Galaxy S5 Released Together With The Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit Wearables
The fifth Galaxy S flagship from Samsung was unveiled this February at the Unpacked 5 event held in Barcelona, Spain at the Mobile World Congress 2014. At the event, the South Korean company announced the release date to be Friday, April 11. The date came and passed and the Samsung Galaxy S5 has been released. As we reported, South Korean carriers broke the release date and released Samsung’s upcoming flagship in retail stores; the decision is a direct consequence of restrictions imposed by the South Korean government, that prevent the carriers from signing up new customers form April to May. Also, if you pre ordered your Samsung Galaxy S5 from the United Kingdom, you were given the possibility to get it on Thursday, April 10.
In the United States, you can get the fifth Galaxy S from all major carriers (AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon) for two hundred buck on a two year contract. If you did not pre order and plan on buying it online, you can find the cheapest Galaxy S5 at Amazon and Amazon UK (which has it for $189.99 on contract, or $699.99 without a contract and you can choose between three color variants: black, white and blue). The Samsung Galaxy S5 is also available in over 150 stores, scattered all over the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia.
Together with the fifth Galaxy S, Samsung also released the second generation Gear wearable devices, including the Samsung Gear 2 and the Samsung Gear 2 Neo smartwatches, plus Samsung’s first fitness tracker, the Samsung gear Fit. All wearable devices were also unveiled in February at the Unpacked 5 event that was held in Barcelona, Spain, at the Mobile World Congress 2014 and they are priced from $199 to $299. Amazon sells the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, and Gear Fit devices for $299, $199, and $210 (and free shipping), respectively.
The Samsung Gear 2 and the Samsung Gear 2 Neo are Samsung Galaxy Gear’s successors and they are slimmer and lighter than the first generation Gear. Just like the Samsung Gear Fit but unlike the first generation Samsung Gear, the two new Samsung Gear smartwatches offer the option to change the wristband with a 22 mm watch strap. There is also a new home button under their display. When it comes to specs, Samsung upgraded them: while the Samsung Galaxy Gear featured a single core 800 MHz chip, the Samsung Gear 2 features a dual core 1 GHz chip. Also, the Samsung Gear 2 and the Samsung Gear 2 Neo feature improved battery life as they don’t need to be charged for almost half a week, unlike the first generation Gear smartwatch which needed a recharge every 24 hours. They also come with a heart rate monitor and a pedometer and you can use them without having to connect the smartwactehs to a smartphone.
As for the Samsung Gear Fit, it was declared by many the best of show at this year’s Mobile World Congress, even though Samsung had just unveiled the fifth Galaxy S flagship. It features a curved AMOLED touchscreen display with very wide viewing angles and syncs with your smartphone to receive notifications and alerts. The Samsung gear Fit also features a heart rate monitor, an IP67 (Ingress Protection) rating which means that it is “totally protected against dust” and is “protected against the effect of immersion between 15cm and 1m“ and it offers guided coaching. All in all, the Samsung Gear Fit will probably be an important device on the market (a market dominated by Nike and Fitbit) so if you are interested in fitness trackers, you should definitely give it a try. The Gear 2 and gear 2 Neo smartwacthes also seemed to improve over their predecessor. We can all agree that Samsung learned from its mistakes and the second generation of wearables (now branded Gear) are a solid effort from the South Korean company.
About the Samsung Galaxy S5
The Samsung Galaxy S5 keeps the design of the fourth Galaxy S almost intact. The Samsung galaxy S5 features a Super AMOLED panel capable of a Full high Definition resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The fifth Samsung Galaxy S is powered by a 2.5 GHz quad core Snapdragon 801 System on Chip with 2 GB of RAM and an Adreno 330 GPU. It will also be released in a variant with an octo core Exynos 5422 System on Chip that will feature two CPUs (a 2.1 GHz quad core Cortex-A15 and a 1.5 GHz quad-core Cortex-A7), 2 GB of RAM and an ARM Mali T628MP6 GPU. It also features 16 GB of internal memory (that you can expand to 128 GB via the integrated microSD card slot) and a removable Li-ion 2800 mAh battery that is larger than Galaxy S4?s 2600 mAh Li-ion battery and it also offers a low power mode that is enabled when battery life is low.
One of the new additions is a home button that, just as the iPhone 5S, integrates a fingerprint scanner. The swipe based fingerprint sensor is inspired by iPhone 5S’ similar sensor, but unfortunately first impressions were not very good: due to the swipe based nature of the fingerprint sensor it is almost impossible to activate it when using the Galaxy S5 with a single hand. The fifth Galaxy S also integrates a heart rate monitor placed on the smartphone’s back, next to the camera’s flash. The heart rate monitor can be used from within the S Health app and after placing your finger on the sensor, it will grab your pulse in about ten seconds, with very good accuracy.
The heart rate monitor is located near the rear camera’s flash. Speaking of Galaxy S5?s rear camera, it features a 16 megapixel sensor, capable of recording videos in 4K resolution, phase detection auto focus (which can focus in around 0.3 seconds), real time HDR photos and video, and an image sensor that can isolate individual pixels inside the sensor to improve its ability to capture light (this translates in better images in low light environments). It also features an F2.2 aperture. It also features a front facing 2.1 MP camera capable of recording videos in High Definition (1080p) at 30 frames per second.
Just like the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, the fifth Galaxy S features an IP67 (Ingress Protection) rating, which makes it dust proof and water proof as it is “totally protected against dust” and is “protected against the effect of immersion between 15cm and 1m“. The Samsung Galaxy S5 also comes with Android 4.4.2 KitKat out of the box and Samsung’s own front end touch interface, TouchWiz, over it plus the usual S branded apps and features. All in all, it is a high end smartphone, worthy of the Galaxy S brand.
