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Samsung Galaxy S Advance hands-on
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If you’ve ever looked at the CNET UK Best Phone of 2011 award-winning Samsung Galaxy S2 and thought, “You know what? It’s a third of an inch too big,” then have we got great news for you! It’s the Samsung Galaxy S Advance, which Luke went hands-on with at MWC.
Samsung’s latest micro-variant in its universally popular Galaxy range has a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, with a subtle curve to it — a Samsung design trope going back to the Nexus S, which lets the phone cuddle up to your face slightly more comfortably when you’re on a call.
The S Advance isn’t a high-end game changer, it’s more of a decimal point somewhere in the middle of the company’s long scale. Its screen has a respectable, if less than HD, 480×800-pixel resolution. Similarly, its 1GHz dual-core processor is fast, but no quad-core record breaker.
The 5-megapixel camera on the back is middling, with an LED flash as expected, but the 1.3-megapixel sensor on the front should make your video calls look very good indeed.
Perhaps the only real disappointment to the S Advance is its Android Gingerbread software, a generation behind the latest Ice Cream Sandwich. Whether it will receive an update at some point in the future is not yet known.
All that remains is the price. Appearing later this year, probably in the wake of the monumental Samsung Galaxy S3, the S Advance will certainly be far cheaper than Samsung’s new flagship device. And if the Korean giant can keep this cautiously crafted handset under the £200 mark, it’s sure to find homes in plenty of budget-conscious pockets.
For more hands-on previews and videos than you can count, head to mwc.cnet.co.uk, where you’ll find what our intrepid bunch of tech hacks think of every phone and tablet at this year’s epic Mobile World Congress. Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments, or over on our Facebook page.
