Samsung Galaxy S II for AT&T review: A legend reborn

Gallery and file browser are there for you

The Samsung Galaxy S II uses the standard Android gallery. The gallery automatically locates the images and videos no matter where they are stored. It even imports the online photos from your Google Picasa web albums.

The standard Android gallery

Little about the Gallery should surprise you – aside from displaying full-res images and the addition of the two-finger tilt zoom, there’s nothing new really. And don’t you worry, the double tap and pinch zoom are still there.

Two-finger tilt zoom works much like the name suggests. You touch the screen with two fingers and s sson as you start tilting it, it will zoom in or out according to the tilting motion.

The My Files app is a simple to use but functional file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files via Bluetooth. My files will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can’t access the system drive).

The My Files app

Image and video editors are at your service

You also get an image editor and a video editor preinstalled. The image editor handles the basics like image rotation, cropping (no resize though) and adjusting brightness/saturation/contrast. You can also make selections (using a smart tool similar to the Quick selection tool in Photoshop). It’s not nearly as accurate as the Photoshop tool though.

You can apply effects too but the one feature that caught our eye was Context fill – similar to Photoshop’s Context-aware fill tool but, again, not nearly as accurate.

The photo editor acts as tough as Photoshop

The video editor lets you arrange multiple clips (or photos) and music on a timeline and create a new movie to share. There are several presets, which change the look and feel of the final cut.

It’s pretty basic but you can trim videos, split them, change the transition between scenes, apply effects and a few other tricks, to turn you into a pocket Spielberg.

The video editor is quite capable

TouchWiz-ed music player

The Samsung Galaxy S II for AT&T uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung has enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.

The music player is great

The nice feature that allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search is also here. The handset also prompts you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album.

The video player has a lot to give

The video player offers a simple list-based interface. It displays all video files stored on the phone and you can sort them by name, date, type or size. The video player also remembers the last viewed position of the video, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. There’s 5.1 channel virtualization and subtitle support. You can change font size and adjust subtitles sync (adjust them back or forth a few seconds) but there’s no option to manually load subtitles, they have to have the same filename as the video file to load.

The video player has a simple interface but don’t let it fool you

The video player had absolutely no trouble with any of the files we threw at it – starting with WMV through AVI (DivX and XviD) and MP4 to MKV (H.264). Resolution wasn’t a problem either – the Samsung Galaxy S II played Full HD files just fine. Large files of over 2GB worked as well.