Optus will launch Samsung’s second-gen Android Galaxy S smartphone on Thursday July 1st, ‘free’ at $59/month and selling outright for $849; a Telstra Next G model is set to follow.
The ‘Android attack’ continues next week as Samsung and Optus team up for the new Galaxy S.
Optus is first out of the gate with Samsung’s second-gen Android phone which will be available on Thursday, July 1st on all ‘Yes’ plans.
A Telstra spokesman confirmed that The Big T will introduce the Galaxy S on its Next G network sometime after Optus’ one month exclusivity period expires, although "pricing will be announced a little closer to the launch date."
Optus is factoring handheld repayments into its $19/month and $49/month plans, but the Galaxy S comes ‘free’ on the $59/month plan with 1GB of data plus unlimited Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace access. Optus will also offer the Galaxy S at $849 outright and unlocked.
The Galaxy S (also known as the i9000) sports a 4 inch Super AMOLED display which boosts the brightness, clarity and daylight visibility of the Samsung’s original AMOLED panels.
The Australian model comes with 16GB of memory (the near-mandatory microSD card slot allows an extra 32GB) and runs on Optus’ dual-band 2100MHz and 900MHz network.
While launched with Android 2.1 it will be upgradable to Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’ once Samsung has updated its own TouchWIZ 3.0 skin.
That will be worth waiting for, because TouchWIZ is the ‘secret sauce’ to an already high-spec smartphone (it packs a snappy 1GHz ‘Hummingbird’ CPU with PowerVR graphics processor, 11n wireless, 5.0 megapixel camera plus front-facing VGA camera, 720p HD video recording and playback, and – get this — playback support for Matroska MKV video files along with DivX/XviD).
Samsung has built in the innovative Swype keyboard interface, created by and licensed from the inventor of T9 predictive text system, which lets you type faster by moving your finger around the keyboard; a ‘Daily Briefing’ app for instant access to news, weather and you diary; plus a ‘Social Hub’ app for aggregating email, social networking and IM chat sessions.
The phone’s large sharp screen is also being promoted as a way to let the Galaxy S serve double-duty as a pocket-sized ebook reader, with Borders eReader app (a rebranded version of the Kobo reader) offered at launch and providing access to some two million eBooks.