Samsung Galaxy S III (U.S. Cellular)

By Sascha Segan

U.S. Cellular is serving up Samsung's Galaxy S III ($199 for 16GB, $249 for 32GB) the way it was truly intended. The Editor's Choice hardware here is the same as you'll find on the Sprint and Verizon models, but U.S. Cellular's S III has been stripped of bloatware, leaving it an even more elegant device. It's the best Galaxy S III yet, and an easy Editor's Choice for the best touchscreen smartphone on U.S. Cellular.

Editors' Note: The Samsung Galaxy S III models on all five carriers it's offered with are extremely similar, so we're sharing a lot of material between our various reviews. That said, we're testing each device separately, so read the review for your carrier of choice.

Physical Features and Networking
All of the new Galaxy S III models look the same, except for the carrier logo on the back panel. Each is available in dark blue or white (AT&T also has a red option), and they're some of the biggest phones we've ever handled. At 5.4 by 2.8 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and 4.7 ounces, the GS3 is considerably larger than U.S. Cellular's other smartphone options. It's still manageable, but this isn't a phone for people with small hands.

I'm not a fan of the huge?phone. But I've given up on panning them because every time I suggest these handsets are too big, I get pummeled by comments from people who adore them. Huge phones are the thing. I accept it.

The all-plastic body feels a little less high-end than the exotic materials of the HTC One series, but the phone is solidly built, and light despite its size. The front of the phone is dominated by the 4.8-inch, 1280-by-720-pixel Super AMOLED HD screen. Yes, it's PenTile, which can sometimes look slightly pixelated. But, no, you probably won't notice. Below the screen, there's a physical Home button, as well as light-up Back and Multitasking buttons that start out invisible, so you have to memorize where they are or change a setting to keep them illuminated. The 8-megapixel camera is on the back panel, which, thanks to its reflective finish (on the blue model), doubles as a pocket mirror.?

Independent studies have shown that the Galaxy S III's screen is dimmer than some competitors', and the default Automatic Brightness setting makes the screen too dim. Kill it and pump up the brightness and it's fine, even outdoors.

The S III has a removable 2100mAh battery. Taking off the back cover also reveals the microSD card slot, which supports cards up to 64GB.

Call Quality and Service Plans
Default call quality is good. Volume is on the high end of average, with no distortion from loud inputs. The speakerphone isn't quite loud enough to use outdoors, but it's fine for the car or a boardroom. The microphone does a good job of cancelling background noise. Bluetooth headsets work fine with Samsung's S-Voice voice dialing system.

But as with so many things here, call quality gets richer if you burrow down into the GS3's menus. A Volume Boost button throws the phone into a super-loud, quasi-speakerphone mode for noisy areas, but that's just the start. Deep within the settings, there's an option to set custom call EQ. The phone plays you a sequence of quiet high and low tones and you tell it which ones you can hear, and then it EQ's calls accordingly. This is pretty radical stuff. I prefer my calls sharp, with more high-end, and the GS3 delivers.

If you haven't heard of U.S. Cellular, it's the seventh-largest carrier in the U.S. It runs its own 3G and 4G LTE networks in parts of 26 states. Prices are decent, but U.S. Cellular doesn't compete aggressively on price. Rather, it's trying to offer better customer service and network quality than other carriers. Our readers say it succeeds, giving USCC our Reader's Choice award this year with high ratings for having reasonable prices and a reliable network.?

An unlimited voice and SMS plan with 2GB of data from U.S. Cellular costs $114.99/month, or $94.99/month during special sale periods. Compare that to $79.99 from T-Mobile, or $100/month from Verizon. A lighter voice plan, 450 minutes with unlimited SMS and 2GB of data, is $74.99/month. That would cost $69.99/month on T-Mobile.

You need to spend most of your time in U.S. Cellular 4G LTE areas to take best advantage of this Galaxy S III. Right now, there are four clusters of those cities: one in Maine, one in North Carolina, one on the Texas/Oklahoma border, and one through Wisconsin and Iowa. None of the nation's largest cities are included. U.S. Cellular says it's bringing 4G to more mid-sized U.S. cities soon.

When we test U.S. Cellular phones, they're roaming on Sprint's network here in NYC. They work, but Internet connections are painfully slow. That's no slight against USCC, but rather a suggestion that you shouldn't buy this phone for frequent use outside USCC coverage areas.

