Samsung Galaxy S II plays 1080p Flash videos in the browser, can hot-swap SIM cards just fine

A retail version of the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II 1.2GHz just arrived and we immediately started fiddling with it. Here are two interesting things we tried, that to our surprise, worked smoothly: 1080p Flash video played right in the browser and we hot-swapped the SIM card just like that.

Here’s how the tests went…

Hardware acceleration enables smooth playback of FullHD Flash videos, which is quite an achievement for a mobile device. Many netbooks choke at 720p and 1080p is impossible unless there’s a hardware video decoding chip to do the heavy lifting.

We had some trouble interacting with the YouTube player though – when viewing videos on YouTube.com, toggling the video resolution is quite buggy, but if the player is embedded on another page it works just fine.

Also the screen auto rotation seems to confuse the player – playing a video in fullscreen and then flip the phone horizontally rotates the video again but not how you’d expect. If you flip the phone first and then choose fullscreen it displays properly.

Flash videos in full screen don’t play nice with the screen auto-rotation

As for the SIM card, we tried hot-swapping it a few times and it worked. Annoyingly, the microSD card (which will be swapped more often) is placed in such a way that you have to remove the battery – so there’s no chance to swap it without switching the phone off.

Anyway, if you pull out the SIM card from the slot, put another one in and toggle Flight mode on and off, the Samsung Galaxy S II will accept the card (despite its polite request to restart) and you can make calls without a problem – even cards for different carriers worked.

It’s back to the Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II review for me – that would be our third encounter with this phone after the head-to-head with the LG Optimus 2X and the Galaxy S II preview.