Samsung has announced the launch of its new affordable and the much mocked Android 4.1 powered Galaxy Grand Phablet in India. At an event held in Mumbai, Samsung sort of surprised everyone with the pricing of the device and also by roping in Saina Nehwal as brand ambassador for the event. The Galaxy Grand was officially announced a few weeks ago and was infamously lampooned by the global press owing to the fact that it had a mid range spec sheet in a high end firm factor (You know, a 5 inch display). Let’s take a look at what goes inside the device.
To start with, the phone boasts of a 5 inch, WVGA TFT display. That might be too low a resolution for a display of this size – but in reality, it didn’t look as bad as I thought it would look. Under the hood of the device is a 1.2 Ghz dual-core processor supported by 1 GB of RAM. It gets 8 GB of internal memory which you can expand further using microSD cards. The device also packs in an 8 megapixel main camera which can also capture videos in full HD. The secondary front camera can snap things at 2 megapixels and is ever ready to help you make occasional video calls. For low light imaging , there is a single LED flash as well. Pretty neat.
Size comparision with the Galaxy Note 2
On the software side, the device runs Android 4.1 JellyBean which is the latest in town and is reasonably futureproof , provided Samsung issues regular updates for this one in the future.
Lest I forget, let me also remind you that this happens to be a Samsung DUOS branded device. This obviously means that the device sports dual SIM capability. The device however is not dual SIM active, That said, Samsung packs in a feature that will let you forward calls from one SIM to another. This works when you are on a call on one SIM and you receive a call on the another. In such a scenario, you can forward that call to the other number. There is a charge for this from the operator side – just in case you were wondering.
Here is a brief video of the camera options on the Galaxy Grand.
Samsung has priced the Galaxy Grand a Rs. 21,500 in India. The phone would land here by the first week of February and as an early limited period offer the company would offer the Samsung Smartcover accessory free with every Samsung Galaxy Grand sold in India. Samsung also said that Galaxy Grand users on Vodafone would get 2 GB worth of data for a period of two months from the date of purchase of their new phones.
