The web browser
Whereas the interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed, the hardware specifications of the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket push it to great heights of user experience. The large, sharp display with great colors makes reading a delight.
The browser supports both double tap and pinch zooming along with the new two-finger tilt zoom. There are niceties such as multiple tabs, text reflow, find on page and so on.
Samsung offers you a couple of Hubs
Hubs are not just for Windows Phone – Samsung, at least, seems to think so. They’ve added two Hubs to their Android powerhouse.
The Social hub we’ve seen before – it combines you email accounts with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn) and IM accounts (Gtalk, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger) and shows all incoming messages as one list with handy shortcuts to reply, mark as favorite and so on. There’s filtering by message source too, to help manage the inflow of incoming updates.
The Media Hub enables you buy or rent movies or TV shows. Its interface is neat and spontaneous, while its setup will take you no time.
The Skyrocket comes with Quickoffice preinstalled. It’s one of the most feature rich mobile editors we’ve seen. You can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and there’s a PDF viewer too.
The calendar has four different types of view: list, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.
The list view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. It’s a very handy tool when you need to check your appointments for the next few days.
There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big enough and easy to hit.
The smartphone features a decent alarm clock application which allows a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.
The Memo and Mini Diary are self-explanatory. The first app works with text only, while the Diary lets you also attach pictures.
There’s a YouTube app although it’s really irrelevant here. It cannot match the resolution the in-browser flash player can give you.
