Samsung Announces Galaxy S Advance

Reports about a new Samsung Galaxy series smart phone have been floating around for a few days now, and today Samsung has finally made it official by announcing the new family member: Galaxy S Advance. It's a 4" higher middle-class model, so it's not competing against Galaxy S II or Galaxy Nexus. Below is a comparison table including the new Galaxy S Advance.

First, let's discuss the SoC. Samsung only lists it as 1GHz dual core processor, so we don't have any concrete specs (hence the question mark). The SoC selection of the Galaxy S lineup is fairly fragmented as well. The original Galaxy S uses 1GHz single-core Samsung Hummingbird S5PC110, Galaxy S Plus uses 1.4GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255T, and Galaxy S II moved to dual-core with 1.2GHz Samsung Exynos 4210, though there have been reports of TI OMAP 4430 based Galaxy S IIs as well. Then we have T-Mobile version of the S II that uses Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 APQ8060. Galaxy Nexus is another oddball as it uses TI OMAP 4460. Pretty simple, huh? 

Luckily, the frequency gives us some indication of the core SoC. Snapdragon S3 isn't available at 1.0GHz, so we can rule out Qualcomm. That leaves us with Exynos 4210 and OMAP 4430, of which both are available at 1.0GHz. Given the track record of the Galaxy S series, our guess would be Exynos 4210 as Samsung seems to prefer in-house SoCs. Then again, we may see country specific models utilizing TI's OMAP 4430, in which case the GPU changes to PowerVR SGX 540. Either way, we should be looking at lower performance than what the high-end smart phones provide. 

UPDATE: We have received data that the SoC is actually ST-Ericsson NovaThor U8500. This is a rare SoC as it has only been used in HTC Sensation Z710t in the past. Anyway, NovaThor U8500 consists of two Cortex-A9 cores and ARM Mali-400 GPU, so it's very similar to Samsung's Exynos 4210. We are still waiting for official confirmation, though.

Galaxy S Advance has Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) pre-installed, but unfortunately there is no word on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwhich) support. According to the press release, Galaxy S Advance won't be available in the US; the release will happen gradually in Russia, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia and Latin America, starting in February. No pricing has been released either but we are probably looking at €400-500 (i.e. ~€100 cheaper than the high-end models), although the price will vary depending on taxation and contract.