Samsung Galaxy S II

With an IDC-estimated 10.8 million units shipped during the first quarter of this year, Samsung files as the world’s fourth-largest smartphone vendor, behind Nokia, Apple and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. However, the rising popularity of Samsung’s feature phones and dumb handsets powered by their own operating system called Bada has helped the Korean phone maker capture the #2 slot in terms of all handset units shipped globally.

Samsung was outdone only by Nokia in the first quarter. According to IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, Samsung shipped 70 million handset units during the first quarter of this year versus the 108.5 million Nokia phones. With 18.7 million iPhones Apple came in fourth, behind LG Electronics which shipped 24.5 million handsets. That was last quarter…

The global handset landscape is going to alter rapidly by the June quarter’s end, predicts Japanese research firm Nomura. Their analyst was quoted as saying that “Nokia looks set to relinquish its smartphone crown (in unit terms) to Samsung and Apple”. This means, their analyst argues, that Nokia will be #3, with Samsung and Apple taking the #1 and #2 slots, respectively. Mind you, Nokia has been the world’s top handset maker since 1996…

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ2oFpzzjqg&w=670&h=411]

Even though Samsung’s Galaxy S II packs in an impressive 1.2GHz dual-core processor, for some folks that simply isn’t enough oomph. No problem, the most popular Android phone can be easily overclocked to a whooping 1.5 GHz, as shown in the above video by coolbho3000 over at the XDA Developers Forum. Just how fast is 1.5GHz compared to 1.2GHz, you ask.

Well, the Quadrant benchmark shows up to sixty frames per second, which is a rather notable performance jump over the factory 1.2GHz clock frequency setting. The posted notes you will need appropriate Windows USB drivers and the latest version of the odin3 tool to deband the handset. REad on…

From there, in just a few simple steps you can bump up the clock frequency to 1.5GHz. Proceed by downloading the overclocked kernel (a tar file) and reboot the phone into download mode using adb reboot download. Flash the kernel using odin3 by placing the tar file in the PDA section and pressing Start, after which the phone will reboot automatically. Finally, use SuperOneClick to root your phone if you haven’t already, fire up SetCPU and enjoy the 1.504GHz heaven.

According to many, Samsung Galaxy S II is the best mainstream Android phone currently available on the market. It appears the company has a hit on their hands as Electronista reports they sold an astounding three million pre-orders around the world as of Sunday night. The figure puts Samsung on track to beat its own goal of ten million Galaxy S II units in 2011. The dual-core phone sold about 120,000 units in the first few days of availability in South Korea. The Galaxy S II features a monstrous 4.3-inch display with the latest Super AMOLED Plus display technology.

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