Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II preview: Second encounter

Familiar gallery and file browser

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 gallery certainly is a looker

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.

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

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 thinks it’s 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.

Video editors is fun and capable

Music player is unchanged, video player absolutely rocks

The Samsung Galaxy S II makes use of the standard TouchWiz music player. We guess it’s reserved for the Galaxy S lineup. Samsung has enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.

The music player has benefited greatly from the TouchWiz UI

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 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 itself supports three crop modes to select how the video fills the screen. There’s 5.1 channel virtualization and subtitle support. You can change font size and adjust subtitles sync (move them back or forward a few seconds) but there’s no option to manually load subtitles, they have to have the same name as the video file.

The video player has a simple interface but is quite capable

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 FullHD files. Large files of over 2GB worked as well.