







The biggest difference between the Galaxy S II’s AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint models is something you won’t see, and as it turns out probably won’t notice: the processor. For T-Mobile, Samsung opted to use a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor instead of the 1.2GHz Exynos CPU inside other variants, because the Snapdragon is able to support the network’s 42Mbps download capabilities. In using the phones, there’s no real difference between the options: while T-Mobile’s version isn’t blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast, you certainly won’t find yourself waiting for your phone very often. Even the slightest delay will be obvious as you're typing or launching apps, and I almost never had an issue with either. The one place where there’s an occasional speed issue is going home when an app is open — once in a while I’d hit the home button, and it would take a half-second to close the app, by which time my impatient self had already hit the home button again and accidentally launched the Vlingo-powered voice control app. Overall, though, the device is pleasingly fast, and extremely responsive to taps and swipes. Some basic benchmark tests mirrored that experience, too, showing that the Snapdragon is very fast, but not always consistent; I got Quadrant scores as high as 3,802, but as low as 2,200.

T-Mobile’s super-fast HSPA+ 42 network is a selling point by itself (AT&T’s "4G" doesn’t even compare), and even though 42Mbps was but a pipe dream, I got impressive results. In midtown Manhattan, I consistently got speeds between 8 and 11Mbps down, and 1-2Mbps up using the Speedtest.net app; that’s certainly fast, and makes the included hotspot mode an excellent feature. (It costs $15 / month, though, and T-Mobile throttles your connection speeds after you hit your data cap, so use this feature sparingly.) Latency was alarmingly high, often at over 500ms, but I tested other T-Mobile phones as well and that issue seems to have more to do with the network than the phone.

4G speeds are pretty battery-crushing, too, and unlike on the Epic 4G Touch there’s no easy way to turn it off. I could get a full day of "regular" use out of the phone, making a few phone calls, browsing and sending emails on a mix of Wi-Fi and HSPA+, but it was always nearly dead at the end of the day. More troubling was that the phone seems to use a lot of power on standby: if I left the phone on overnight, it ran a huge amount of battery even if I didn’t do anything with it.

Call quality was pretty mixed in the time I spent with the phone. I sounded loud to the people on the other end of the phone, though they occasionally claimed I sounded tinny. The noise cancellation mic on top, which the Epic 4G Touch lacks, also made a big difference when I was on the street or in a room with others. On my end, things sounded quite good — loud, and clear, without a lot of distortion. The speakerphone, however, was a bit of a disaster: callers could pinpoint the second I put them on speaker, and told me it sounded as if I’d fallen in a well. The speakerphone was plenty loud on my end, but the sound quality was only average.