The Samsung Galaxy S Advance was released last year, and is regarded as the mini version of the Samsung Galaxy S II.
But even today it is one of the most affordable Dual core phones available.
I know that there are many budget phones available now, some of which offer quad core or IPS screens, but people are still worried about Customer service, and the Quality of the product.
And this is where Samsung truly delivers, not only is this an affordable phone, but it also features some decent specs. The S Advance is quite comparable to its big brother Samsung Galaxy S 2.
It features,
- NovaThor U8500 Chipset
- Dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 CPU
- Mali-400 GPU
- 768 MB RAM
- Stunning 4.0 inch Super AMOLED Display with a resolution of 480 x 800 and a 16 Million Colour Depth.
- 5.0MP camera (2592 x 1944 pixels) with LED Flash and Auto Focus,Geo-tagging, Touch focus, Face & Smile detection. 720p@30fps video output.
- Front camera with a 1.3MP resolution.
- 1,500mAh Li-Ion Battery
- 16GB Internal Memory
- MicroSD Card Support (32GB max)
- Bluetooth 3.0 A2DP, HS
- USB 2.0 microUSB
- TouchWiz 4.0 User Interface
Apart from these, you also get Samsung Apps, Chaton, Google apps etc.
The phone comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but it has received an official update for JellyBean 4.1 from Samsung. In fact we are expecting them to provide an update for 4.2 very soon.
Gaming experience:
I did not try many games in the Gingerbread firmwarem but I have tested plenty of the games on Jelly Bean including
- Max Payne
- GTA III
- GTA Vice City
- Ravensword Shadowlands
- Real Racing 3
- Dead Trigger
- Temple Run 2
- Subway Surfers
- Beach Buggy Blitz
- Need for Speed Most Wanted
Some of these games are incompatible with the S Advance, but since I bought them from the Play Store, I just copied the apk from my Nexus 7 on to my phone and they work perfectly fine after authentication. In fact the games are playable with almost no lags whatsoever, thanks to the decent RAM and the Dual core CPU.
Camera:
The Camera is really good and the LED flash is quite powerful. And you also get a widget which enables you to use it like a flashlight. Here are a few pictures that I took on my S Advance.
The zoom feature works fine on Jelly Bean.
General performance:
The phone and the Jelly Bean firmware are buttery smooth and performs well no matter what I threw at it. The battery life is great too. And it also played some video files in the mkv format natively. Despite people saying that the phone requires a mini SIM card, it actually does work with normal ones too. That is what I am using, a normal SIM.
To know how to update your Samsung Galaxy S Advance to the official 4.1 firmware, read our post here. And to root your Jelly Bean updated phone, read our post here.
The only bad things I can say about the phone are the screen is not true Corning Gorilla glass, but more of a scratch resistant glass. And the home button is kind of hard to press. If you want to protect your device, I suggest you buy a Flip Book Cover from eBay. I am waiting for a cover to be delivered tomorrow, so expect a review of it soon.
The phone does not have MultiWindow, but we could still get it if some developer ports it or Samsung play nice and add it in a future update.
