If you haven’t heard by now, the official stock Android 4.0.4 ROM for the Samsung Galaxy S3 was leaked to the world on Saturday. Samsung’s latest heavily customized version of Android, TouchWiz, comes in at a whopping 800MB. If you had any doubts in your mind that Samsung was focused on bloatware software, look no further at this feature packed ROM. It’s packed with various Samsung technologies such as S-Voice (Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Siri), Pop-Up Play (a picture in picture for watching movies), Smart Stay (which uses the front camera to turn the screen off if you’re not looking at it), and S-Beam (an NFC front end for setting up WiFi direct), to name just a few features.
Developers and other Android enthusiasts have been scrambling to port and extract as many features as possible from the leaked firmware. So far we have S-Voice, Wallpapers, Live Wallpapers and Ringtones for your downloading pleasure.
S-Voice
It’s been a bumpy road the past few days with S-Voice. After the APK (application) was extracted from the ROM, Android ICS users around the world scrambled to test it out. I was quite surprised to find S-Voice to just be a themed and customized version of Vlingo, hoping for some more innovation on Samsung’s part. If you aren’t familiar with Vlingo, the application has been providing voice actions for Android since 2010. Vlingo was actually an early competitor for Google’s own Voice Actions (and I used Vlingo on my BlackBerry Curve 8830 and Storm years prior).
Either way, S-Voice (Vlingo) is a great app and works quite well as long as you’re running Ice Cream Sandwich. Shortly after the world began experiencing S-Voice for the first time on non-approved devices, Samsung changed their server configurations. The result? S-Voiced failed to function properly responding only with “network error”. Thankfully, Android gurus had the community covered, shortly after the block, a patched APK was released, fixing the problem at hand.
If you want to try S-Voice for yourself, download the new APK here. Once downloaded, use ADB or Root Explorer to push it to /system/app/ and apply r-w, r, r for permissions. If this doesn’t work, and you’re desparate, some users have had success editing their build.prop to reflect SGS3 device information. This has been reported to break some applications such as Google Wallet though. The safe bet is to try the patched APK.
However if it doesn’t work:
Change…
ro.product.model=GT-N7000
To…
ro.product.model=GT-I9300
Do the same with line ro.product.device=GT-I9300
Live Wallpapers
The SGS3 comes with three gorgeous live wallpapers; Luminous Dots, DeapSea (my favorite) and Dandelion. To install them, simply launch the downloaded APK file and click install. Then from your home screen either hit menu to bring up settings or long press the screen, then select wallpapers and live wallpapers (this step may vary depending on your ROM).
Regular Wallpapers
Here are the stock Samsung Galaxy S3 wallpapers in their full resolution glory. Download them all. To install your newly downloaded SGS3 wallpapers, simply extract the images to your SD card and use the Gallery app to browse them and set one as your wallpaper.
Ringtones
If you want your current Android smartphone to completely transform into the SGS3, you’ll want these ringtones. To install these ringtones, just extract the downloaded zip contents into system/media/audio/ringtones or just to your sd card.
Are there any other SGS3 features you’ed like to see ported to other devices? Let us know and keep your fingers crossed.