Samsung, the South Korean corporation, let the cat out of the bag about its newest unit that joins its existing Galaxy group of devices. It is more than just power. With the sleek curves, it is also about style.
The Galaxy S Advance smartphone has a Super AMOLLED display of 4 inches. With the 3G HSPA 14.4 Mbps, the Blue-tooth 3.0, Dual-Core Cortex A9 CPU running at 1GHz, and 768M RAM, this is a hefty phone.
Throw in the 8G or 16G internal space, the 5 MP back camera, with 720p video capturing capabilities, and the 1.3MP front videoconferencing camera and you almost realize the full power of the phone. Perhaps the nicest feature is the weight, at a mere 120g. That is a whole 20g lighter than iPhone 4S.
Russia will be one of the first to experience the Galaxy S Advance in February, followed by Europe, CIS, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, Latin America, and China. One more surprise is the copycat move Samsung is making to follow in the steps of HTC. Samsung will promote Jays headphones in a similar move to what HTC has done with Beats audio. However, this promotion will be time-limited and primarily target Korean customers.
The company is spewing the predictable rhetoric that this phone is a perfect balance between style and performance, benefiting from the Samsung Hub Services. The problem is that this comes across as if Samsung compromised on one to make the other.
The dual-core 1.0 GHz processor and the HSPA connection, no one can argue that this phone was designed with powerful connection in its bones. When the reactive interface is placed in front of the user, multi-tasking becomes a breeze. Lag has been whittled down to nearly nothing and application launches are very brisk. Transitions between screens and churning through images is faster than the eye can manage. But the Net freak will notice, more than anything else, that browsing speed has been boosted.
The Samsung Galaxy S Advance makes handling the phone secure, with its curved glass etching, but the 4-inch Super AMOLED screen is the eye-catcher. The colors are brilliant and at the mercy of the 5MP camera the photos will become treasures.
The Galaxy S Advance runs Gingerbread version of Android, but is beefed up with TouchWiz from Samsung. Actually, you might feel like Samsung is trying hard to get its hooks in you when you meditate on what the “Hubs” are. These Hubs and the ChatON services tie the user into a Music Hub with more than 11 million songs, a Readers Hub with more than 2.3 million books (plus 3.500 magazines and 200 newspapers), and a Gaming Hub that opens a world of thousands of games. We all know, though, that you can easily find hundreds of thousands of worthless games and millions of crappy songs. So numbers mean nothing. Consider satellite TV? It was just hundreds of channels of the same fluff that you had on cable.
ChatON is simply a dangerous tool, depending on phone numbers rather than usernames and passwords. It does not take a rocket scientist to see where that is headed. Even if the Samsung Galaxy S Advance is a great phone, the services are enough to scare you away, like an overly slick used care salesman drooling on your wallet.
