I have generally kept my contracts to a maximum of £15 and had decent phones during the time, but I never really splashed out on getting one of the best phones around the time.

I won't go into the mission into actually receiving this phone from T-Mobile, as that is another story for itself, and not really relevant here, so don't worry I will stay on topic.


Size and Screen
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The phone itself is a thing of beauty. It has a 4.3 inch super amoled screen. Now for those of you who are not up to date with technology this is the very latest is screen technology and up until recently had not even been developed for large screens, but over the coming months and years OLED will be replacing TV's, and is the future.

It is quite a large phone, but not too big that it is uncomfortable to use, there are some manufacturers coming out with 5 inch screens in the future, and I think this would just be over the top. With it being a touch phone, there is no keypad, and this is to be expected with a modern smart phone, but the screen space is needed with the bright vivid colours. In comparison to the Iphone which my brother has, this definitely has the brighter and better screen, there is no doubt about that and I review completely without Bias.


Audio
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There is a 3.5 jack for earphones which is quite standard, and not really much to say here, if you have earphones then I imagine you will be using this as a music player, and it does the job with the internal audio being decent, but of course not up to the standard of a specialist music player.


Charging
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It seems that all phones universally being released now have micro USB slots, which is great, as the companies cant charge excessive prices for chargers, and you can find them for a couple of pounds on EBay.


Camera
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The camera has 8mp which is pretty decent, and also when comparing it to Iphone camera it wins there as well. It is sharper and the HD video truly it awesome. You can usually tell the difference when the videos and images are uploaded to a computer and on a larger screen and generally with the Samsung Galaxy S2 the quality is maintained.


Android
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With most non Iphone Smart phones out these days you can expect them to be running with Android, so this means their own Android apps, which are growing at an alarming rate, and last I heard it may be overtaking the apple market soon enough. You get free apps and paid apps, but there is no point in delving into anything here as the apps are pretty irrelevant to this review.


Video
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This phone can play most video files, but anything it can't, then just use your computer to convert it to a format that the phone plays like a wmv, and it does play 1080p which is awesome. Personally I don't really use this for watching video clips too much though, as I am more of a fan of watching on bigger screens, but I can see why this may appeal to some people. I do watch the odd youtube clip here and there on it, but have never tried a movie on it so can't comment there but I think it would be of a very good quality.


Games
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I have a couple of favourite games on here like the basketball app, and really these games downloaded from the market, are available on most android phones, so they aren't really exclusive to this phone, but I can recommend Angry Birds which of course is a very popular game, plus racing Moto a great biking game.


Memory
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You can get two versions of the game with 16 GB and 32 GB, plus most importantly that is expandable memory in the form of a microSD card of up to 32 GB, so potentially up to 64 GB. It doesn't matter how much you know about memory and gigabytes etc, this will be more than enough, and for a phone you shouldn't really need to be storing anymore, unless you literally use your galaxy S2 as a main computer as well.


GPS
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I have to say the GPS is awesome, and one of the main reasons I got the phone. Especially with my job entailing me to get to some remote locations, I really can not live without it. I don't mean just for the car, but for walking as well. Say for example you need to find some random restaurant, with this phone you won't even need to type in the address, just type in the restaurant, and the GPS links in with google street view, so you can navigate your way through the streets, right to the door of the restaurant, it really is that simple and one of the best features on the phone. The GPS is used for the weather, tube status and little perks like that which can be useful.


Battery Life
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I have found that this is a weakness, however not just confined to this phone, but most smart phones. For someone like myself that listens to music on it on it the way to work, plus catching up wit the latest news, tracking share prices, using it for games on a break, it is fair to say that it simply can not handle a whole day. It has sometimes ran out of battery before I got home, which is not great, and somewhere I would have to mark the phone down. I keep a USB cable at work, so that I charge my phone at work, and don't have to come to a situation where if I have a long day, that the phone runs out of battery.


Overall
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In the end I think this is an excellent phone, and one of the best on the market to date, if not the best phone, although I am sure some apple fan boys will disagree but that is simply as they haven't tried out this beauty yet. Don't get me wrong it has crashed every now and then but that is cause I push it oh so hard, but definitely an issue that could be looked at. Even with this minor issue and the battery life I simply have to reward this phone with five stars and think it is worth every penny for making my life so much more simple.