A New Toy for Geniaus

I took delivery of my new Samsung Galaxy S3 yesterday and have already spent too many hours playing with it.

I had been tracking the device's trip to Australia from the Kogan warehouse via the internet and,from the info there, guesstimated that it would arrive yesterday. I had just about given up when the postie tooted his horn around 4:00 pm to announce his arrival. I could hardly contain my excitement when he handed me the small parcel housing my phone. I was expecting him to deliver a case of wine not my phone that I thought was coming via  DHL.

Screenshot from my S3

My first discovery was that one pays a price for buying from Kogan (but it was over $250 cheaper then at Telstra); the getting started booklet was in French. I was able to understand most of this thanks to schoolgirl French.   I G+ed about this and Tamura Jones came to my rescue with a link to the guide online in English.

Having downloaded the guide I realised that I really didn't need it as there are clear instructions given during the setup process. This was not tedious and didn't take too long as I seemed to get connected to the home wireless in a flash.

My next task was to install the SIM from my other 'phone into the S3; I tried to wedge it into the slot until I twigged that a micro SIM was needed. I consulted the internet and found that I could cut down my SIM to fit but chickened out. I had plenty to do to set up the device without bothering about getting it ready for phone calls.

Today saw me heading to the local Telstra store ready for a fight; the young lady there swapped my SIM for a micro and advised me that the micro SIM would be working within 15 minutes, and it was.

I had no trouble connecting to Hungry Jack's Free Wifi while I was in the shopping centre even though I don't know where the Hungry Jack's store is! So that's another tick for the S3.

Back to basics. The phone is nice to hold, it fits snugly in the palm of my left hand, the touchscreen is very responsive, and I seem to be able to type accurately on the screen (that was one of my fears). Having had a good feel of it I set to adding my fave apps some of which downloaded automatically from the Playstore. Some didn't download so I added them manually - go figure!.

I ditched some of the icons on the home screen in favour of things I use more frequently; this will change as I determine exactly how I will use the device.

Navigating the S3 seems intuitive to me but that may be because I had an older Samasung smartphone as well as a Galaxy Tablet. As most of the functions are the same or similar I felt very comfortable using the device straight away.

One of my first photos with the S3 - Can you see the ducks in our dam?

One of the reasons for getting the S3 was for the camera. I have a large camera and, until earlier this year, had a small camera that I carried around in my handbag. Sadly it had an accident at The Grand Canyon and was pronounced dead. Although it only has 4x zoom I think that the Galaxy will serve as my handbag camera. This was one of the reasons I purchased the 32 gig model; I can use the 50 gig Dropbox account that came with the S3 for backing up my photos along the road but will wait for a wifi connection to do so.

So far I have used the S3 to read and send emails, make calendar appointments, read my RSS feed, compose most of this blog post, play Scrabble online, search the web, make a phone call, send a text message, access Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, save links to Evernote and take photos.

And I have only had it for just 24 hours!

In a future post I will let you know what apps I have installed on the S3.