All eyes may be on the Samsung Galaxy S II right now, but the Korean company believes there’s some life left in its best-selling predecessor. The Samsung Galaxy S Plus GT-I9001Â was officially announced at the end of March, a 1.4GHz upgrade to the original Hummingbird phone, and Android Community caught up with Vodafone UK today to grab some playtime and run some early benchmarks.
Outwardly, there’s little to differentiate the 119g Galaxy S Plus from the Galaxy S before it: the same plastic casing, 4-inch WVGA Super AMOLED display, reasonably slimline chassis and 5-megapixel camera on the back. You also get the same front-facing camera, 8GB of internal storage – with a microSD card slot to boost that by up to 32GB – and Android 2.3 Gingerbread with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI.
What’s different is processor speed and battery life. Samsung has overclocked the original 1GHz chip to 1.4GHz so as to bring it more in line with the performance we’ve seen from dual-core devices, but it’s also managed to extend battery life at the same time. In fact, the company reckons the Galaxy S Plus will last 24-percent longer than the regular S.
We took the opportunity to run a couple of benchmarks on the phone, starting with Quadrant Standard. The Galaxy S Plus scored 1241, a neat bump on top of the Galaxy S. Then we turned to Vellamo, Qualcomm’s mobile browser benchmarking tool, which combines various web-centric tests into one. Here, the Galaxy S Plus scored 829, slotting in-between the HTC EVO 3D and the HTC Sensation, an impressive boost over original phone.
In short, while you’re not getting the very best specs of the day, you’re getting a phone that needs no third-party ROMs to achieve a turn of speed. Vodafone will be offering the Galaxy S Plus imminently in the UK, priced from free with a new, 24-month agreement at £31 per month ($50) including 600 voice minutes, unlimited messaging, 500MB of data and 2GB of inclusive BT OpenZone WiFi hotspot use.
Update: The Galaxy S Plus is available now, on pay monthly plans from £25.
Meanwhile, we’re giving away a pair of Vodafone Galaxy S II handsets to UK readers over at SlashGear, so head over to see how you can win!
nice. i had the S now i have ugraded to S2….
but still a gr8 bump
Hello, sorry about the off-topic question, but the SGS+ has a very nice case. Which one is it? It’s real smart how it hides the silver edge just letting to see a bit of it .
Thanks, that’a a great article 🙂