Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE - I9305

If you are excited with the launch in New York on 14 March 2013 for Samsung's flagship Samsung Galaxy S4, you will be thrilled, at least, for now, with the Samsung Galaxy S3. If you think that the S3 is just plain, what about the upgraded S3 with 4G radio then?

The standard Galaxy S3 comes with lots of goodies including a 4.8" Super AMOLED screen and 8MP camera at the back and a 1.9MP camera at the front. It comes with a removable 2100mAh battery with NFC installed on the battery itself. The S3's hardware is quite new as it packs a quadcore 1.4Ghz and lots of 2012 hardware specification. With the purchase of an S3, a user will have up to 50GB usage of dropbox for two years for free. This is a bargain. I'm more interested in the satellite navigation as it comes with A-GPS and GLONASS. Best of all, the SAR UK is just 0.24 W/kg (head)! I'm truly amazed as not even Nokia can pull this off! I can remember that the Nokia Lumia 920 was more than 1W/kg! The screen is protected by Corning's Gorilla Glass II and it runs on the Android 4.1.2 OS at the time of writing this article.

The TouchWiz UI on the S3 is smooth and I have no complaints.

What about the S3 LTE then?

The Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE is definitely a step up from the normal S3. The difference between the S3 and the S3 LTE is minimal but nonetheless it is worth mentioning. Apart from the difference in the chipset of the S3 LTE which incorporates an LTE chipset, it comes with 2GB ROM instead of the standard 1GB ROM. Since I have the S3 LTE, it will be a good point to try out the 4G radio on the phone. I've managed to collect an average download speed of 45MB/s and an upload speed of 35MB/s in London so it is pretty good considering that the average 3G download speed is around 8MB/s and 1.5MB/s upload.

I'm not too happy with the 2100mAh battery as I need to recharge the phone once every day with Skype and the weather always working at the background. I was thinking of getting a beefier battery for the S3 LTE. Well, I've got a 3000mAh battery from Samsung the other day and guess what? I could stay on for two more days with the new 3000mAh battery! One downside to it is that the weight of the phone will increase from approximately 131g to around 145g but it feels good in my hand. This could never be compared to the Nokia Lumia 920 which I had before as it was pretty heavy.

In conclusion, the S3 LTE packs a punch with the 3000mAh extended battery from Samsung. if you are wondering whether I will be getting the S4, I would say no as I don't think a phone with a 5" screen is worth buying since I already have the S3. Maybe it will be a good idea to give it a pass until the next year when Samsung release a successor to the S4.