Samsung Galaxy S Advance deals & review

The Samsung Galaxy S Advance is a testament to the success of the original Samsung Galaxy S: following up with a similar design and a boosted processor, this mid-level smartphone won’t disappoint those who know what to expect. If you want a phone to show off with, this isn’t going to be the one for you, but if you’d like good features, smooth performance and classic design, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance offers it all at a decent price.

The Galaxy S Advance handset is clearly a Samsung: smooth, rounded corners and a spacious 4-inch display with a few dedicated buttons underneath, it doesn’t look dissimilar to the original Galaxy S. It’s a neat, streamlined phone that’s pleasing to the eye but doesn’t offer up the exciting design of some handsets, like the Sony Xperia S, for example. At a slim 120g, it’s less burdensome than a lot of mid-range phones, though if portability is your thing then it’s immediately blown out of the water by super-slim high-end models like the 6.7mm Huawei Ascend P1S.

The phone’s 4-inch AMOLED display produces bright, vivid images just as you might expect from a phone with the Galaxy name. The 5MP camera is perfectly adequate, though if you’re looking for a camera-replacement phone, this won’t be the one for you. Nevertheless, it offers up crisp images that certainly won’t look amiss in the family album. The front-facing 1.3MP camera makes Skype a lot more fun, and is a nice feature to see in a mid-range phone. As you’d expect, the onboard memory (either 8GB or 16GB) is upgradeable to 32GB with a microSD card, which should be more than enough for most users.

With a 1GHz dual-core processor, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance certainly isn’t competing in the big league. The phone runs smoothly however, and apps don’t lag – unless you’re wanting to do some really hardcore multi-tasking, you shouldn’t find the phone lacking in sheer power. It potters along smoothly when playing music and video, and the handset’s GPU is the same found in the Galaxy S2, so in that respect the Galaxy S Advance offers great value for money.

Disappointingly, the Galaxy S Advance only comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which is not quite the most recent version – that honour goes to version 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich - but 2.3 is still a great release, and Samsung usually aren’t far behind in offering system updates. The phone’s menus are easy to get around, and the 4-inch screen touchscreen display offers ample space to swipe around the interface to your heart’s content. Otherwise, the Android Market offers plenty of apps and the phone has all the connectivity you’d expect - Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth.

If you’re looking for a mid-range smartphone, you won’t go far wrong with the Samsung Galaxy S Advance. If you don’t think you’ll need the phone’s speedy processor and spacious display howeber, you’ll save yourself a couple of hundred pounds with the Samsung Galaxy Apollo, which offers a similar user experience in a more basic package. Android fans might want to consider a higher-end handset: the Sony Xperia S bundles in a faster processor and Android 4.0, but will cost a lot more in comparison. For what it’s worth, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance is a welcome addition to the mid-range smartphone market.