Samsung Galaxy S Advance, Midrange Performer

The Samsung Galaxy S Advance was released in April 2012 and holds some really nice features in its basket full of advanced goodies. Besides being an attractive and wise phone, it’s also available at an affordable price, so why not check it out in the following review ? There are some big chances that you’ll like what it has to offer and consider buying it.

Main specs:

• Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
• 14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA support
• 4.0" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touch screen of WVGA (480 x 800 pixel) resolution; Scratch-resistant coating
• Android OS v2.3.6 with TouchWiz 4 launcher
• 1 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU, Mali-400 MP GPU, 768MB of RAM
• 5 MP autofocus camera with a powerful LED flash, face and smile detection
• 720p HD video recording at 30fps
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n support; DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot
• GPS with A-GPS connectivity; digital compass
• 8/16GB of inbuilt storage, microSD slot
• Accelerometer, gyroscope and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• microUSB port
• Stereo Bluetooth v3.0
• FM radio with RDS
• Gorilla Glass
• 1.3MP secondary camera
• Document editor
• File manager comes preinstalled

Full specs here.

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In the phone’s box, you’ll find the user manuals, a charger, the microUSB cable, a pair of headphones with in-ear plugs and some additional differently sized buds. No microSD card, but the phone’s internal memory is of 8 or 16 GB, which is quite enough for most users.

The Galaxy S Advance is a good looking guy, measuring 123.2 x 63 x 9.7 mm and having a weight of 120 g. Even if it’s all made of plastic, it seems to be strongly built and looks great. I especially liked the interesting pattern on its back, which keeps the fingerprints away from sticking to it and looks nice. The phone has a curved back and can be easily handled with one hand, as it’s light and slim; your pockets will like it too.
The phone features a 4 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touch screen that has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and a 233 ppi pixel density. The contrast is very good, the colors are bright and vibrant, the sunlight legibility is great and so are the viewing angles.

Above the screen are the earpiece, a secondary camera for making video calls and the ambient light and proximity sensors.
Below the display are two capacitive haptic-enabled keys for Menu and Back, with a physical key for Home between them.
The left side of the phone holds the lonely volume rocker. Also lonely is the Power/Lock key, which can be found on the right side.
The top of the phone is bare, meanwhile the bottom is pretty crowded, hosting the microUSB port, a 3.5 mm audio jack and the mouthpiece.

The phone comes loaded with Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread and is upgradeable to v4.1 Jelly Bean. Also here is the TouchWiz user interface, which grants a wonderful experience. The Galaxy S Advance is powered by a NovaThor U8500 chipset, has a dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 processor, Mali-400 GPU, 2 GB of ROM and 768 MB of RAM. It’s very snappy and works just fine, without annoying you with lag or anything like that.
At the telephony department, you have a great phonebook that stores tons of info about your contacts and syncs with your social networking accounts. Smart dialing is available and the phone offers a very good call & reception quality.
At the messaging area, your messages are organized in threads and displayed as conversations.
Instant messaging is handled by Google Talk and for emailing, you have Gmail and a generic email app for your other accounts.
For texting, the Android virtual QWERTY keyboard is very easy to use.
The Galaxy S Advance has a rich set of connectivity features. You have support for quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3G with 21 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA, dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi Hotspot, High Speed Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0.

Browsing is wonderful on the phone, as you’re being offered support for Flash 11, text reflow, multiple tabs, double tap and pinch zooming and others. The pages are loaded fast and fit the screen nicely.
The Galaxy S Advance is equipped with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera that takes pictures at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels and has a LED flash companion for assisting in low light situations. You also get settings for geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection and others. The image quality is very good.
The video camera also does a great job and is capable of producing 720p videos at 30 fps.

For audio playback, you have a nice TouchWiz player and some nice features, like the DNSs sound enhancement, several equalizer presets ( a user defined one included), the possibility of searching for a song on YouTube or Google and so on.
The video player is very capable, handles DivX or XviD files without a problem, has support for subtitles and more.

The Galaxy S Advance features the Polaris Office application for viewing and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It can also view PDF files. Some other useful apps are the Memo, Mini Diary, Task, Voice Recorder, Calendar, Alarms and so on.
The phone comes with a built-in GPS receiver that has A-GPS support and Google Maps for navigation.
A 1500 mAh battery is on board and will keep your phone alive for a little over a day of intensive usage.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a reliable, smart, good looking phone that’s also available at an affordable price, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance will definitely satisfy you and you won’t regret making the decision of buying it.

