User Review: Samsung Galaxy S II

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Posting the thread (So that i dont forget) for now, and update the details in next 1 or 2 days!

@ Sushubh, may be u can move Mascot's experience of S3 purchase, "ACP Pradyuman"s purchase of Pantech phone and such threads to this section.

So here it goes.....

I hadnt took any photo of S2 till now, and just took one to post here (Excuse me for the lower resolution, as my Nokia N78 has 3.2 MP camera!)



PS: Dont ask me, why i have applied "talc" to the phone. Home is under repairs, and there are these particles stuck on it. Will clean it, or just replace the scratchguard, once everything is over! 😀

Few screenshots i had taken on the phone.....





Some background to my purchase......

Now this was my first Android phone (Bought on October 25, 2011). Till then, i was a Nokia loyalist, and never believed that Symbian had any competition in the first place. I had used Nokia 6260, 3230, and N78. But when i saw this beast (Yeah it was a beast then!) with one of my friend, i was just awed & decided that i have to have this phone.

Review.....

Being my first Android, i was just awed by the first hand experience. It was a difficult migration as well, from Symbian non-touch, to Android, touch. It costed me for Rs. 28,000.

Accessories:
1) The leather case, USB cable, the charger & ofcourse the earphones were the accessories i got bundled in the pack.
2) I added it up with the scratch guard, & a 16 GB external Memory for another 499+1250 bucks. I did buy a Philips headphone of Rs. 295 hoping to improve my Music experience, but its lying useless now, as it isnt upto the mark.
3) A few months back i bought a Capdase car stand for it, which costed another 810 bucks and its coming really handy at the Office desk!
4) Yesterday i got iBall Power Bank for the phone, which has costed 2,200......though technically speaking its not just for this phone. Its for all the phones we own at our home!

Coming to the camera performance.....

For a feature rich phone, this kind of camera comes in really handy! Following are some of the snaps i took from the 8 MP Rear camera:





Looking at the snaps, i wud say it is much more than a decent offering. Atleast for a casual photographer! It has helped me capture snaps of some fun/happy moments at office and share it with the colleagues. And they always praise the quality of the camera.

The experiments i have done with it

To begin with, i was very very skeptical of even modifying its looks by installing new launchers. But then i soon got fed up of the TouchWiz Launcher (Default that was installed by Samsung) & installed Go Launcher (The best option i guess for Gingerbread).
When ICS was launched a few days after my purchase, i was waiting eagerly for it to be available officially for my phone as well. In around March 2012 or so, it did become available. I eagerly hooked the phone via Kies to PC & started downloading the update.

The download did finish after struggling for more than 3-4 hours with it. And then, it started to install. During the installation, some damn file failed to initialise & the setup got stuck. I had ended up bricking my phone. Then i took the brave decision (For someone who didnt even change the launcher initially, this has to be a brave step!) to use Odin and flashed the ROM manually.

This adventure, though successful, eventually disappointed me, as Samsung had really messed up ICS with its bloatware. Fed up of that, i took another brave step - root the phone & install a custom OS. I installed the Pure ICS ROM, which was really good, and gave a good ICS experience.

Then came Jellybean.....i installed the most stable ROM available but had a few very nagging drawbacks with it.....

No Wifi Direct, too low Volume, No connectivity via USB as a Mass Storage Device were the major of those. I even tried out Pure JB, which had the same troubles. So i ditched everything & have reverted back to Pure ICS!

Phew! Have covered quite a few things......still, let me know in case i have missed out on anything. I have purposely ignored the specs part, as it is freely available all over the net! Still, the link to gsmarena......

http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9100_galaxy_s_ii-3621.php

For ROMs relevant for this phone, follow this site: http://www.galaxys2roms.com/
 
CM10 Nightly is amazingly stable and smooth, giving great battery life, far better than jellybam and even pure ics. 😀

no bugs?

since it does not yet support HW acceleration,does it lag while scrolling ?
 
Some lags I noticed on scrolling in tapatalk.. There may be bugs but till now I haven't noticed any except wifi direct is missing.. I guess it supports hw acceleration bcoz now devs have access to leaked version of jb from where they might have extracted and merged. On bug I have noticed even in ics stock was signal went off when you put in charger and restart the phone, and same is happening in cm10 too. Don't know its a bug or some hardware issue with S2 or just my phone.
 
Have u tried clearing cache and user data and restoring factory settings? That normally fixes bugs like these.
 
Before installing cm10 cleared dalvik and other caches along with formating the system and cleared cache and factory reset after installation.
 
Actually, my phone used to shut down automatically when I was on pure ics. It aggravated after I installed jellybam. So i did all those things that I mentioned & it worked fine!
 
Never happened with me in pure ics. Only that signal problem was there as I mentioned earlier.@Cm10 why they are releasing new nightly everyday?
 


Jellybam 3.1 is much better than 3, faster, smoother and stable...will use it until CM10.1 get stable with jb 4.2... I find jb 4.2(cm) amazing but has bugs and not stable.
 
Lolz. Its better we stay put with one, and look to update every 3-4 months!
 
They will keep updating until they reached stable 4.2.. Hehe and I will keep flashing. 😀
 
Jaymin bro.. May be I am wrong but I have noticed great battery life improvement in jb 3.2.
 
Good then. Now that u have installed it, keep track for some more days, and post an update. I can jump over if thats true!
 

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