Samsung Galaxy S II T-Mobile review: A dragon's heir

Gallery and file browsers are at your service

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 as soon 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

There is an image editor as well

You also get an image 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

Oddly enough, the Video Editor, which we became used to seeing in the other versions of Samsung Galaxy S II is missing in the T-Mobile version. We have no logical explanation why.

The usual TouchWiz music player

The Samsung Galaxy S II for T-Mobile 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 is capable as always

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 deceive you