The Samsung Galaxy S II (GT-I9100) is a smartphone running the Android operating system that was announced by Samsung on 13 February 2011 at the Mobile World Congress. It is the successor to the Samsung Galaxy S, with a different appearance and significantly improved hardware.[3] The phone is also the predecessor of the Samsung Galaxy S III.[4] The Galaxy S II 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.[5] The Galaxy S II has a 1.2 GHz dual-core "Exynos" system on a chip (SoC) processor,[6] 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),[7] 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(USB OTG) is supported.[8][9]
The user-replaceable battery on the Galaxy S II gives up to ten hours of heavy usage, or two days of lighter usage.[10] According to Samsung, the Galaxy S II is capable of providing nine hours of talk time on 3G and 18.3 hours on 2G.[10][11]The Galaxy S II was given worldwide release dates starting from May 2011, by more than 140 vendors in some 120 countries.[12]
On 9 May 2011, Samsung announced that they had received pre-orders for 3 million Galaxy S II units globally.[13]
In some time after the device's release, Samsung also released a Nvidia Tegra 2 powered Samsung Galaxy R (or 'Galaxy Z' in Sweden) variant version. The release of the Galaxy R 'GT-I9103' corroborated with early pre-release reports of an Nvidia powered Galaxy S II smartphone.[14][15] Eldar Murtazin, of Mobile-Review.com, hinted that Samsung might have faced delays in meeting worldwide shipment of both its Exynos chip and Super AMOLED Plus screens. He noted that nobody expected the "huge success" and "sky high" demand for the previous Samsung Galaxy S.[16]
Different regions around the world have received this device to market beginning from the earliest of April 2011.The Galaxy S II has a 1.2 GHz dual core ARM Cortex-A9 processor that uses Samsung's own 'Exynos 4210' System on a chip(SoC) that was previously code-named "Orion".
The Exynos branded SoC was the source of much speculation concerning another branded successor to the previous "Hummingbird" single-core SoC of the Samsung Galaxy S. The Exynos 4210 uses ARM's Mali-400 MP GPU.[26][27] This graphics GPU, supplied by ARM, is a move away from the PowerVR GPU of the Samsung Galaxy S.[28]
The Exynos 4210 supports ARM's SIMD engine (also known as Media Processing Engine, or 'NEON' instructions), and may give a significant performance advantage in critical performance situations such as accelerated decoding for many multimedia codecs and formats (e.g., On2's VP6/7/8 or Real formats).[29][30][31]
At the 2011 Game Developers Conference ARM's representatives demonstrated 60 Hz framerate playback in stereoscopic 3D running on the same Mali-400 MP and Exynos SoC. They said that an increased framerate of 70 Hz would be possible through the use of an HDMI 1.4 port.[27]
The Motorola Atrix advertised in June 2011 that it was "the world's most powerful smartphone"; in August 2011 the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the Atrix was not as powerful as Galaxy SII due to its faster processor.[32]
A newer Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100G) uses a 1.2 GHz dual core TI OMAP 4430 processor with PowerVR SGX540 graphics.[3
