Software and services[edit]
The Galaxy S II was launched with
Android 2.3 "Gingerbread". American variants began shipments with the slightly-updated version 2.3.5 installed.
[20][21] Version 2.3.6 was made globally available on 12 December 2011.
[3][22] On 13 March 2012, Samsung began to roll out upgrades to
Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich"[23] through their phone management software
KIES to users in Korea, Hungary, Poland and Sweden. Russian users received the update on 5 July 2012, while the rest of Europe received it on 1 August 2012.
[24][25] In February 2013, Samsung began rolling out an update to
Android 4.1.2 "Jelly Bean" for the device.
[26]
The S II employs the
TouchWiz 4.0 user interface, following the same principle as TouchWiz 3.0 found on the Galaxy S, with new improvements, such as
hardware acceleration. It also has an optional
gesture-based interaction called 'motion' which (among other things) allows users to zoom in and out by placing two fingers on the screen and tilting the device towards and away from themselves to zoom in and out respectively. This gesture function works on both the web browser and the images in gallery
[27] used within this device. "Panning" on TouchWiz 4.0 allows the movement of widgets and icons shortcuts between screens, by allowing the device to be held and moved from side to side to scroll through home screens. This gesture-based management of widgets is a new optional method next to the existing method of holding and swiping between home screens.
[28] The Android 4.1 update
backports the TouchWiz Nature interface and other features from the
Galaxy S III, such as Direct Call, Pop-up Play, Smart Stay, and Easy Mode.
[26]
Four new Samsung 'Hub' applications were revealed at the 2011
Mobile World Congress: Social Hub, which integrates popular social networking services into one place rather than in separate applications, Readers Hub, providing the ability to access, read and download online newspapers, ebooks and magazines from a worldwide selection, Music Hub (in partnership with
7digital,
[29]) an application store for downloading and purchasing music tracks on the device, and Game Hub (in partnership with
Gameloft,
[29]) an application store for downloading and purchasing games. Additional applications include
Kies 2.0, Kies Air,
[30] AllShare (for
DLNA), Voice Recognition, Google Voice Translation,
[31] Google Maps with Latitude, Places, Navigation (beta) and Lost Phone Management,
Adobe Flash 10.2,
QuickOffice application and 'QuickType' by SWYPE.
Before launch, it was announced that Samsung had taken steps to incorporate
Enterprise software for business users, which included On Device Encryption,
Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN, device management, Cisco WebEx,
Juniper,
[32] and secure remote device management from
Sybase.
[33]
The Galaxy S II comes with support for many multimedia file formats and codecs. For audio it supports
FLAC,
WAV,
Vorbis, MP3,
AAC,
AAC+,
eAAC+,
WMA,
AMR-NB,
AMR-WB,
MID,
AC3,
XMF. For video formats and codecs it supports
MPEG-4,
H.264,
H.263,
DivX HD/
XviD,
VC-1,
3GP (
MPEG-4),
WMV (
ASF) as well as
AVI (
DivX)),
MKV,
FLVand the
Sorenson codec. For H.264 playback, the device natively supports 8-bit encodes along with up to 1080p HD video playback.
[34][35][36]
Hardware and design[edit]

Dismantled Samsung Galaxy S II, from left to right components include the handset, battery and back cover
The Galaxy S II has a 1.2 GHz
dual core ARM Cortex-A9 processor that uses Samsung's own '
Exynos 4210'
System on a chip (SoC) that was previously code-named "Orion". The Exynos branded SoC was the source of much speculation concerning another branded successor to the previous "
Hummingbird" single-core SoC of the Samsung Galaxy S. The Exynos 4 Dual 45 nm (previously Exynos 4210) uses
ARM's Mali-400 MP
GPU.
[37][38] This graphics GPU, supplied by ARM, is a move away from the
PowerVR GPU of the Samsung Galaxy S.
[39]
The Exynos 4210 supports ARM's
SIMD engine (also known as
Media Processing Engine, or 'NEON' instructions), and may give a significant performance advantage in critical performance situations such as accelerated decoding for many multimedia codecs and formats (e.g., On2's
VP6/7/8 or
Real formats).
