Samsung's Galaxy SIII arrived at my desk amongst a crowd of adoration and admiration from the Lady Geeks, everyone wanted to touch it and look at it and marvel at its very existence. The phone arrived in a swish navy box that opened, like a particularly nice jewellery box, to reveal the phone nestled inside. Even the instruction booklet is inviting, warning you to 'be careful not to damage your fingernails when you remove the back cover'. Friendly!
The screen is so soft it's almost slippy, your fingers slide effortlessly across the glass, calling up and dismissing apps with just the swipe of a finger, and the size of it, whilst initially daunting, quickly becomes normal within my hands. The large screen also makes watching videos a pleasure, and is a nice change from squinting at the comparatively smaller screens of the majority phones currently on the market. I actually find myself using BBC iPlayer's app, rather than just owning it, and the feature where you can minimise video whilst still watching it, so you can reply to texts and check facebook without disrupting your video experience, is so novel I can't quite believe no one's done it before. Speaking of novel ideas, the phone has a function that allows you to switch from text to phonecall, just by lifting the phone to your ear.
One thing that isn't so exciting is Samsung's answer to Siri. S Voice is a disppointment, it doesn't recognise my voice very well and in the end, life is too short and i'm better off doing it manually.
The Samsung SIII's camera quality is good, offering 8MP on the back, and 1.9MP on the front, so now you really can leave the DSLR camera at home without worrying about blurry, badly lit images being the story of your portable life.
S Beam lets your SIII make friends with other SIIIs instantly so you can transfer documents, contacts, pictures, music and videos just by tapping them to one another. A great concept that works well enough in reality, though seeing as I only know two other people who are privileged enough to own the SIII, it probably isn't being used to its full potential by me.
The phone is powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which means it's fast when doing tasks, and the battery life is good, regularly maintaining a reasonable 20-25% by late evening which is positively magical when compared to the loft height of 15% that my regular iPhone 3GS drops to by mid-afternoon.
It's true what they say, the Samsung Galaxy SIII really is the phone to rival the iPhone cult and potentially the first phone that's questioned my brand loyalty to Apple. It creates a synergy between human and phone, and is a step towards the genuine conveniences that we all imaged when smartphones burst onto the scene.