Samsung Galaxy S Advance review

Media

An all-round handset that hits the mark on multiple fronts, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance is not let down by its multimedia capabilities, despite featuring an inbuilt speaker that is far from impressive and offers little in terms of bass yet creates a considerable amount of distortion and crackle at high volumes.

With the standard MP3 player integration offering an outlet for your music on the go, the PMP abilities are yet another example of Android's efficiency that has seen the market flooded with a number of marginally different handsets that give the Samsung Galaxy S Advance little room to work with.

Bringing what can be a largely stoic aspect of a smartphone's feature bag to life, Samsung's TouchWiz UI and the Samsung Galaxy S Advance's multi-touch display and gyroscope have combined to use a selection of tilt to zoom and pan options that have been made available alongside the standard pinch-to-zoom offerings.

Elsewhere, with a selection of advanced image editing apps available from the Google Play store, those looking to make minor adjustments to their handset-shot snaps or downloaded images need not venture to the retail outlet with a selection of basic editing options pre-installed in the media-friendly handset.

Enabling you to crop and adapt images, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance will be a friend to those looking to make minor adjustments to their snaps before being shared via the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Media can be stored in the phone's inbuilt 8GB or 16GB storage capacity, which can be extended via up to 32GB of external memory.

Battery life

With the Samsung Galaxy S2 and the newly launched Samsung Galaxy S3 being two of the heaviest handsets on their limited battery lives, the Korean manufacturer faces marginally improved performances in the incorporated 1,500mAh Lithium-ion battery.

Samsung touts a 550 hour 3G standby time and the 7 hour 20 minute talk time, which come into fruition.

More importantly, the handset tackles the 24-hour single charge challenge, managing to go the distance under a natural day's use when we did everything from checking emails and browsing the web to making calls, sending texts and downloading a selection of handset-filling apps.

Connectivity

Aside from the strong Wi-Fi and 3G connections that leave room for improvement, the Samsung Galaxy S Advance plays host to the standard collection of connectivity options, including Bluetooth.

Thanks to the micro USB adaptor, it can be synced with your PC, enabling data transfers at a reasonable rate of knots

Despite being made in 8GB and 16GB storage forms, Samsung has retained the handset's optional microSD card slot under the bonnet, an option that enables increased storage and offers you the chance to rapidly shift content between devices.