They added:
Smart stay to keep the screen on when in use via eye tracking in the front facing cam.
S beam which uses NFC and WiFi to move large files between phones .
Best photo which takes 8 pictures in succession choosing the best shot taken in the burst.
AllShare Play which uses DLNA and Wifi-direct to wirelessly share media and files.
Photo share which will instantly push pictures to your friends galaxy s3 devices within range.
Social tag which integrates with the likes of Facebook to assist with tagging pictures of your friends.
Pop up play which overlays any videos you are watching over the phones GUI effacing you to watch the video and user your phone at the same time.
Multi window which enables the user to run two apps at the same time.
Improved TouchWiz interface - they actually made it stuck a lot less!
What they should have done is innovated some better internals and an extra row of icons...
The dock got an extra icon. Does that count? 😉
-So basically the screen stays on if you're looking at it?oh god what such innovation
-Yeah because sometimes I want to move my movies from phone to phone
-HDR,takes 3 pictures,chooses the best one of the 3 and lets you keep the original(only if it took 8 pics right?)
-AllShare is actually useful
-PhotoStream but that only works if your friends have the same device as you?wow thats really good,Apple should do that(and then get killed by it)
-So people complained Apple facebook integration was a no feature but something that helps you tag your facebook friends on a picture on your phone is a killer feature on S3?yeah sounds like an objective view of things
-Practical advantages besides bragging rights?checking twitter and facebook at the same time?this is something very few people actually use besides bragging about it.
And like I said in my post:hardware-wise the improvements from the S2->S3 are pretty much the same from the 4S->5.
All you stated are software things(most of those things are gimmicks anyway but all companies do it),the only really useful thing of those things is the AllShare Play which is indeed useful and really improved TouchWiz?so if sucked before they get points for improving it?thats like their job to make it suck less.
Sure GameCenter is gimmicky as well but it was something required to get the gaming part of iOS,Newstand should be available on something like if you wish to use the magazines that use the newsstaand api's to work you need to download it,passbook isn't that great but at least it doesn't require NFC installed everywhere to be useful(still the usefulness of both is very reduced at best).
Now granted Android is evolving at a faster pace than iOS(which is nothing new since Android uses the windows approach of letting everything go into it even if it isn't really useful and iOS they decide what they think they can do well and do that and think of other stuff later,neither of which is a really good approach although Apple's one keeps everything running how they thought it should the reason why most people think iOS runs so perfectly) and Apple needs to start catching up in the evolution and revolutionize lots of things on iOS(NC and multitasking bar) but not by adding things most people won't use if at all.
In essence:hardware-wise a very similar upgrade,software-wise S3 brings much more new features than the 5 although most of them are like Apple's 200 new features in OSX in that very little changes or it isn't all that useful.
