SGSIII for a day

My dad decided that it was time to finally step into the smartphone game, his main motivator was to be able to access his spreadsheets on the go. He gets a lot of calls about products, the details of which are all stored in a few spreadsheets.

I'm glad he asked me for advice, because he wanted to be able to read spreadsheets I told him that screen size should be his biggest buying factor. I gave him the choice to get either the Galaxy Note, the SGSIII which he ended up getting and the HTC One X.

Once he picked up his new phone he made a trip down to me to help him get setup and show him a few things that his phone can do.

The apps I installed for him:

• Swype beta....I have posted on this before, awesome. Dad was swyping in less then a minute.
• HandyCalc, probably the best calculator program on Android, much more then he needs but still does the basics well.
• Dropbox already installed just needed an account, this is another thing that he really wanted....not dropbox specifically but the function that it provides, I could have gone with Google Drive / Ubuntu One. But dropbox comes with 48Gb with the SGSIII.
• Torque, I also had a bluetooth OBD2 adapter that I gave him. This one really blew him away, he just had no idea that it was even possible to read the data from the car computer with you phone. He is a mechanic and always thought that you had to get the very expensive proprietary tools, which is true for older models. But you can get all , kinds of data using the adapter and your phone.
• Polaris Office was already installed, this is what he uses to open and read the spreadsheets. It is a fairly good mobile office suite. I didn't really use t much.
• ES File Manager, just so he can browse his files. And it let me put a direct link on his home screen to his most used spreadsheet.
• Google account, so he could access the play store.

I also showed him Ceberus, the phone security suite, which also amazed him the capabilities of phones is really stunning to those who haven't kept up with the state of the tech. I will post with an in depth review later about Ceberus.

It was interesting to help dad and see a different use case to what I'm used to, being a "power user" I shop on specs / modability. His last phone was all txt and call, he has jumped into the smartphone game at the top. The SGSII is one of / arguably the best phone in the world for now. But he didn't buy it because it is the best, but because it has a big screen and his use case requires more stuff to be displayed at once.

Now one geeky thing...is it better then my HTC One S? No, they are both really really polished bits of hardware. The software is not much of a comparison, I am running CM10 Jellybean and the SGSIII is running ICS with touch wiz. I have never been fond of touch wiz, I think it looks far too simple and boring. But I also don't like Sense by HTC as it is too bloated. CM10 is not completely finished but is in a daily driver state, which is what I am using it for. The SGSIII is big though, really big, I wouldn't want to carry it round all the time but it was not as bad as I expected. I wonder what the Note 2 will be like with its 5.5" screen.

Another thing that is interesting is he wants to know more about the tech but has really not kept up with it at all, other people that I deal with who have the same level of knowledge don't want to know anything about the tech they just want a phone that "does internet and email"