The Galaxy S has a 4 inch touchscreen, a Super AMOLED type, screen technology being one of Samsung’s real strengths, as evidenced by the screens on its 2009 range of mobile phones.
Taking a leaf out of HTC’s book, the Galaxy S includes something called Samsung Social Hub, which gathers together by your contacts information, information, messages and status updates from calendars, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, email and instant messaging. So pull up someone in the address book, and all your interaction with them is close by.
It is powered by a 1Ghz processor, and sports a 5 megapixel camera, that can shoot still or HD 720p video.
Featured pre-loaded apps
- Daily Briefing: Offers instant access to weather, world news, stocks and your daily calendar schedule.
- All Share: Enables inter-device connectivity via DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) technology to share photos, HD video and other files to other DLNA enabled devices such as TV and computers
- Write and go: Write now and decide later on a format such as SMS/ MMS, email, calendar or memo.
- ThinkFree: View and edit Microsoft Office documents.
- Smart Alarm: Wake up with a natural alarm sound that will gradually increase in volume and an automatically switched-on display light.
Price and availability
The Samsung Galaxy S goes on sale on July 1, and is exclusive to Optus for 4 weeks. In August it will be available at other carriers.
You can pick up the phone from Optus for $0 upfront on the Optus $59 ‘yes’ Social plan on a 24 month contract. This will get you unlimited Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace access, plus 1GB of other data per month.
Small Medium Business (SMB) customers can buy the Samsung Galaxy S for $0 upfront on the $59 ‘Business Complete’ plan on a 24 month contract which includes unlimited voicemail and SMS for SMB customers. And when Optus say ‘unlimited’, they mean to add “Unreasonable use is excluded (see Optus Mobile Fair Go
The minimum total cost on both plans is $1,416.
Puchase a Galaxy S before August 31, and you can select something to read on the Borders eReader application that ships with the Galaxy S. Pick from either “The Slap” by Christos Tsiolkas or “Underbelly: The Golden Mile” by John Silvester and Andrew Rule. Don’t be alarmed, it’s the book version of “Underbelly: The Golden Mile”, you won’t be forced to sit through a very ordinary TV series!
Video hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy S
This 4 minute overview of the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone was shot at this year’s CITEC show.
Specifications
- Network: 2.5G (GSM/ GPRS/ EDGE) : 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz; 3G (HSDPA 7.2Mbps, HSUPA 5.76Mbps) : 900 / 1900 / 2100 MHz
- Operating system: Android 2.1
- CPU: 1 GHz S5PC111
- Display: 4.0” WVGA Super AMOLED (800 x 480)
- Camera: 5.0 megapixel camera + VGA Video Telephony Camera, Auto Focus, Self shot, Action shot, Add me, Stop motion, Cartoon shot, Smile shot, Panorama shot
- Video: HD (720p @ 30fps) video playing & recording
- Video codecs: Mpeg4, H.264, H.263, DivX, XviD
- Video playback formats: 3gp (mp4), WMV (asf), AVI (divx), MKV, FLV
- Audio: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, OGG, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, WAV, MID, AC3, IMY, FLAC, XMF
- Browser: Chrome-lite
- Value-added features: Android Market and Samsung Apps for more applications and contents
- Auto codec support: Samsung Social Hub, GPS, Augmented Reality with Layar Reality Browser, 1 GHz Application Processor, SMS, MMS, Email, Video Messaging, Offline & No SIM Mode, Mobile Widgets
- Sensor: Accelerometer, Digital Compass, Proximity, Light
- Connectivity: Bluetooth technology v 3.0, USB v2.0 (High-Speed), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Allshare via DLNA
- Memory: 16GB storage, 512MB RAM, external memory slot (up to 32GB)
- Dimensions: 64.2 x 122.5 x 9.9 mm
- Weight: 124 grams
- Battery: 1500 mAh
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