performance in the review. Expect benchmarks.

    

This beauty is also equipped with NFC (unlike the Sprint variant), so hopefully, someday, it'll have Google Wallet support. Right now only Nexus S 4G owners get to live in the future. Speaking of software, this thing is packed with garbage. It comes with 3 and a half pages of apps; I've got my work cut out for me.

The full review will be coming in a few days. I'm going to go get to work. In the mean time, enjoy the photos and feel free to ask any questions you would like addressed in the write-up.