So the Galaxy S III is officially launched in most markets now, and my God, the tech press wants me to believe Samsung's finally done it—they've made the phone that beats Apple's. The spec sheet is ridiculous. 4.8-inch display. Quad-core processor. Android 4.0. Camera that can track your eye movements. It's objectively more powerful than anything Apple's shipping right now, and I get why everyone's excited about it.
But here's the thing that's bugging me: I've been using one, and it doesn't feel like the future. It feels like someone made a really, really good Android phone. Which it is! Just not the revolutionary thing the headlines want it to be.
The screen is gorgeous, I'll give it that. Oled technology on a phone is still kind of wild when you see it in person: blacks are actually black, colors pop, and when you're watching video, it's better than anything else I've held. But then you go into the settings menu and you're scrolling through Samsung's custom Android skin, and suddenly you're back in a phone that feels like it was designed by committee. There are too many menus. Too many settings buried in weird places. Too many Samsung apps that do what Google's apps already do, just slightly worse.
The quad-core processor is fast, yeah. It handles everything I throw at it without stuttering. But here's what nobody wants to admit: the iPhone 4S already feels fast enough for what you actually do on a phone. Browsing the web. Checking email. Taking photos. Texting people. The Galaxy does all of this imperceptibly faster, which means it does it at exactly the same speed you perceive it. That's the law of diminishing returns, and it's fully in effect here.
The eye-tracking camera feature is neat for, like, thirty seconds. Then you realize you're looking at your phone weird trying to make it work correctly, and the novelty dies. The camera itself is legitimately great: 24 megapixels sounds insane, and the photos are sharp and detailed. But every camera phone's photos are "sharp and detailed" now. The real difference between phones is in software and processing, and Samsung's processing is aggressive to the point of looking slightly artificial. Not bad, just... a choice I wouldn't have made.
What really gets me is that everyone who's excited about this phone is excited about it for the wrong reason. They're excited because it's more powerful than the iPhone. More pixels on the screen. More cores in the processor. Bigger battery. More megapixels. It's the spec-sheet argument we've been having for years, and Samsung's finally winning it decisively. But the iPhone wins at something much more slippery—the thing you actually experience when you use it every day.
iOS just works. It's boring as hell, and if you're into tinkering with your phone, it's infuriating. But if you just want a phone that gets out of your way and does what you ask without showing you seventeen menus to do it, iOS is still the winner. The Galaxy S III is actually really good, but it still feels like you're using Android, which is to say you're aware you're using an operating system. You're navigating it. You're working around its quirks.
The thing I keep coming back to is that this phone feels like it was designed by people who wanted to beat the iPhone on paper, not by people who wanted to make the best phone. Samsung threw everything at this: the fastest processor they could source, the biggest screen they thought would still be phone-shaped, the best camera sensor available. They made an engineering marvel.
But Apple made a tool. That's the actual difference, and no amount of extra cores is going to change it.
Will the Galaxy S III sell like crazy? Absolutely. It should. For people who want a more "open" system and faster hardware and the ability to customize things, it's genuinely the best choice right now. For people with way too much money and strong opinions about technology being good, it might even be better than the iPhone.
But is it the phone that beats the iPhone? Not yet. Not even close. Samsung's not there until they realize that faster isn't the same as better, and shoving more stuff into your phone isn't the same as making it work better. They've got the hardware down. The software is still catching up.