Recently, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 for Verizon. I bought it used for about $300, off contract, so that I can keep my unlimited data. This phone has been incredible after making a few changes to it. The stock operating system looked horrible, and was slow. That's because of the TouchWiz user interface, which Samsung includes on most of their phones now. I rooted the S3 (using
this method) and put the
CyanogenMod 10 custom ROM (like a new operating system) on it immediately. The usability increased tenfold with a new ROM.
CyanogenMod is a modified version of stock, or Vanilla Android. This is what most people call stripped down Android, and it is what Google releases Android as. I used this on my Motorola Droid and Galaxy Nexus, and I loved it. CyanogenMod enables many more options and settings to be tweaked. Some cool settings that are new for CM10 are a default weather and calendar event display for your lock screen, enhanced notification bar widgets, custom profiles for changing volume settings quickly, and many more. You can even turn off the backlight for the settings and back buttons, which I did. One setting I find useful is changing the functions of some buttons. I edited holding down the settings button bring up Google Now. I also only use two home screens, a great feature that is only available in custom ROMs.
The touchable hardware is pretty standard for an Android phone. The S3 has a power button on the right side, volume up and down on the left side, and a menu, home, and back button. The menu and back buttons are touch sensitive and blend into the bezel, whereas the home button is a button you can actually press down. When you hold down the home button for a second or so, your previous apps will pop up. This is great for switching or clearing apps. One other feature is a notification LED, which is used for notifications.
Lighflow is an app that lets you customize what notifications show up, and what color the LED should light up.
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| Notification bar hot keys. |
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| Lock screen shortcuts. |
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| Power off options. |
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| Second screen. |
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| Home screen. |
The Galaxy S3 was released in July 2012, but is still a strong phone. With a 4.8 inch screen, 8MP rear camera and 1.3MP front-facing camera, 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM, this phone is still one of the fastest phones available. According to the Passmark and Antutu benchmark tests, the S3 has the 4th best hardware of any phone available now. A few things I recommend buying are an extended battery and a case for that. I never had a case for a phone until I bought the S3, and I am pretty confident this phone's screen won't break like my Galaxy Nexus did. The Hyperion extended battery, which doubles the stock battery of 2100mAh (milliamp hours) up to 4200mAh, has been awesome. I've got 30-40 hours of battery life with heavy usage. There is a good case made just for the battery and battery cover, and I would recommend that as well. This does make the phone about twice as thick, but it still fits in your pocket very easily. Links for the exact products I bought are in the photo captions.
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| Lock screen on a CyanogenMod S3. |
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| Side view of the thickness of the phone. |
Conclusion: The setup I am running on this S3 is incredible. It has so many features and with unlimited data and super long battery life, this phone is a complete workhorse. I can use it all day with Wifi tethering, and still not have to charge it at night. The unlimited data from Verizon is really coming in handy, seeing as I have topped 10GB in just two weeks. I also have a solid list of apps that I use, and I wrote about that
here.
