Samsung Galaxy S Advance mid-range Android Things sometimes change fast. Take the HMS Lord Nelson, a fine battleship when laid down in 1905 but almost instantly rendered obsolete by HMS Dreadnought, laid down just a few months later. Or take HTC’s One V. A 3.7in single-core LCD Android phone now up against a dual-core 4in OLED-screen device for the same contract price …
Or is it just addresing two disparate markets?
If you want something that just works with all the Android Apps you have ever known - then Gingerbread brings a better user experience. If, on the other hand, like most of us if you want to run stuff you never could, and in more innovative ways - then the latest version, if not a beta of something - is more attractive. Even if it means you can no longer run something or - have to CHANGE something. We love change. Other people hate it.
I think the candidate reasons are:
a) Samsung prioritised the SIII first and the ICS based version of their phone will deploy to other devices over time.
b) It's a cynical attempt to put some differentiation between this phone and the SIII and to get people to buy up.
Probably it's a bit of both.
I think by mid range they mean that the phone is priced mid-way between the traditional £500-£600 early adopter shafting launch price that some idiots seem willing to pay and it having no real value at all. Once it has dropped by £100 or so then it will be down where real 'punters' can see some realistic value in their lives (as opposed to the kind of 'punters' Samsung invent to rank yourself against and persuade you into an early purchase)
I've been using one of these phones on a trial for a few months. Let me tell you that the battery life belies the specs. I don't know what Samsung have done to this phone, but it's the first (sensibly-sized) Android phone I've had that will last for more than one day between charges. You will get two days comfortably out of this phone, and it's nice to get to the evening with 50% battery left and no need to panic. That, and the speed and storage, makes it a winner in my view.
Its £337 at Amazon these days. Surely the massive spec improvement means that at only £70 more than this it's still preferable to go for the older brother?
IIRC you gave that 85% as well, which makes it even harder to justify this review. It's a little smaller, it's heavier, it has a worse screen, worse CPU, it has less RAM, it has less storage space, it has a now pretty old version of the OS which suggests it won't be particularly well supported.
Sure it's mid-priced - but it's about a year too late to justify the difference.
I do like that they're playing with not just making bigger and bigger phones every time though.
The San Francisco only had an OLED screen for the first month or two. Then it went back to an OK-ish LCD one. Not that I wish to suggest skullduggery, but after all the great reviews had come out, they made the phone worse, for the same price...
It may just have been a manufacturing cock-up, or supply difficulties though, and they went back to OLED. My brother got one of the no OLED ones, and it was OK for the money, but not great.
"IF Huawei could do the San Francisco at 100 (OLED screen mind you)"
ZTE did the San Fran but your point still stands. Samsung also do the Europa (i5500), a cracking little smartphone that can be had, SIM Free, for £60. I would have said £180-200 for this. Particularly with the Nexus available for £280 and the Nexus S for only £30 more.
On the subject of Android and older OSes, I remember from my fruit loving days that I'd keep my OS up do date and my wife would neglect hers. By the time the contracts came up for renewal her iPhone was several iterations behind mine in OS but generally felt a lot less clunky to use. I think it behoves a hardware manufacturer to nudge it's users (particularly when they are tied into the brand with apps, contact data etc) towards new hardware every so often, as the iPhone 3G empirically proved (granted with a very small test group).
In this case though there's no excuse not to be using ICS - can't fathom why they didn't do it.
Staggeringly, Android phones prior to 4.0 cannot add a proxy server to particular wi-fi connections (at least not without rooting and a special app), making them fairly useless for corporate environments (yes, you could NAT through and avoid a proxy, but that's not clever [e.g. would bypass any corproate proxy logging/filtering]). Hence, if for that one reason alone, releasing a new Android phone in mid-2012 with Android 2.3.X when several other older phones in your range already have 4.X is puzzling beyond belief.
Yes, the 4.X upgrade will hopefully eventually come to this phone (and if Samsung had any pride, they'd announce exactly when 4.X will be available), but is that 100% guaranteed to a) actually turn up and b) turn up in a timely manner? It does surprise me that this review made no big deal out of this phone coming with Android 2.3.X - heck, even my ancient HTC Desire runs that!
Your company allows mobile devices on their network?
Sorry if that's a ridiculous question, and I'm sure my radar is a little off after spending the last few years working with companies with seat counts in the healthy 5-figure to low 6-figure range... but most companies I know just leave them as an external device ( i.e. on the carrier's network while in the office).
Quite a few large companies will run guest wi-fi networks - our entire office is fitted out on 7 floors with them. It allows user devices to access the web through a proxy but without hitting the main corporate network as well as allowing vendors/salesmen to demonstrate at users desks or when suitably fitted offices aren't available and still be able to VPN into their office networks.
It perplexes me how Android is the only OS of the top three that has phones available that aren't either already on the latest OS version or immediately updatable to the latest. Both iOS and WP phones always ship with the most up-to-date OS version, in fact sometimes WP phones ship with a version that hasn't quite been released to existing phones - for instance the Lumia 610 shipping with Tango which is due out shortly for all existing handsets.
Having said that, the dominance of Android in the sales charts appears, oddly, to suggest that your average punter doesn't actually give a shit about the version of their OS or indeed whether it's upgradable. Ho-hum.
They're not though, Android phone manufacturers are competing against Apple and other Android phone makers.
Apple makes money on the hardware and the media and software for the phone. On Android the phone maker only makes money on the phone and there is huge competition in phone making. Google or other application stores owners make the money on the software.
Forewarning I prefer HTC handsets but I also know an unfair comparison when I see one.
If you want to compare similarly priced phones a better comparison would probably have been the Galaxy S Advance and the HTC Sensation XE. The One V is the budget handset of the One series whereas the Galaxy S Advance is an updated former flagship phone so comparing them, despite both being new and costing similar amounts per month, is hardly a fair comparison. The Sensation XE is a dual-core phone, it has a qHD resolution and has a larger capacity battery. I have nothing against the Galaxy S Advance but come on, be fair.
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