Chris Davies over at Slash Gear has all the fun. This time, he’s reviewing the Samsung Galaxy S II and he says it screams with performance. And you’d expect it since the original Galaxy S was one of the most successful phones in the market last year. With a lot to live up to, Samsung has pointed to the center field fence and hit another out the park. Let’s take a closer look …

Samsung definitely put more under the hood with a 1.2GHz dual-core Samsung Exynos processor. And with 1GB of RAM and 2GB or ROM, it’s built for speed. But looking at the larger and stunning 4.3 inch Super AMOLED Plus display one cannot be amazed by the color, which Chris says seems to be a “vividly colorful splash of eye-pleasure.” Gorgeous.

But what’s really amazing is just how thin the Galaxy S II is. At 8.49mm, it’s truly the thinnest handset on the market. And with Gorilla glass to protect it, it’s lightweight and tough. The Galaxy S II will come in two models, one with 16GB of storage and doubled that. Both can take up to 32GB of additional storage courtesy of it’s microSDHC card slot.

Fortunately, Samsung didn’t punt to Froyo, instead choosing to go with Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread out of the box. Sadly though, TouchWiz is also there as Samsung’s custom overlay, but it’s vs. 4, so it’s pretty well matured. Also, Samsung has loaded up some preloaded apps including it’s various “Hubs”: Social, Music, Readers and Gaming. It’s not a bad choice to bundle email, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and IM messages into a single timeline. But MySpace? Anyway, Readers Hub gives users magazine, newspaper and eBook reading options. Games Hub offers Gameloft titles and other games. And there’s also Polaris Office, a cool Mini Journal for daily snapshots of one’s life, and even some cool video editing software to polish clips taken with the Galaxy S II’s full 1080p HD video recording capability at 30fps.

But the real hallmark is it’s benchmarks. The Galaxy S II screams with performance numbers like 2939 in Quadrant Standard and 3540 in Quadrant Advanced. And it’s just as good on utilities like Linpack Pro and SunSpider. If it’s doing that good with the overlays, imagine how a custom ROM would perform!

Lastly, there’s the battery life. And the Galaxy S IIs 1650 mAh battery provides two full days of regular use with push notificatins, GPS, video recording, Internet and even phones calls (we do still use smartphones for calls, don’t we?). Two days? That’s sick! Power users will get a day at least, and judicious casual users? Longer to be sure.

The Samsung Galaxy S II can be bought unlocked for around $826 unsubsidized. But users can find it free with a two year deal. A solid offering and great followup for a phone line that had a lot to live up to. Check out the rest off Chris’ review here.