Conversely, my Motorola bluetooth headphones used to disconnect from my Atrix, now they’re rock steady. It’s great that manufacturers ensure interoperability, but are they forgetting to test their own devices with each other?

I agree. I’m quite surprised that it wasn’t mentioned in the review that the 720p screen on the GS3 uses a pentile sub-pixel arrangement, giving it effectively 1/3rd less sub-pixels than a full RGB 720p LCD or if it were to use the Super AMOLED Plus technology that was present on the GS2.

The first thing I noticed when looking at the GS3′s screen was the blue hue and highly over-saturated colours. Whites just aren’t white and orange looks outright weird (as do skin tones). Sure it has awesome blacks, but at the expense of fine detail, sharpness and colour accuracy. This is easily evident by placing the HTC One X next to the GS3 and comparing screen quality. The HTC One X’s Super LCD screen is clearly sharper, brighter and more accurate.

Some people don’t notice pentile’s downsides at a high resolution of 1280x720p (even though its technically not full 720p) and that’s great, but for me its noticeable and distracting and the screen is the no1. most important thing to me on any device.

Samsung made a huge step forward with the GS2 by abandoning the pentile arrangement and adding a white stripe to make a full RGB sub-pixel arrangement. It gave the SGS2 one of the best looking 800×480 screens out there. I’m assuming the only reason they didn’t stick to a “Plus” screen for the GS3 is cost, or difficulty building such high quality displays in massive volumes. That’s totally understandable, but I really hope to see next year’s Galaxy S4 make the leap to S-AMOLED Plus.

It’s a grille not a grill.

8-)

I flashed Sense 4.1 (via the Insertcoin 8.0.5 [Tegra 3 One X] ROM – Still on Android 4.0.4 for the moment) last night and it’s deliciously smooth, and fast. Still a little buggy though.

Yes and no- side by side the AMOLED on the S3 is much more vibrant than the XL (SLCD). However, it is ALSO blue and washed out. THAT is one reason I chose the XL.

True. But each generation of OLED has been a significant improvement over the previous one. Right now there are two issues. One is colour management (the blue cast you mention), but that surely that just a case of getting the ICM profile right. The other is display life and power consumption, which leads to the manufacturers deliberately keeping the display brightness turned down. My personal solution to both those problems is to create my own background image. I have no artistic skills, but you don’t need any – it’s totally black. It has the nice side effect of making the display easier to read.

Anyway the point is given the rapid advances Samsung is making with their OLED displays it seems likely both those issues will be fixed within a few iterations. LCD on the other hand has no hope of matching OLED’s colour range or it’s dynamic range.

All those advantages aside, it suffers from one defect – it’s too small.

That’s your opinion :P I don’t have slabs for hands :D If you want something bigger, get a tablet :D

The Galaxy Note seems about right, but it needs an update.

Coming, end of this month I believe: http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/samsung-plans-august-29-release-date-for-galaxy-note-2/1/186997.html

Samsung is using their Galaxy series to push OLED development. It has a far better colour gamut than LCD

Yes and no- side by side the AMOLED on the S3 is much more vibrant than the XL (SLCD). However, it is ALSO blue and washed out. THAT is one reason I chose the XL.

http://cdn2.sbnation.com/imported_assets/1059095/vs05-03_20-02-48x1020_gallery_post.jpg

(not a brilliant photo, but illustrates the point)

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/2012-Superphone-comparison-Samsung-Galaxy-S3-vs-HTC-One-X-vs-Galaxy-Nexus-vs-iPhone-4S.jpg

(That’s a better comparison (2 on the left) but it’s still hard to see)

There’s alot still to come with LCD tech I believe.

You didn’t mention it supports the Qi wireless charging standard. If I owned one I would be putting a Qi pad on the bedside table. That would be one less night time ritual I would have to think about.

All those advantages aside, it suffers from one defect – it’s too small. These devices still think they are phones; things that work perfectly well when they the size of a matchbox. But who uses the smartphone predominantly to make phone calls? For all the rest of the uses you need the largest device that fits comfortably in one hand. The Galaxy Note seems about right, but it needs an update.

I wonder what Apple thinks of all this. Particularly the OLED display. Samsung is using their Galaxy series to push OLED development. It has a far better colour gamut than LCD, but on my Nexus it is uneven. That’s fixed on the S III. If Apple wants the best display available for their devices, the time can’t be far away before they have to buy it of Samsung. Interesting times.

Sure Sense is slower and a bit buggy (Sense 4.1 has been leaked and apparently is much faster- not surprising seeing as it’ll likely come with JB and Project Butter underneath…) but it is EMINENTLY more beautiful and nice to look at .

Touchwiz, by contrast, looks if you’ll excuse my vulgarity, like someone smooshed dogs bollocks on the screen IMO….