[40][41][42]
The Mali 400 GPU in the Exynos 4210 SOC is one of the only, if not the only GPU powering Android devices, that does not support GL_RGB Framebuffer Objects (FBOs), only GL_RGBA. The newer Galaxy S II (9100G), based on the PowerVR SGX540, does not exhibit the issue.
At the 2011
Game Developers Conference ARM's representatives demonstrated 60 Hz framerate playback in stereoscopic 3D running on the same Mali-400 MP and Exynos SoC. They said that an increased framerate of 70 Hz would be possible through the use of an
HDMI 1.4 port.
[38]
A newer Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100G) uses a 1.2 GHz dual core TI OMAP 4430 processor with PowerVR SGX540 graphics.
[44]
The Galaxy S II has 1 GB of dedicated RAM and 16 GB of internal mass storage. Within the battery compartment there is an external
microSD card slot capable of recognizing and utilizing a 64 GB
microSDXCcard.
[45][verification needed]
The Samsung Galaxy S II uses a 108.5-millimetre (4.27 in)
[12] WVGA (800 x 480)
Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen that is covered by
Gorilla Glass with an
oleophobic fingerprint-resistant coating. The display is an upgrade of its predecessor, and the "Plus" signifies that the display panel has done away with Pentile matrix to regular
RGB matrix display which results in a 50% increase in sub-pixels. This translates to grain reduction and sharper images and text. In addition, Samsung has claimed that Super AMOLED Plus displays are 18% more power efficient than the older Super AMOLED displays.
[46] Some phones have display issues, with a few users reporting a "yellow tint" on the left bottom edge of the display when a neutral grey background is displayed.
[47]
The Galaxy S II uses
Yamaha audio hardware.
[48] The Galaxy S II's predecessor, the original Galaxy S, used
Wolfson's WM8994 DAC.
[49] User feedback on
Internet forums as well as an in-depth review at
Clove,
[48] have expressed the Yamaha chip's inferior sound quality compared to that of the Wolfson chip featured in the original Galaxy S.
On the back of the device is an 8-megapixel
Back-illuminated sensor[50] camera with single-LED flash that can record videos in full high-definition
1080p at 30 frames per second. There is also a fixed focus front-facing 2-megapixel camera for
video calling, taking photos as well as general video recording, with a maximum resolution of 640x480 (
VGA).
The Galaxy S II is one of the earliest Android devices to natively support NFC
Near field communication.
[32] This follows on from the Google
Nexus S which was the first de facto NFC smartphone device.
[51] It has been reported that the UK version will be supplied without an NFC chip at the beginning of its production run,
[52] with an NFC-equipped version released later in 2011.
[53]
Samsung has also included a new high-definition connection technology called
Mobile High-definition Link (MHL). The main specialty of MHL is that it is optimized for mobile devices by allowing the device's battery to be charged while at the same time playing back multimedia content.
[54] For the Galaxy S II, the industry standard micro USB port found on the bottom of the device can be used with an MHL connector for a TV out connection to an external display, such as a
high definition television.
[55]
The micro USB port on this device also supports
USB On-The-Go (USB OTG) standard which means the Galaxy S II can act as a 'host' device in the same way as a desktop computer in allowing external USB devices to be plugged in and used.
[11] These external USB devices typically include
USB flash drives and separately powered
external hard drives. A video demonstration on YouTube
[56] has shown the OTG function to be readily available with an ordinary micro USB (B-type) OTG adaptor. The same YouTube video goes on to mention a successful test completed on a 2
TB USB external hard drive (requiring own power source) but however reports of failure when trying to connect USB keyboards, tested USB mice and tested USB
game pads. Currently the only
file-system supported for USB drives within OTG is
FAT32.
A 3.5 mm
TRRS headset jack is available and is located on the top side of the device. The micro USB connection port is located on the bottom side of the device.
BCM4330 combo chip integrates 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 + HS and FM radio (except in phones released to the US market, which lack the FM receiver). BCM4330 supports
Wi-Fi Direct that communicate directly with one another without having to interact with an access point.
[57]
Additional accessories available include: