The Samsung Galaxy S II is a touchscreen-enabled, slate-format Android smartphone designed, developed, and marketed by Samsung Electronics. It has additional software features, expanded hardware, and a redesigned physique compared to its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S. The SII was launched with Android 2.3 "Gingerbread", with updates to Android 4.1.2 "Jelly Bean"
Samsung unveiled the S II on 13 February 2011 at the Mobile World Congress.It was one of the slimmest smartphones of the time, mostly 8.49 mm thick, except for two small bulges which take the maximum thickness of the phone to 9.91 mm.The Galaxy S II has a 1.2 GHz dual-core "Exynos" system on a chip(SoC) processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 10.8 cm(4.3 in) WVGA Super AMOLED Plus screen display and an 8-megapixel camera with flash and 1080p full high definition video recording.
It is one of the first devices to offer a Mobile High-definition Link(MHL), which allows up to 1080p uncompressed video output to an MHL enabled TV or to an MHL to HDMI adapter, while charging the device at the same time. USB On-The-Go is supported.The user-replaceable battery gives up to ten hours of heavy usage, or two days of lighter usage.According to Samsung, the Galaxy S II is capable of providing 9 hours of talk time on 3G and 18.3 hours on 2G.
It was succeeded by the Samsung Galaxy S III in May 2012.Software and services
The Galaxy S II was launched with Android 2.3 "Gingerbread". American variants began shipments with the slightly updated version 2.3.5 installed.[20][21] Version 2.3.6 was made globally available on 12 December 2011. On 13 March 2012, Samsung began to roll out upgrades to Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich" through their phone management software KIES to users in Korea, Hungary, Poland and Sweden. Russian users received the update on 5 July 2012, while the rest of Europe received it on 1 August 2012.[24] In February 2013, Samsung began rolling out an update to Android 4.1.2 "Jelly Bean" for the device.[25]
The S II employs the TouchWiz 4.0 user interface, following the same principle as TouchWiz 3.0 found on the Galaxy S, with new improvements, such as hardware acceleration. It also has an optional gesture-based interaction called’motion’ which(among other things) allows users to zoom in and out by placing two fingers on the screen and tilting the device towards and away from themselves to zoom in and out respectively. This gesture function works on both the web browser and the images in gallery used within this device. "Panning" on TouchWiz 4.0 allows the movement of widgets and icons shortcuts between screens, by allowing the device to be held and moved from side to side to scroll through home screens. This gesture-based management of widgets is a new optional method next to the existing method of holding and swiping between home screens. The Android 4.1 update backports the TouchWiz Nature interface and other features from the Galaxy S III, such as Direct Call, Pop-up Play, Smart Stay, and Easy Mode.
Four new Samsung’Hub’ applications were revealed at the 2011 Mobile World Congress: Social Hub, which integrates popular social networking services into one place rather than in separate applications, Readers Hub, providing the ability to access, read and download online newspapers, ebooks and magazines from a worldwide selection, Music Hub(in partnership with 7digital) an application store for downloading and purchasing music tracks on the device, and Game Hub(in partnership with Gameloft) an application store for downloading and purchasing games. Additional applications include Kies 2.0, Kies Air, AllShare(for DLNA), Voice Recognition, Google Voice Translation, Google Maps with Latitude, Places, Navigation(beta) and Lost Phone Management, Adobe Flash 10.2, QuickOffice application and’QuickType’ by SWYPE.
Before launch, it was announced that Samsung had taken steps to incorporate Enterprise software for business users, which included On Device Encryption, Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN, device management, Cisco WebEx, Juniper, and secure remote device management from Sybase.
The Galaxy S II comes with support for many multimedia file formats and codecs. For audio it supports FLAC, WAV, Vorbis, MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, MID, AC3, XMF. For video formats and codecs it supports MPEG-4, H.264, H.263, DivX HD/XviD, VC-1, 3GP(MPEG-4), WMV(ASF) as well as AVI(DivX), MKV, FLV and the Sorenson codec. For H.264 playback, the device natively supports 8-bit encodes along with up to 1080p HD video playback.