The new Galaxy S is a significant phone. Its predecessors sold over 40 million units - outselling the iPhone - and the S II was arguably the first phone to be critically lauded as being better than the iPhone in many regards. But the S III launches into a different market: there are several top phones battling to be number one now and one of the very best launched two month's ago with very similar specs - the HTC One X.

I said the One X was the best phone ever... of the week. The pace of the phone market is such that new models appear all the time and models can look old quickly. The One X takes some beating though and the similarly-specified S III has its work cut out. Furthermore, a new variant of the One X - the One XL - has just launched, offering super-fast 4G connection speeds which the S III can't match... yet. We'll cover that below.

In short

The S III is a similar size to the One X and Galaxy Nexus despite having a slightly-larger 4.8-inch, 1280 x 720-resolution screen. Both use the latest version of Android (version 4 aka Ice Cream Sandwich). It's 3G and has 16GB of on-board storage plus a microSD card slot for expansion. 32GB, 64GB and 4G variants will be released later. It has Bluetooth 4 and a Near Field Communication chip which is compatible with banking services. The 8-megapixel camera offers rapid-fire picture taking and Full HD video. The battery lasts a full day more comfortably than the HTC One X's. This plus superior handling nudge it ahead of the HTC, but it's more expensive.

Style and handling

The S III is available in dark blue or white and has a silver band going round the side. It's comfortable to hold and use in one hand and weighs only 133 grams. The back is as flimsy as previous Galaxy phones, but it's very flexible and feels solid when attached to the rest of the phone. Being able to access the back means you can reach the battery unlike the One X which has a solid, polycarbonate body. You can also insert a microSD card to boost storage - something that the One X doesn't offer. As for which looks best will depend on who you are.

The S III has three buttons below the screen: two touch-sensitive and a main, 'home' push-button. It's not the most sensitive push button but I can forgive that because the two touch-sensitive buttons are exactly what I've been hoping for - a menu button and a back button. The first Android 4 phone, the Galaxy Nexus, had no dedicated navigation buttons and that was annoying. The One X fixed this by adding a separate home button, page flip button and a back button below the screen. However, not having a dedicated menu button was also annoying - the page flip button is not nearly as useful. It sounds minor, but you'll be relying on these three buttons more than anything else, so it's good that the S III has finally got them right.

There's also the standard power button on the right and volume button on the left.

The Unlock screen now apes HTC's in that swiping to unlock can now act as a shortcut directly to the phone, camera, email and internet apps. Layout resembles the standard Android environment (much like the One X) although the main apps are all dumped into one list that isn't separated into All, Frequently Used and Downloaded like HTC's does. It's minor, but I missed that.

I also missed HTC's superb tethering options. If you plug in a cable to an HTC phone you are offered the ability to charge only, share the internet connection, use the computer's internet connection or act as a simple disk drive. Samsung still struggles at this: plugging a cable in allows for clunky file transfers and syncing using the Kies system is still convoluted.

Another traditional winning area for HTC is contact management. HTC brilliantly groups together contact information from multiple sources including Google, Outlook and various social media sources. That said, the S III's equivalent system wasn't too bad - duplicates were minimal and most sources merged successfully. It's still far better than Apple's system where contact management is horrendous and duplicates appear too frequently if you don't use other Apple products as the contact source.

Samsung does offer some nice usability tweaks of its own, though. By recognising when you're looking at it, the screen doesn't go dark when reading a webpage for an extended period of time. Also, the ability to automatically phone the contact on screen by simply moving the phone to your ear worked very well.

Screen

AMOLED screens, like the one on the S III, are often a mixed bag. They tend to offer good colours and contrast but don't often get very bright. The S III suffers no problems here. It gets as bright as the impressive super LCD screen on the One X. There's very little to pick between them, both are excellent and offer great colour reproduction although the S III can display slightly-better reds.

Speed

The One X redefined what a fast and responsive phone was. There's pretty much no lag whatsoever. The only issues appear in the form of occasional hangs but these didn't happen too often and were a very minor annoyance. The Galaxy S III, also uses a quad-core processor - built in house by Samsung especially for the job - and it too flies along but without any hiccoughs at all. I'm wary in saying this though: the first Galaxy S was fast at the beginning but ground to a halt after a few months. That was different technology, though. Nonetheless, some phones do slow down after time and need to be completely reset. Only long-term testing can identify this. Suffice to say now, that there's virtually no lag or delay in any software application I used.

