On June 30th without much fanfare, Samsung introduced 4 new lower end phones into their Galaxy family; the Galaxy Core II, the Galaxy Star 2, the Galaxy Young 2 and the Galaxy Ace 4. Personally, I am not a Samsung fan but I found it very odd that this wasn’t all over my G+ feed. Last year, we saw Motorola aggressively enter the budget phone market and now with the success of the Moto-E abroad it seems that Samsung has decided to go after this demographic as well. While all of these phones will ship with Android 4.4, have 4GB of internal storage and are expandable via SD cards, I’m sure many of you won’t be impressed with these handsets because we tend to go for devices with better cameras, bigger batteries and higher resolution (and sometimes contracts/financing) but clearly we are not the targeted audience.
The Galaxy Core II is the only offering that slightly compares to the power of the S5 with its quad-core 1.5gHz processor. It has only 768MB of system RAM. The rear facing 5 mega-pixel cam does include auto-focus, but your selfies and Hangouts are sure to suffer with the VGA 0.3 megapixel front facing cam. With a 2100 mAh battery on board, you won’t have to worry about your handset dying mid chat.
The Galaxy Ace 4 boasts a dual-core 1.2gHz processor and 1800mAh battery. It has the same camera specs as the Core II with identical internal storage amounts but a slightly smaller display screen (the Core II comes in with a 4.5″ display as compared to the Ace 4’s 4″ screen). It is worth noting that this is the only handset that is NOT dual SIM.
The Galaxy Young 2 and Star 2 will probably be the most affordable of the pack. Both phones posses 512MB of RAM,low-res 2 megapixel rear cameras with no flash, lack front facing cameras and are only expandable with SD cards up to 32Gb.
Again, the specs on these phones aren’t much to brag about but the reasoning behind it baffles me. Samsung has yet to release any upgrade schedule for Android L, both the Young and Star may have problems handling the feature heavy software upgrade with the low amount of RAM and single core processors. No release dates or pricing have been announced but it’s easy to see that Sammy is boldly stepping into the affordable phone market. But why? Samsung never struck me as the company that wanted to water down their devices due to pricing. Are S5 sales under-performing so much that is has come to this? Or is Samsung just testing the waters? Share your conspiracy theories in the comments and thanks for reading!
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
