The highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy S II is finally available on AT&T, and it was worth the wait. Very similar to the unlocked version  ($699, 4 stars) released earlier this year, as well as to the Epic 4G Touch for Sprint (4 stars, $199.99), the Galaxy S II has a rich, beautiful screen and a blazing fast dual-core processor. Throw in a plethora of useful features and outstanding battery life, and you're looking at the best smartphone available for AT&T right now. Though the iPhone 5 is likely just around the corner, we can't compare this phone to one that doesn't yet exist. The Galaxy S II is our latest Editors' Choice for smartphones on AT&T.

Physical Features, Phone Calls, and Internet

The Samsung Galaxy S II is beautiful. At 5 by 2.6 by .4 inches (HWD) and 4.3 ounces, it's sleek, thin, and comfortable to hold, albeit a touch large. It's a black slab made entirely of plastic with a textured back panel, but it feels classy. Most of the phone's size is dedicated to its beautiful, 4.3-inch, 800-by-480 Super AMOLED Plus screen. This is lower resolution than the 960-by-640 retina display on the Apple iPhone 4 ($199-299, 4.5 stars), but there's no denying the incredible richness of Super AMOLED Plus. Colors here are more saturated, blacks are deeper, and you can still see it outdoors.

The Galaxy S II is also a good voice phone. Reception was average, though calls sounded great in the phone's earpiece—rich, clear, and natural. The speakerphone also sounds good but volume is on the low side. Calls made weren't as impressive. Voices were somewhat thin and grainy, and background noise cancellation was just average. I had no trouble connecting to a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129.99, 4.5 stars) and calls sounded great. Voice dialing, on the other hand, isn't so good. Samsung has traded the usual Android voice dialing for the much more powerful Vlingo app, which should let you dictate text messages and issue other commands by voice. While it did a pretty good job with text message dictation, I had a hard time getting it to recognize the names in my address book.

The phone uses AT&T's HSPA+ 21 network and 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. The phone also works as a tethered modem or Wi-Fi hotspot with the right service plan. Download speeds averaged 3Mbps down, while uploads were around 1.5Mbps up. Those speeds are decent, but no match for the blistering speeds on Verizon's or AT&T's LTE networks. (AT&T doesn't have any LTE phones yet.) Battery life, at 11 hours 7 minutes of continuous talk time, was stunning.

Processor and Apps

The Galaxy S II uses the same processor as the unlocked Galaxy S II and the Epic 4G Touch: Samsung's new 1.2GHz dual-core Exynos processor. Right now, the Exynos benchmarks better than any other processor we've tested. It's ahead of the pack everywhere, from browser to gaming to system performance. It only places second for Adobe Flash performance, running closely behind Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip.

While the Galaxy S II's benchmarks blow the rest of AT&T's Android competition out of the water, it's harder to get a sense of how it compares to the iPhone 4, which is powered by a single-core 1GHz processor. Testing the phones side by side, Web pages loaded faster on the Galaxy S II, but only by a second or so, which doesn't mean much. Both phones should be able to handle the toughest challenges out there right now, but the Galaxy S II is packing more advanced hardware that will carry it for a longer haul.

The phone runs Android, 2.3.4 "Gingerbread" with Samsung's TouchWiz extensions. There's also a bunch of useful add-on apps, including Kies Air, which lets you view your phone's contacts, messages, and media through a PC's Web browser; Media Hub, a downloadable music and video store; photo and video editors; and Social Hub, a combination Facebook/Twitter client. There's some bloatware from AT&T too, including FamilyMap and the U-Verse Live TV app, which are both deletable. Other apps, like AT&T Navigator and an AT&T 'Featured Apps' store, are not. Of course, the Galaxy S II should also be compatible with everything in the Android Market, which has over 200,000 apps.