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Samsung Galaxy S, The Birth of a Super Star

The Samsung Galaxy S is the first super smartphone from the Korean company. It was released in 2010, two years ago, as a direct competitor to the iPhone 4 from Apple (and what a game changer was that iPhone 4 folks, let’s be real), and what a battle it was. One total stranger vs. the iconic object of adoration, the trend setter, you know, the IPHONE.
 Anyway, Samsung managed to create a pure beast roaring high tech and sheer power, with impressive hardware for that time and a very slick design. Let’s take a look:

Key features

• Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G support
• 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA support
• 4" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of WVGA (480 x 800 pixel) resolution
• Android OS v2.1 with TouchWiz 3.0 UI customization
• 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird CPU; 512 MB of RAM
• 5 MP autofocus camera with face, smile and blink detection
• 720p HD video recording at 30fps
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b, g and n support
• GPS with A-GPS connectivity; Digital compass
• 8/16GB internal storage, microSD slot
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v3.0
• FM radio with RDS
• 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery
• Great audio quality
• Slim waistline at only 9.9mm thickness
• Document editor
• File manager comes preinstalled
• Secondary video-call camera
• Swype predictive text input
• Excellent choice of preinstalled applications
• Full Flash support for the web browser (after 2.2 update)

Full specs here.                                                                              http://www.mobilephonedeals.com

 The Samsung Galaxy S featured the largest Super AMOLED on the market, courtesy of its maker of course, it had a 1 GHz processor under the bonnet and a HD capable 5 megapixels camera, not to mention the 2.1 Eclaire OS onboard, man, all the geeks were having a boner, trust me folks.
 First things first, the beast was pretty big for its time, at 122.4 x 64.2mm and 118 g, featuring a huge 4 inch display  and a very slim 9.9 mm  waistline. Anyway, the Galaxy S fits easily in your pockets and is very easy to use.
The smartphone is entirely made of plastic which attract fingerprints pretty easy, it’s a questionable decision from Samsung but it kept the price in the low bracket, it was the stuff under the hood that make the difference.

 Anyway, the stellar 4 inch super AMOLED compensated for the mediocre body, it was one of the best displays in the industry at that time, a pleasure to look at, both indoors and in the sunlight.
The sensitivity of the capacitive touchscreen is flawless even for today’s standards, below the excellent display there are the minimalist Android keys, the power/screen lock key is located on the top of the device, on the left you can see the volume rocker, also on the top we find the 3.5 mm audio jack and the micro USB port protected by a plastic lid.
The back of the Galaxy S is blue dotted and it houses the 5 megapixels camera lens, removing the back cover reveals a hot swappable micro SD card and the 1500 mAh battery which can run for 3 days with heavy usage, again, stellar performance keeping in mind we are dealing with a state of the art technology here.
The Samsung Galaxy S is a very well built phone, with perfect assembly quality, it looks and feels solid in hand, and ergonomics are top notch.

 The Operating System is Android Eclaire 2.1 customized by Samsung’s own TouchWiz, they actually did a marvelous job. The interface runs fast and smooth, we have a real performer here in terms of hardware, thanks to the S 1 GHz Cortex A8 CPU and the 512 MB of RAM make all the difference, everything runs flawless.

The phonebooks is also impressive, with unlimited capacity and provides any functions you can think of, you have all your SIM and Google contacts stored in it, you can use photos for contacts and all kinds of cool features.
Telephony is great on the Galaxy S, there are no problems with holding to signal or reception quality, the in call sound is loud and clear, you have smart dial and due to the proximity sensor, the display shuts down during calls.

 Messaging is yet another feature in which our baby excels, the UI is fast and simple, the phone supports anything and everything, from SMS to MMS to email, thanks to the Gmail app.
The G-Talk takes care of your Instant Messaging, being compatible with most clients, i.e. Pidgin, Kopete, iChat and Ovi Contacts.
For text input, the virtual keyboard comes with SWYPE (you will love this app) and works like this: instead of tapping on keys you sweep a finger across the keyboard.

 The video player in the Galaxy S is one of the best in the Android family, it comes with full support for DivX and Xvid and that’s a rare treat folks, the performance is great, you can play 720p videos without breaking a sweat, the phone comes with TV-Out and DLNA enabled so you can use it as a real media player around the house.

 The interface is minimalistic and well thought the phone can playback almost 8 hours of video on a single charge. The music player is also pretty cool, the UI is tabbed, features equalizer presets and you can search for a song via Google/Youtube. There is also an FM radio built in with RDS.

 The audio output quality is near perfect. The camera is a 5 megapixels shooter, it features geotagging, touch focus and face detection, yet no flash. The interface is simple and intuitive, the menu offers all you can imagine, blink detection, image stabilization, geotagging, smile detection, face detection and auto contrast.
Video recording is in HD 720p, an excellent feature, the clips are captured in 1280 x 720 pixels resolution at 30 fps.

Of course, when we are talking connectivity, we have a champ here, with  quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dual-band HSPA with download rates of up to 7.2 Mbps and upload at 5.76 Mbps, Wi-Fi (b/g/n), the new Bluetooth v3.0 with A2DP support and USB v2.0. The USB interface is standard microUSB.

Web browsing is a pleasure on that 4 inch wide super amoled, the Android web browser is the best in the business and the one from Galaxy S shines with Éclair, the UI is minimalistic, in the Google tradition, it supports dedicated buttons, double tap and multitouch pinch-zooming and is Flash enabled.

As a business tool, you get everything you need, with an exhaustive organizer, featuring ThinkFree Office preinstalled, which enables both viewing and editing any kind of file. You also benefit from GPS navigation, with Google Maps and StreetView.
 If you need more, the Android Market is just around the corner.

Final word, this is one of the best Android smartphones ever made, it was the king of the hill in its time and still now, it can put a smile on your, face, it has anything you will ever need from a mobile device, even if it doesn’t have a dual core processor, it’s still a good choice even for a hardened geek.

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