Samsung pushes out a quite phenomenal number of handsets during the course of a year, and adding to its mammoth collection is the robust Xcover 2, built purposely for those who may regularly encounter the brunt of the varying terrain in the great outdoors. Unveiled today, it runs on Android Jelly Bean (4.1), boasts a 5-megapixel camera, and offers a 4-inch display. More details after the break.
Samsung likes to offer a wide variety of smartphones to suit most needs and budgets. There’s the Galaxy S III for the high-end user, the Galaxy Note II for those in search of boatloads of display real-estate, and the Samsung Galaxy mini, for consumers not sold by massive specs and or screens. The Xcover 2 takes a slightly different approach to the vast majority of the company’s Android-based releases to date, and instead paints itself as a device ready to cope with the rain, sand and dust you might encounter while out and on your travels.
While it perhaps doesn’t look as sleek as your Note or Galaxy device, it’s still easy on the eye, and as well as being water resistant, is also fully dust and sand proof. It is completely waterproof down to one meter depths, so you can – providing the water is clear enough – even take some pictures underwater.
Those looking for a rough and ready smartphone do tend to focus on battery life, and with a 1,700mAh battery, the Xcover 2 will readily retain those all-important drops of juice. There’s also a front-facing VGA camera for video calling / Skyping, Bluetooth, and 4GB of internal memory, which can be expanded up to a total of 36GB thanks to the microSD card slot.
Not only is it well suited to explorers, but it would seem a perfect handset for those working on building sites, or other areas in which muddy puddles and gadget hazards are aplenty. Most folks working in such environments tend to sacrifice the latest technologies in order to find a practical, suitable phone, and while the Xcover 2 – with its 1GHz dual-core chip – is not going to set the world alight in terms of performance, it’s certainly a step up from what is currently available.
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