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Samsung has lifted the lid on a new 5-inch smart phone — hooray! But despite boasting a palm-filling display, this phone has middle-of-the-road hardware that is unlikely to set your pulse racing. Boo!
The impossible-to-not-say-in-a-Northern-accent Galaxy Grand is a slender 9.6mm thick, has an 8-megapixel camera and looks almost identical to the flagship Samsung Galaxy S3.
Good stuff, but the Grand is let down by a boring 480×800-pixel screen resolution, that pales in comparison to the 720×1,280 pixels you’d find nestled within the S3 or Note 2‘s panel, or the 640×1,136 pixel display on the iPhone 5.
With a display that big, you’ll really notice the drop in resolution too. Don’t expect text or high-definition video to look particularly sharp, and you’ll probably notice blurriness around text and onscreen icons.
Less worrisome but equally boring is the 1.2GHz dual-core processor. You may find the Grand performs admirably when it comes to simple tasks like web browsing, but it could struggle if you throw particularly intensive games in its direction, and with only 1GB of RAM it could be first on the pyre when Samsung’s deciding which mobiles to stop updating next year.
In other words, the Grand is a sheep in wolf’s casing, or to put it in more terms that shepherds will understand it’s mutton dressed as lamb — a mid-range mobile clumsily dolled up with a gigantic display.
It could win some points back by being dirt-cheap, although it’s competing with wallet-friendly smart phones like the Google Nexus 4.
Better news is that you get 8GB of on-board storage plus space for a microSD card, and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will come pre-loaded. That’s not the very latest version, but it’s close.
It’s not clear yet where or when the Grand will go on sale, but I’ve asked Samsung for details and I’ll let you know if I hear something.
Are you tempted by Samsung’s Grand affair? Or would you rather have another smart phone stretching your jeans pocket? Let me know in the comments, or on our Facebook wall.
