I had the Samsung Galaxy S2 for three days but had to send it back because of unacceptable battery life, which only seems to affect some users. Below is a summary of my experience with the phone with its upsides and downsides.

Battery Life

Even with everything that makes the phone attractive turned off, the screen brightness kept down, 3G almost permanently off, WiFi only on when I was actively using it and all the battery saving options settings maxed out  (which are very extensive and helpful) I was still getting considerably less than a day on a full charge with normal light usage. I consciously did a full day with “normal” and not “excited new toy testing” usage and it was still unacceptably bad. I might have been just able to scrape by on this but I still can’t accept it — I want to be able to use the phone, and that means not constantly worrying about whether I can do something because of how much battery it might munch.

There seems to be a serious issue with battery life on the S2 for some users but not for others. Many are reporting outstanding battery performance, getting through nearly two days on a charge, others are having the same experience as I did. This may be related to the Android build. I had the KE2 Gingerbread build on mine, KE7 is supposed to be better. I couldn’t test that because O2 Germany had locked out updates on the handset and I didn’t want to root the phone within my narrow return window. I also didn’t want to risk waiting and no longer being able to return it. However, other users reporting the KE2-related problems were also reporting that Android System was accounting for over 40% of the battery drain and that definitely wasn’t the case for me, mine was just at around 14%, which sounds pretty normal.

Thin and Slim Design

It would definitely be possible to put a battery double the size in this phone without any negative consequences for handling or weight. Samsung seems to know this, because they’ve already announced a Power Pack case that doubles the battery capacity.

Personally, I found that the phone was really too thin and too light. It feels fragile, even though it may not be, and I wouldn’t want to use it on a daily basis without a good hard shell case. Subjectively, it feels as though it would break in two like a bread stick if you sat down with it in your hip pocket. The designers have sacrificed day-to-day functionality in pursuit of an anorexic, Apple-envying Holy Grail of thinness and lightness.

Overall Performance

Otherwise, this phone rocks. One of the most amazing things is the speed of Internet access with 3G turned off. Even on normal GPRS, it builds pages lightning fast — I found myself using it for Pulse news reader instead of the iPad because it was faster, more accessible and really just as readable. The big screen makes that much of a difference. I installed FTP clients and servers and performance was exceptional there as well.

WiFi Problems

On the connectivity downside, WiFi reception was weak, weaker than on any other wifi device in my house. Worse on 5GHz than on 2.4GHz, but still not good on 2.4 either. It often only got one bar when all other devices were getting three to five. We can only hope that this is a firmware issue and not the hardware. Actual performance seemed to be OK, as long as I had a connection, so this may even be just a display issue. Even so, it was disturbing.

Call Quality

Call quality connection-wise was good, with solid, stable connections, but several people I called complained that the sound was unpleasantly harsh. This was worse on the wired headset, but also noticeable using the phone directly. Call volume on the headset was also very low, even on maximum and even with the internal maximum setting adjusted to 100% with the *#*# magic codes. It wasn’t possible to make calls in a noisy public place with the headset because I couldn’t hear what the person I was calling was saying. I’ve seen other reports of this online as well.

Camera and Video

The camera and video are both very good, although the automatic white balance was often badly off. This is a problem because it defaults to automatic, so you always need to change it to manual before you can take a photo. I didn’t manage to find any way of changing that. On the positive side, you can configure white balance control as one of the four on-screen shortcuts in the camera app, but it’s still annoying.

It comes with photo and video editing apps that I didn’t get around to testing so I can’t comment on those. But they’re there.

Allshare Server

The built-in Allshare media server works very well. You just switch it on and any device on your network that can access media servers can see the media on the phone (photos, videos, audio) and play it if they support it. My PS3 didn’t support the video format saved by the phone, which was a big downer, but I’m sure there’s a solution for that.

Screen

The screen is crisp and bright and is a pleasure to read, more so than the iPhone 4 (which I don’t own), and way more than my old 3GS. The size makes a huge difference — 3.5″ screens like the iPhone’s feel terribly cramped in comparison. After using this I simply won’t be able to accept a screen smaller than 4.3″ for my next smartphone, whatever it is. It’s not so good for photo editing, however, because the colors are not really accurate. They just look nice, with bright, contrasty jellybean colors. Also, the whites on white pages tend to be more blue than white. This is particularly apparent if you compare with an iPhone or iPad, where Apple really seems to focus on things like that. It may also have something to do with AMOLED — I don’t have any other experience with AMOLED screens.

Power Power Power

The processing and graphics power were amazing. Nothing I could throw at it fazed it. This also means it sometimes gets quite hot, for example on complex desktop web pages, probably with a lot of scripting going on (I was using Dolphin HD with the user agent set to desktop), and then you can watch your battery contents being flushed down the digital drain.

Touch responsiveness is also outstanding. The dreaded Android lag is definitely history here. Everything felt instantaneous.

Crapware and Other Included Apps

This will vary depending on where you get the phone, of course. The phone comes with a number of Samsung “hubs” for books, magazines, music, video etc, and something called “Social Hub” for aggregating your social media sites. I didn’t really use the Social Hub, but it looked like a potential privacy hazard and battery killer. I’d like to delete all the hubs completely because they’re all pretty rubbishy, but it wouldn’t have been possible without rooting the device. This also applies to other crapware like Yahoo Finance, AP Mobile and so on. On my phone they were all locked against removal and ran in the background all the time, which is really, really annoying. The phone would have been easily rootable, however, so removing them would have been possible if I had kept it.

The Samsung email app is very good and borrows heavily from Apple Mail. I like it enough that I would keep it if I had kept the phone. Otherwise I didn’t use any of the on-board apps. I prefer Dolphin HD as a browser, for example, so I didn’t even bother to look at the stock browser.

Samsung insists on including its own mini app store on the phone, which contains a weird collection of annoying crapware, some good free games and marginally useful free and paid apps. The first thing you should do is check whether it contains anything you want, then switch off the annoying notifications for it and forget about it.

Voice Commands and Dictation

The accuracy of voice commands and voice dictation were stellar, with astonishing accuracy, but they ate batteries like a cookie monster churning into Oreos. This applied particularly for the Vlingo apps, which worked better than the Google offerings. This makes it all the more annoying that there’s still no way to launch voice commands with the button on the wired headset: You have to unlock the screen before you can start voice commands with a double-click on the Home button or by starting the app manually. If you’re in the car with the charger attached you can have Voice Control running and listening for the “Hey Galaxy” command, which wakes up the phone and asks you what you want to do, but you wouldn’t get very far with that on foot because of battery usage. This setup kind of defeats the point of having voice commands. Instead of being usable, they are just something cool that you can demonstrate. Crazy. Or does anyone know a workaround for this? I wasn’t able to find any so far…

Summary

I had to send mine back because I wasn’t willing to accept the very marginal battery life, and I had to make the decision while I could still return the phone without incurring massive costs and other headaches. However, if the battery issues can be solved, I would get another one in a heartbeat. The only real show stopper was the battery problem, everything else you could live with.