Samsung president J.K. Shin touts some of the S III’s innovative eye-tracking features saying, it “recognises your eye movement while you use the phone. Screens usually go dark after a pre-set time. But sometimes we want to linger on a page without touching it. It’s annoying to have to touch the screen to keep it awake.” This is solved with a new feature called Smart Stay. The S III uses the front facing camera to detect whether the user is looking at the display or not.
Another intriguing feature is the ability to simply raise the S III to your ear — while in the middle of typing a text — if you decide to call instead. There’s also face recognition to identify people you’ve tagged in your social networks for account linking.
S Beam (enhanced Android Beam) combines NFC and Wi-Fi Direct to enable fast sharing of files — up to 1GB in three minutes — between devices. DLNA-based AllShare Cast allows content on the phone to be streamed to a compatible display; AllShare Play lets you send media “regardless of the distance between devices,” suggesting the possibility of internet routing of content. There’s also “Group Cast,” which shares your phone’s screen with other users on the same network and allows them to annotate and add comments.
Samsung is launching “Music Hub” an iTunes Match like music service with 17-million songs, in seven countries. Samsung will also introduce S Health — a personal wellness app.
Built on top of Ice Cream Sandwich, the S III runs on Samsung’s proprietary “nature inspired” TouchWiz Nature UX and features Siri-like voice control called “S Voice”. You use the key phrase “Hi Galaxy” to initialise it and it understands eight languages. The voice recognition can also be customised. You can for example say “snooze” to shut off your alarm when it goes off or “direct call” to dial someone that you’re in the middle of texting.
