So Samsung finally showed off the Galaxy S III on Thursday, in London, and I stayed up way too late watching the stream (which, side note, buffered like it was still 2007, thanks a lot, whatever CDN they were using). The phone itself is basically what the rumor mill had already nailed: 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED screen, quad-core Exynos chip at 1.4GHz, Ice Cream Sandwich under their TouchWiz "Nature UX" skin, a new voice assistant called S Voice, and a feature called Smart Stay that supposedly uses the front camera to tell when you're looking at the screen so it won't dim on you. Ships in "Pebble Blue" and "Marble White," rolling out across Europe by the end of the month, no firm US carrier dates yet as far as I can tell.
Here's the thing nobody's really talking about, though: that pre-show video. Before they even got to the phone they ran this whole skit with actors playing a nosy neighbor family peering over a fence trying to figure out what's inside a box, cutting away every few seconds to reaction shots that felt like they were lifted from a daytime soap. It went on for what felt like ten minutes. I actually said out loud to my empty apartment, "just show me the phone," which is a weird thing to say out loud to nobody at 2am but there you go.
I get what they were going for — this soft jab at the whole "designed for humans, inspired by nature" thing, contrasting themselves against a certain other company's product-focused keynote style. But it landed closer to a phone commercial from an in-flight magazine than anything that made we want to run out and buy the thing. Apple's keynotes have their own theater to them too, sure, don't get me wrong, but at least they get to the product in the first five minutes.
Once they actually got to specs I was mostly on board. A 4.8 inch panel is genuinely huge for a phone that's still supposed to be a phone and not a tablet you hold up to your face, and I'm curious how that feels in the hand day to day — my one gripe sight unseen is that it's still a plastic unibody, glossy on top of that, at a moment when HTC just put out the One X with that machined polycarbonate/soft-touch build that feels a whole class up. If you're going to be the flagship, the one everybody's going to point to as "the Android phone," maybe don't make it feel like the same material my microwave's turntable is made of. That's a small complaint in the scheme of things and I'll happily eat those words if it feels better than it looks on a livestream.
S Voice is the part I'm most skeptical of, honestly. Every voice assistant announcement since last October has had to answer to Siri whether it wants to or not, and from what I saw in the demo it's doing the same categories of thing: set alarms, check weather, snap a photo by saying "cheese." Fine. Useful, even, if it actually works reliably, which is a big if with these things. My money says it'll be the feature everyone tries twice in the store and never touches again once they own the phone, same as it's gone for basically every voice thing that isn't Siri so far. I'd love to be wrong.
Also, quick unrelated complaint while I'm here: I'm now two months out from being upgrade-eligible on my current contract and every single one of these announcements just makes the waiting worse. My current phone's battery barely makes it to 4pm anymore and I've started carrying a charger in my bag like it's an inhaler.
Anyway. The Galaxy S III looks like it'll be a serious phone and probably the biggest Android release of the year, and I don't want that to get lost under me complaining about a skit with actors in it. I just think if you're going to spend that much money on a launch event, spend a little less of it convincing me you have a sense of humor about home appliances and a little more just letting the hardware do the talking. Full European rollout is supposedly by the end of May, so I guess we'll actually get to touch these things soon enough and find out if the screen and the camera live up to the spec sheet, video skits aside.