When I bought my Galaxy Nexus at the end of last year, I had this niggling feeling that Galaxy S III (henceforth S3) might just make me eager to upgrade again in less than six months. Having been quite pleased with the Nexus thus far, I was waiting for Thursday’s S3 release event to start with curious anticipation. How much better would the new phone be compared to the Nexus? What would it look like? How bad an effect would TouchWiz have on user experience compared to vanilla Android? Above all, would it be good enough for me to splurge 600+ euros on it?

The release event started, and soon the world was able to lay its eyes on the new device. I think it’s safe to say that the majority of viewers were immediately disappointed by the looks of the device. I tried to view it in a positive light, but I just couldn’t make myself to like it. The S3 is easily the ugliest flagship phone that I can remember. The vaguely interesting Samsung applications and services presented didn’t do much to ameliorate the initial disappointment.

In addition to the dismal looks of the device and other issues I’ll come back to later in this post, there’s nothing much to say about yesterday’s release event, except that it was a spectacular failure. It failed on so many levels that I decided to scrape up a blog post about how dismayed I feel. Even my outline for this post blew up to 600+ words, so I felt I really needed to get this off my heart.

Actually, you can view the phrase “spectacular failure” in two parts. The event was 1) spectacular because of the giant screen and the light show, in addition to the live orchestra which seemed pretty good. But it all just managed to precipitate the ultimate 2) failure of the event. It’s not just the device; Samsung f’ed up the presentation as well. A video of the release event is available, I encourage you not to have a look. There’s a 2:40 supercut by The Verge highlighting the event’s odd promo video clips.

The biggest problem of the event was that the presenters were just reading from a teleprompter, almost all the time. The unavoidable result was that their speech seemed forced and awkward. The moments where they said some words of their own were so few and far between that they seemed quite conspicuous. Their presentation suffered from dearth of enthusiasm, as if they knew they had were releasing a substandard device. Only one of the presenters was a native English speaker (as far as I could tell), so that could have been a contributing factor. Still, Samsung should have invested more to presenting the device in a more enthusiastic way. It’s not like you can just throw anyone at the stage, especially without a lot of rehearsing, to present a product that costs 600+ euros and is supposed to sell 30+ million units.

Americans are, by far, the best at giving presentations. Speaking in one’s native language is of course a big help, but people working in marketing and PR are supposed to have a great command of English and the ability to give engaging presentations. It’s not enough to walk back and forth on the stage, reading words on the teleprompter with your thick accent. It just makes you and your product look bad. I could definitely do better, even for free, just to show Samsung how it’s supposed to be done. English is not my first language, but people who know me know that I’m not fucking kidding.

One of the problems in the presentation was that they pretty much quickly jumped from one feature to the next. Even the ones they spent more time on were presented in ways that are best described as disappointing. A few times they resorted to showing a video that had barely anything to do with the device or its capabilities. The first TV advertisement that they showed, which the presenter stated she was very proud of, was a very generic film, supposedly telling the audience how the GS3 is supposed to become part of their lives. I had difficulty figuring out what made the supposedly good ad any good.

They also made a few faux pas when presenting. When demonstrating a feature where the phone’s camera selects the best photo of eight shots taken in a burst, one of the presenters said something along the lines of: “Is that really the best photo of me? We’re going to have to talk about that.” Sorry, Samsung, but that’s a pretty bad way to present a new feature that’s supposed to be one of your device’s selling points. A feature which, incidentally, has been already brought to the market by HTC in their One line of Android phones.

Another hard-to-believe moment was when a presenter demoed the S Voice, supposedly an Apple Siri equivalent, by asking for the weather in London. As it often happens the weather forecast didn’t happen to be too enjoyable, which the presenter duly pointed out. The way he said it put the emphasis on the bad London weather instead of the S Voice feature. It immediately struck me as a horrible way to introduce a potentially useful feature. The S Voice wasn’t demoed any further, apart from an eerily disturbing video, much to the chagrin of the audience. Well, to me at least.

A mistake appeared in one of the several presentation videos, in which a narrator said something like “no more missing of missed calls.” Please, Samsung, proofread your promo video scripts before you make fools of yourselves. You know it’s the right thing to do. I think I’m feeling at least half as perplexed as the video’s narrator at this oversight.

There’s a lot to be said about the GS3 device itself, and not much of it is good. First the positives. Or the only positive aspect: performance. There’s no denying the fact that the phone really smokes the competition, at least according to early benchmarks. Whether this finally results in a lag-and-stutter-free Android experience remains to be seen. Funnily enough, the performance aspect was conspicuously absent from S3′s launch presentation.

Then the negatives, of which there are, sadly, many. First off, Samsung failed to deliver a real RGB AMOLED display. We’re instead stuck with basically the same technology already introduced in November 2011 in the Galaxy Nexus. The S3′s display is, using the correct marketing term, HD Super AMOLED, and is missing the “Plus” designation that would indicate RGB subpixel arrangement. Also, the resolution is the same as in the Galaxy Nexus, i.e. 720p, so the pixel density is also a tad lower. Engadget got around to taking a close-up shot of the S3′s subpixel arrangement, which indeed confirms the bad news.

