this abt something i always wanted to share and ask abt the galaxy s2 regarding its ics update!
Ice Cream Sandwich update brings:
- Improved user interface
- Faster web browser with added features
- Slightly better graphics performance
- Slightly better battery life
- Stereo sound in videos
- SNS integration into phonebook
- Better UI for switching apps and killing them
- Face unlock
- Built-in data usage monitor
all this time we have been made to see what ics aka 4.0.3 update yet to land in india is delivering!
but still there are so many unfixed! i would rather say that the ics update on the galaxy s2 is numb! cant feel it! except at few places! i would rather call this a value pack! when you take your s2 and compare it with the galaxy s that is currently receiving the value pack i bet has all the features above!
now i don't understand how this happened! so i feel that they have worked on the gingerbread and tweaked it up calling it the ice cream sandwich update! its not the ics that's injected into the process! as we all know from the look and feel of it! and i dono abt ROBOTO they were talking abt the new font style and am not sure its there on the update never said never heard! but there are more features they haven't given along with the update! like the image capturing while recording a video! that is still not available and so on! so is it that they will give us all the missing parts or should we have to just forget it!?
ok now from here! am starting from how the galaxy s2 fails so as its not like what ics is all abt!
am just wondering though the galaxy nexus is still not as powerful as the galaxy s2 it could take all the potential of the ice cream sandwich! the betterment is proved by the bench marks reviews available at the gsmarena.com
so based on that! we see the s2 deserved a better ics look and feel!
let me start from the lock screen
ics lock screen
galaxy s2 lock screen
so as we see here! the nexus has a short cut to directly access the camera but the galaxy s2 failed there! because that could compensate the absence of a camera button! and by thus been more productive! so there we go again! i don't understand why Samsung had to remove that.
HOME SCREEN:
ics home screen
home screen on the galaxy s2
so seeing the home screen there is not a much of a difference! but one thing what i felt is they could have refreshed the icons. there should be something new to see and feel! so some new icons and wallpapers would have done better. yet not disappointing. so we can't blame them here
NOTIFICATION BAR
ics notifications
notification bar on the galaxy s2
ther is hardly a change. still the same green feel. can't feel ics on it at all. a blue theme could have been cool.
one more thing to note is that the ics screen shot has a short cut to the settings directly which is not present here. both have swipe to close notification. but still the setting key is missing.
MUSIC PLAYER
ics music player
galaxy s2's
no one asked for same cool blue! but the same functionality and appearance on green too would have been really nice. but i have heard that the music player has become better. so ill write abt that when i get the update and plug in my head set.
CONTACTS
ics contacts view
galaxy s2 contact view
the contacts have a better look but couldn't be as good as on the nexus, some where close! still better is all i can say. this a really good improvement over the app
TEXTING:
on the texting part the galaxy s2 is still a lot disappointing though the keyboard has changed is what i hear so looking forward that even the predictive texting is as good as its on the nexus
check that link above to see how it works on the nexus
those are some common things we use on the phone all the time and its a shame that samsung didn't concentrate on that part at all! especially am disappointed that they didn't give the application and wigit column in the main menu. even that would have give a complete ics feel to galaxy s2 as on my side and all the galaxy s2 users across the world we request samsung mobile to work on these problem we are facing and make it a better os for the best phone in the market
with bench mark views the galaxy s2 is really close with the htc one x in most of the cases though the one x has a quadcore with nvdia tegra 3 chipset. even with the battery performance the galaxy s2 has proved itself as a masterpiece and i would say it deserves a better treatment of ics on it.
Performance improvements
You'd think that getting better performance out of a phone would require a hardware update (and unlike PCs, smartphones just can't do that), but Ice Cream Sandwich brings some tangible improvements.
Our CPU benchmarks don't report a massive change. Actually, Linpack's result went down after the update. We've seen that before and think it's a problem with Linpack rather than the CPU performance going down.
It sill shows that apps are not quite ready for the relatively rare 4.0 ICS version, but that's bound to change as millions of Galaxy S II phones along with others get the update.
NenaMark 2, a 3D benchmark, shows definite improvement however. This means you can expect slightly better performance after the update. Like Linpack, there might be some compatibility issues, but we haven't encountered any yet.
And now we get to the good stuff - the browser. We already mentioned it's faster than it used to be, time to put concrete numbers to that claim.
