As hardware specs have become more similar, vendors in the Android camp have been trying to differentiate their products using software, and the Galaxy S III is no different. Like its predecessors, it uses TouchWiz on top of Android.

Samsung has also added integrated voice recognition. The feature is called S Voice and can be used to control the phone and like Apple's Siri ask for things like weather information. It will understand English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Korean.

NFC can be used to share content such as video clips, but the feature only works between two Galaxy S IIIs.

"It is an issue when great functionality is restricted to specific devices. But the implementation on the Galaxy S III is a first step," said Saadi.

Also, a number of features take advantage of the cameras and sensors in new ways. For example, the front camera can spot that someone is looking at the screen and as long as that is the case it won't dim the screen.