Camera

The One X's camera is its party piece. It can shoot at four frames per second (for 99 frames) and can even snap pictures when recording or playing back video. So the good news is that the S III's camera matches it in many areas. It too can shoot rapidly albeit for "only" 20 shots. You can take a picture while shooting video but not when playing back. Both offer High Dynamic Range photographs and on-board Panorama stitching and in both cases the fast processing speed makes using these features a joy. The S III also has a smile-activated shutter and can tag faces with contact details. These are useful or gimmicky depending on who you are.

The S III's camera has eight-megapixels at the back and 1.9-megapixels at the front. The front is a bit grainy and dark in low light, but passable. At the rear, the LED Flash is relatively powerful and impressively avoids washing out pictures when used. While the shutter button is "instant" that doesn't necessarily mean a shot will be in focus. Focus-searching and flash charging can add make the camera a bit slower than you'd like. Video can be recorded in Full HD and is incredibly sharp for a phone.

There's not much in it, but I preferred the One X's camera here. Focusing seemed that bit quicker and low light shots, without flash, were a bit brighter. There's not much in it though.

Battery

The One X's Achilles Heal was battery life. It can just about get through a long day, but not if you use it a great deal. The S III however, sits in standard smartphone territory and more-comfortably lasts a day even under relatively-heavy use - noticeably more-comfortably than the One X. With differences on a knife edge between the two, it's here that the S III nudges into the lead.

4G

A slight annoyance is that the 4G variant of the S III has not yet been given a release date in Australia. It will appear though. Currently, however, it isn't necessarily a great loss. Recently, I've been testing the HTC One XL - the dual-core 4G variant of the One X - and like the HTC Velocity 4G before it, battery life was poor. Internet content certainly did load much faster... when we had a 4G signal (which is incredibly patchy even around Sydney CBD) but the trade-off was watching the battery drain even faster. So while the One XL pulls ahead a little here, it also trails off much quicker.

Other features

The S III has a Near Field Communication chip, which other phones, including the One X, also have. This is useful for gimmicky file transfer and online selection services but the real benefit is for banking. Unlike other phones, this one will be able to work with Pay Wave-like technologies, meaning it can act as an e-wallet. The relevant deals need to be sorted out with credit card companies and banks in Australia, but these features should appear down the line.

I'm always wary of proprietary apps and Samsung offers a few. The most notable is S Voice which lets you talk to the phone in a second-rate Siri-like way. The iPhone's Siri voice-recognition system hardly ever understood a word I said. The following picture sums up my experience with the S III voice recognition.

S Planner is a proprietary calendar app that does what the regular Android calendar does only worse. Aside from repeatedly losing newly-entered appointments it crashed a lot. Fortunately there are plenty of free calendar apps on the Android 'Play' Store. Samsung Music Hub is a subscription service which offers fewer songs than all the other available music subscription services. Pop Up play allows you to watch a video on the phone while browsing the web at the same time - just what the world has been waiting for. 50GB DropBox space being included is far more useful.

Australian models have Navigon Sat Nav included which is potentially handy. Special offers for the Good Food Guide and Quickflix may also appeal to some people.

Value and competitors

The S III is officially available at $899 RRP although all Australian networks seem to be bending over to offer some great cap plans and deals. Online it can be had from $750 for the 16GB version up to $1000 for the 64GB version depending on whether you want to grey import. This matches the price for the 4G-compatible HTC One XL which is a good choice if you need 4G immediately and can charge the phone throughout the day. The One X, however, costs some $200 less for the 32GB version which will create a headache for some: the Samsung Galaxy S III is, in my view, the best all-round Android phone on the market, but is it really $200 better than the One X? For some it won't be.

Elsewhere, the iPhone 4S has started to fall in price and can be had for around $650 now. It's arguably a better choice if you're a technology novice or have embedded yourself in a world of Apple, but it looks tiny compared to the newer Android phones which are more powerful and more customisable. There are bargains to be had in the world of Windows Mobile, with HTC's HD7 costing just $300 now while the Nokia Lumia 800 has dropped to $400. We'll be covering the new HTC Titan II 4G ($600ish) and Nokia Lumia 900 ($700ish) soon.

Let's also not forget the massive Galaxy Note "phablet" phone which can now be had for under $500, but it will be physically too big for some.

Conclusion

The S III might not be as revolutionary as Samsung hoped, but it matches the excellent HTC One X in many areas, beats it in others and only falls down to it only in a few. The main kickers are the S III's better battery and more-useful navigation buttons. People tend to mould their life around their phones and I'm no exception. Personally, I loved the One X (especially its camera) but the S III will be my stalwart device (until the next competitor comes along and unseats it) and I'm very particular about my phones.