Samsung Galaxy S i9001 Plus preview: First look

User interface

The Galaxy S Plus has version 2.3.3 of Android, called Gingerbread. It has been tweaked to feel fluid and responsive. There isn’t a whole lot of change compared to the original Galaxy S – which by the way has already received its Gingerbread upgrade too. If you want to get an idea of the performance of the Galaxy S Plus check out the user interface video demo below.

Now let’s go quickly through the user interface. The homescreen stretches across up to 7 panes, which can be quite easily personalized. A pinch on the homescreen takes you to the edit screen where you can add or remove stuff and rearrange the panes as you see fit.

The TouchWiz UI running on top of Android 2.3.3

There are the usual four shortcuts docked at the bottom. The rightmost of them toggles homescreen and app launcher.

Up to 7 homescreens • Adding elements to the homescreen

The wallpapers gallery offers both static and live ones. The Android Market can give you even more options if the preinstalled content doesn’t suite you.

The wallpaper selection

The main menu is basically unchanged from the original Galaxy S, except that the icons have lost their color backgrounds to look a lot less iPhone-like. The menu is side-scrollable, with a 4 x 4 grid of icons on each page, the four docked icons at the bottom visible at all times. You can also opt for a list view. Rearranging apps is very easy to – in edit mode just drag an icon where you want it placed.

Galaxy S Plus main menu • Reordering icons

The TouchWiz launcher features a built-in task manager complete with a homescreen widget that shows the number of currently active apps. With it, you don’t need to install a task killer on your own.

The Task Manager app

Synthetic benchmarks

We’ve seen enough proof already that the I9001 Galaxy S Plus is faster than the original Galaxy S. But if you care to know how much faster, our benchmarks are at your disposal. In the case of our test unit, the Snapdragon processor is clocked at 1.2 GHz, which isn’t what the final result will look like. At 1.4 GHz, the market-ready Galaxy S Plus will hopefully do better.

But that’s not to say that the Galaxy S Plus doesn’t outclass the original Galaxy S. In this test, both phones are running the latest Android build – 2.3.3 Gingerbread.

At Quadrant the Galaxy S Plus blew the original away. It was almost twice as fast at BenchmarkPi and way better on Linpack.

Galaxy S Plus at Quadrant • BenchmarkPi • Linpack

So far so good for the Galaxy S Plus, with the Galaxy S lagging far behind. And it’s a safe bet that the final version will pack even more punch.

Galaxy S at Quadrant • BenchmarkPi • Linpack

Smartbench 2011 shows hands down the Galaxy S Plus superiority, while Neocore reported a virtual tie, which isn’t very surprising, considering that the GPUs on both phones aren’t too far apart.

Galaxy S Plus at Smartbench 2011 • Neocore

That’s about it for synthetic benchmarks but you should keep in mind that the actual performance of the two isn’t drastically different. They’re both premium performers.

Galaxy S at Smartbench 2011 • Neocore