My opinion is that PenTile screens shouldn’t claim to have a resolution in the same terms traditionally associated with RGB-subpixel screens, because of different definitions of what exactly constitutes a pixel. In the case of RGB, it’s easy because a pixels comprises the red, green, and blue subpixels. With PenTile, it’s all about fooling the eye with the subpixels. Granted, this is a triviality if the screen looks good enough, but a “720p” 4.65-inch PenTile screen (in Galaxy Nexus) definitely doesn’t, and S3 with its lower pixel density is bound to be only worse.

A lot can be said about the S3′s screen size of 4.8 inches. Three years ago I said, in a half-jocular fashion, that I would be satisfied with a 5-inch screen in a phone. This was in a time when the biggest phone screens were about 3.5 inches at best. The 5-inch barrier has almost been reached, and while my hand could accommodate such a humongous display, I’m not sure about everyone else. There certainly appears to be quite a bit of negative stir around phone display sizes getting out of hand. I think that 5 inches must be pretty much the limit, because even people with bigger hands start to feel awkward using them with one hand; having to always use two hands to operate a phone puts the device firmly into the tablet category.

On the other hand, Galaxy Note, with its 5.3-inch screen, has been surprisingly popular. I haven’t tried it but generally people seem to think it as a successful device. It is also in a niche category of its own between phones and tablets. But what comes to phone screen sizes, there certainly seems not to be a sweet spot, one-size-fits-all solution. The iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen was fine in 2007-10, but by now feels severely antiquated. I think most people would be satisfied with something like a 4.3-inch screen. Unfortunately, phone makers seem to be locked in a one-upmanship where bigger numbers seem better, resulting in yet larger screen sizes. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to camera megapixels anymore; most manufacturers seem to be content with a 8 MP shooter.

But back to discussing the flaws of the S3. There’s no denying that the device doesn’t look very good. Indeed, it looks quite bad compared to the previous Galaxy S models, and doesn’t really deserve, by looks alone, to be part of the Galaxy S lineage. Android Police published a very good article that suggested that the phone had been designed by lawyers who were trying to avert any further lawsuits from Apple, who allege that the previous Galaxy S devices copy the iPhone’s design. There certainly seems to be similarities to the Galaxy Nexus, but while that device looks quite good, the similarities aren’t enough to save the S3.

The physical home key seems to be protruding from the phone’s surface, and its shape doesn’t cease to irritate me. The previous Galaxy S phones had a rectangular, recessed home button with rounded corners. It became somewhat of a signature design decision, which was thrown into the bin with S3, apparently by Samsung’s lawyers.

The back of the device is just hideous. The LED flash, camera lens, and ambient light sensor form a trio of ugliness. I don’t know what the ambient light sensor is doing in such a prominent place. The convention is to team up the flash with the lens, which usually make a decent-looking combination. No such luck with the S3.

I can’t fool myself into liking the looks of the S3. If a phone costs 600+ euros, I’m definitely not going to choose it by its functionality alone. No one buys a luxury item (that’s where such expensive devices are for us “normal” consumers) that performs well but looks like shit. I know some people claim to prefer “function over form” and all that shit, but I’m not one of them. If I were to buy a €100 phone, I would be prepared to get a device that is lacking in the looks department. But for €600+, good appearance has to be part of the deal.

Another huge complaint is the inclusion of hardware keys, and especially the menu key. It  is as if Samsung were trying to keep Android from moving forward, as if Gingerbread were the best there is ever going to be. Google has deprecated the menu button in Honeycomb already, and has posted a comprehensive set of Android UX design principles on the developer site. If Samsung had followed these principles, they would have understood that the Action bar is the new options menu. By including the menu key Samsung is telling developers to stick to the Gingerbread era of application design. I’m telling Samsung to move on with the times. As soon as I get around to it, I’ll rip the options menu from LoanShark, and replace it with an action bar, for all devices running Android 2.1+. This can be, incidentally, achieved easily with ActionBarSherlock.

Since I don’t have a device with a menu button, I can’t confirm how applications with the action bar operate when the menu button is pressed, but I guess it will open the action bar menu (three dots), which resides on the other end of the display (in portrait mode). I don’t know how I’m going to handle this in LoanShark, but one viable option is to just display a toast message that directs the user to use the action bar menu instead. If someone with an S3 gets around to using the upcoming version of LoanShark, they’ll have to endure my thinly-veiled jab at their device having a menu button. Grr!

Unlike the Galaxy Nexus and HTC One X, there’s no button to view a list of previously used applications. You can get to the menu by long-pressing the home key, but I guess this usage tidbit will evade most of the customer base.

I will not be buying this phone; I’m so disappointed with it after months of anticipation. It seems that many others share my view. The next Nexus device will be manufactured by Samsung as well, and that is currently the number one on my list of phones to buy. The next Nexus will most likely be out by the end of the year, and will sport the newest incarnation of Android, Jelly Bean. I’m certainly hoping that Samsung doesn’t manage to screw up the looks of the next Nexus device. If the 2011 Nexus’ design were kept as-is, I’d be more than happy.