SunSpider puts the Samsung Galaxy S II on par with the Galaxy Nexus and since both have two Cortex-A9 cores at 1.2GHz, we're not surprised. Either way, the two phones are the fastest handsets on this benchmark.
Finally, there's BrowserMark, which adds some HTML5 tests to JavaScript, where the Galaxy S II beats everything we've tested so far by a healthy margin.
To sum up, updating to Ice Cream Sandwich will boost the performance a bit in some use scenarios. You might not notice it in games (46fps vs. 51fps isn't that much of a difference), but you'll definitely notice it when browsing - the S II renders pages faster and there's less lag on JavaScript-intensive benchmarks.
Slightly longer battery life
We've used early releases of Ice Cream Sandwich on the Galaxy S II and they showed promise for improved battery life, so we reran the tests after the update.
Call time remained unaffected (there's no reason it should change), the Samsung Galaxy S II will last you just over 8 and a half hours of talking over a 3G network.
Web browsing wasn't exactly a strong suite for the Galaxy S II, with predominantly white web pages that don't play well with the SuperAMOLED Plus screen. After the update, the browser is much faster, but uses less battery too - the S II running Ice Cream Sandwich lasted 40 minutes longer than it did on Gingerbread.
Video playback was the Samsung Galaxy S II's forte - it used to do 8 hours straight until its battery fell to 10%. After the update, it lasted a little less - 11 minutes less to be precise. We're not sure why, we expected to see no difference here.
What you can expect in terms of autonomy is about 42 hours between charges, if you do an hour of calls over a 3G network, browse the web over Wi-Fi for an hour and watch an hour of video each day. That's slightly better than the 40 hours a Gingerbread-running Galaxy S II scores.
In the end, it's not a major improvement in battery life, but considering this is just a software update it's more than we could have asked for. It improved the Galaxy S II in an area that needed work, so it gets the thumbs up from us.
Benchmark Pi
Lower is better
- HTC One X338
- HTC One S306
- Samsung Galaxy S II452
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus408
- HTC Sensation XE536
- Sony Xperia S536
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1351
Linpack
Higher is better
- HTC One X126.1
- HTC One S210
- Samsung Galaxy S II77.6
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus77.1
- HTC Sensation XE50.4
- Sony Xperia S86.4
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.190
The 3D graphics department is handled by NVIDIA's own GeForce GPU. On the HD screen of the One X it did 47+ fps, while the Adreno 25 inside the One S does 60 fps but on a qHD display, which has just 33% fewer pixels. This means the ULP GeForce GPU does better than the Adreno 225 in terms of pure power.
NenaMark 2
Higher is better
- HTC One X47.5
- HTC One S60.5
- Samsung Galaxy S II51.6
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus24
- HTC Sensation XE23
- Sony Xperia S37.5
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.143.6
On SunSpider, the CPU-stressing JavaScript benchmark, the HTC One X posted a blazing fast result, beating all competitors but the One S. The HTML5 test, BrowserMark, however shows that HTC has some more work to do as the One X lost to an ICS-running Galaxy S II by about 10% (and the S II CPU has fewer cores andlower clock speed).
SunSpider
Lower is better
- HTC One X1757
- HTC One S1708
- Samsung Galaxy S II1849
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus1863
- HTC Sensation XE4404
- Sony Xperia S2587
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.11891
- Apple iPhone 4S2217
BrowserMark
Higher is better
- HTC One X96803
- HTC One S98435
- Samsung Galaxy S II111853
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus103591
- HTC Sensation XE72498
- Sony Xperia S74990
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1113256
- Apple iPhone 4S88725
All told, the HTC One X is certainly one of two fastest phones on the market - there's no test in the mobile world it can't pass with flying colors. The dual-core Krait-powered devices might be able to match and at times even outdo it, but you should keep in mind that Nvidia takes good care of its chipsets making quite a few high-quality apps exclusively available to them through its TegraZone store.
isn't that enough to show that the galaxy s2 with a dual core is doing a lot as close to a quadcore?
hope samsung does take this issue serious and make all the users feel worth the money
and one more disappointing this is that they need to work on the updating schedule. its q2 now and still india hasn't received the update. every time asked they say it will be available soon but we dono when, so unprofessional. if they them self dono when and how the update is going to happen how will be the reputation on them?
i hope the upcoming update changes all the above mentioned flaws and give some change over the skin, as it still feel like the gingerbread. and i hope samsung will update the touch wiz too to get some more friendly with the ics on the galaxy s2 soon.