When you're roaming the country, you can take advantage of the Galaxy S III's 802.11n Wi-Fi (on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands) along with Bluetooth, accurate GPS, and NFC. Google Wallet doesn't show up in the Play store on this phone, though.

Battery life was absolutely excellent, with 11 hours, 29 minutes of talk time on 3G.

Apps and Performance
The Galaxy S III runs a heavily Samsung-customized version of Google Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" on a fast 1.5GHz Qualcomm S4 processor. The U.S. Cellular model's benchmark scores were on par with the rest of the Galaxy S III models, which is to say very good.

The surprise here is that there's no carrier bloatware. Samsung added its own apps to the GS3, including music and video stores, Dropbox (with 25GB free storage) and a voice recorder. But the phone isn't cluttered with carrier-specific apps, presenting a much less cluttered face than other versions.

Exclusive new features include S-Beam, the ability to transfer files by tapping two phones together and using a combination of NFC and Wi-Fi Direct; S-Voice, Samsung's answer to Apple's Siri; TecTiles, NFC-enabled accessory tags that can change the settings on your phone, and lots of sharing and tagging options in the camera, such as the ability to automatically tag your friends' faces, and the ability for multiple GS3s within a few feet of each other to automatically share all of their photos.

Many of these features work well, but they're almost all buried. The interface is something of a scavenger hunt. Take Smart Stay, a neat new feature which detects your face and keeps the screen from going black while you're looking at it. I love it! But it's not on by default, and the only way to turn it on is by going to the Display area under Settings. S-Beam is similarly buried, under the Wireless menu.

Samsung helpfully pops up various screens telling you about various cool gestures you can use, like raising the phone to your face to automatically call someone you're texting. But it's a lot of information to absorb, and a lot of gestures that you've never used before. There's a sharp learning curve here.

Multimedia
The 16GB Galaxy S III we tested had 12GB of available memory plus support for microSD cards up to 64GB, which fit under the plastic back panel. There's also a 32GB model for $249.99 with contract, but given the phone's microSD support, I don't see the point of buying the more-expensive model. It plays all the usual music and video formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, Xvid, and WMV at resolutions up to 1080p.

Samsung has customized both the music and video players. Along with the typical music navigation, there's a frill called Music Square, which grades all of your music on a 2D scale from "calm" to "exciting" and "passionate" to "joyful," creating custom playlists by mood. There's also an epic number of EQ presets, which change the sound in effective, if gimmicky ways.

The picture/video gallery integrates Google and Facebook albums, and lets you sort your videos as a list or with thumbnails. The flagship feature here is Pop-Up Play, which can float a video playback window over other apps; I found it to be fairly useless. Netflix and YouTube both look good and run on LTE without any visible buffering. The phone also comes with Samsung's Media Hub music and video store, which has a solid lineup of recent movies and TV shows at industry-standard prices of $4 to rent and $15-$20 to buy.

If you want to play your video on a big HDTV, you need to use Samsung's AllShare system, which like most other wireless video systems rarely works because your home network doesn't have the bandwidth, or a new-style 11-pin MHL adapter. Our old MHL adapters didn't work.

The 8-megapixel camera takes good-looking, saturated photos that are sharp with little noise, at least in decent light. In our low-light test, the shutter speed dropped to 1/40 second, which will cause some softness if you don't have a steady hand. That's still better than many camera phones. The 1-megapixel front camera also showed solid low-light performance. The video mode captures 1080p videos at 30 frames per second indoors and out with the main camera, which is more than we could say for the HTC One X.

You get tons of gimmicky camera modes. HDR takes a little while to assemble its pictures?and showed a tendency to create "ghost" images when I tried it. Smile detection worked well, and Share Shot lets you automatically stream photos to other GS3s in the area. Buddy Photo-Share tags faces with names based on the images in their social-networking profiles. Those last two are buried in the camera settings and while cool, you're not likely to stumble upon them easily.

Conclusions
The Galaxy S III is the smartphone U.S. Cellular subscribers have been waiting for. The S III is the most powerful Android phone in the nation today, and it now runs on the most-beloved network.

It's hard to seriously justify buying any other U.S. Cellular smartphone, but there are a few reasons why you might. The Motorola Electrify is a world phone, able to use low-cost foreign SIM cards for overseas trips. The HTC Merge is a world phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. But neither phone is as powerful as the S III, neither has 4G, and both are stuck on Android 2.3. Serious U.S. Cellular smartphone owners should line up for the Galaxy S III immediately.

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