User interface: Android Gingerbread and TouchWiz 4.0
The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket comes with Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, dressed in TouchWiz 4.0. Ice Cream sandwich has been officially confirmed as an update, so the device is as advanced and up to date as it can get as far as software is concerned.
The lock screen can be removed by swiping in any direction, instead of just sideways.
The homescreen has got several twists too. You get rectangular design for the widgets and many functions. The process of adding widgets is visually improved too with attractive transition effects. Some of the proprietary Samsung widgets allow you to edit the homescreen panes directly on the homescreen. The numbered dots that identify the homescreen panels serve as a scroll bar too. A press and hold on the dots lets you scroll sideways through the resized images of the available homescreen panes in one short go rather than with several swipes.
The app launcher enables you to create folders inside it. Creating folders is very easy and simple too. in edit mode you drag the icons you want over to a blank folder icon at the bottom of the screen. Then you drag the folder to the screen on which you want it to be placed and pick a name for it.
The notification area has been somewhat redesigned in TouchWiz 4, when compared to previous versions, but there aren’t any changes to functionality there.
The task manager, which Samsung has preinstalled, offers a lot of functionality. In this version the RAM screen has been modified, compared to, and there is a single Clear Memory button now, instead of the two in the previous version.
With a dual-core Snapdragon S3 CPU on board, and a gig of RAM, the Skyrocket offers a pleasurable and lag-free experience. Now, we are about to see how does the Qualcomm creation fare with the benchmarks.
Synthetic benchmarks
With two Scorpion cores, clocked at 1.5GHz, and 1GB of RAM, the Snapdragon S3 will handle any task you throw at it without any difficulty. It does however go a bit easier on the benchmarks than its Exynos packing siblings.
Considering that synthetic benchmarks have little to do with the way you will use your smartphone every day, we can attest that the Galaxy S II Skyrocket did show a miniscule amount of lag, compared to the rest of its Exynos sporting Galaxy S II siblings. It is however, faster than any smartphone available in the market.
