Samsung Galaxy S Advance Review | Features | Price

Samsung Launched yet another smartphone, Samsung Galaxy S Advance, in line of its many available galaxy smart phones. Samsung Galaxy S Advance has quite commendable features and also has some not so good feedback about some specifications. The price segment of the Samsung Galaxy S Advance can be classified as upper middle range.Lets check out on the review of yet another smart phone from Samsung but first lets have a look at the specifications and features the phone has to offer to the customers.

Features:

Best Buy:

Body and Design:

The build of the Galaxy S Advance appears to be quite influenced from Nexus, and the front sometimes also looks indifferent from Samsung Galaxy S II. Well, it could also be said that Samsung did not gamble much with the looks of the phone, and kept it in a typical Samsung style, maybe Samsung was considering that the experimentation with the looks in a high mid range phone does not backfire especially when the phone is launched just months before the launch of Samsung Galaxy S III.

The 4” inches display is fitted quite expertly in a compact body. The body is Plastic but it does not bother much, the pattern on the back plastic does gives a glossy and nice look. The back panel may appear little brittle, but still that’s not much of a concern. The overall look of the phone is solid and appealing with a curve towards the top end which gives it a lighter look at the top and heavier at the bottom, and also makes the phone good to hold.

The front of the phone has a 4” inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, below which a centred home button and capacitive menu and back buttons are present. On the top of the screen front facing 1.3 mp camera, proximity sensors and the ambient light sensors are present. The right side of the phone has a power/lock button, which has a nice feedback, the left side has a single plastic sharing volume keys. The phone lacks camera shutter button on the body, but well we can take that this property may have been inherited from Galaxy S.

The back of the phone is plastic with a pattern. The pattern is not to guarantee a better hold on the phone but t does give a good look to the phone. The Top side on the back has a 5mp camera alongside which the flash LED is present. The LED is impressive and did light up more than expected. The loudspeaker grill is also present on right side of the flash. Uncovering the back panel reveals a 1500 mah Li-Ion battery and a SIM card slot alongside a hot swappable microSD card. The top side of the phone does not have any ports or buttons due to its curvy design and thus both the USB port and the 3.5 mm headphone jack are present at the bottom side of the phone.

Performance:

When it comes to performance the phone has a very good response. The good performance of the phone does keep it quite competitive in the market with the smartphones of the same range. The display of the Samsung Galaxy S Advance is Super AMOLED, but it does appears quite dull when compared with other Super AMOLED displays of other smartphones, but still the display is nice and does not poses much of a problem, even while working outside in the sun.

Talking of the operating system, the phone comes with Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread, which provides a very good user experience, well why not, Android is just known for it. The screen unlocks in typical Android swipe method. The feature for missed events (missed call, sms, etc) to have their own unlock patterns is also present. And as in typical TouchWiz the bottom side of display has 4 icons which are visible on home screen as well on application launcher. The first three icons are customizable and the last one is used to switch between the home screen and the application launcher. The smart phone supports up to 7 customizable home screens, which can accommodate many applications with loads of functionalities. The phonebook of the phone comes with quite diverse features and syncs up the contacts with Facebook and linkedIn.

The phone has a decent feedback when it comes to comparing network and calling options. The network reception of the phone is very good. When it comes to call quality, no noise disturbance was experienced. The speaker and loudspeaker of the phone responded with crisp sound and the microphone did not incur any kind of noise.

Camera:

The phone comes with a 5 mp primary camera. The picture quality of the phone is commendable. The saturation level, white balance, contrast all are good and would say nicely balanced. The image clicked through the phone shows low or none noise in the output image. The click button is not on the body but on the screen when camera is used. Left side of the camera screen gives the option to switch between the 5.0 mp secondary camera and 1.3 mp primary camera. The video camera of the phone appeared to be quite of a disappointment. The lack of autofocus in the video camera was clearly impacting the video quality of the camera. The brightness and video recording at low light levels was not up to the mark as expected and also, when compared to 5.0 mp camera of other smartphones, the result was not satisfactory.

Battery:

The 1500 mah battery surely does supply some good power backup to the smartphone. With heavy use of the phone, including 2-3 hrs of calling, some browsing and gaming along with music and video playback and several other application and features testing, the phone easily worked for more approx. a day. With moderate day to day usage of the phone, the power backup from the battery is expected to last for more than 1.5 day. Now that’s a good power backup scheme for an Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread phone with 1 GHz processor.

Pros:

• Good Image quality
• Good battery back up
• good sound quality
• nice features in its price segment
• typical Samsung but good body design

Cons:

• poor video recording
• No dedicated camera key
• memory card slot under the battery cover