Mark your calendar for April 11 — that’s when Samsung‘s newest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, will be available in Canada, along with a number of related smart watch fitness accessories.
The Galaxy S5 is the follow-up to Samsung’s popular Galaxy S4 release, and features a 5.1″ full HD Super AMOLED adaptive display running Android 4.2.2 (Kit Kat). The vendor promises a solid 10 hours of LTE web surfing, and an ultra power saving mode that allows a 10 per cent change to last up to 24 hours in standby. The S5 is powered by a quadcore 2.5GHz processor, is dust and water resistant to the IP67 standard, and features a fingerprint reader for added security.
Samsung is touting improvements to its S-Health fitness app, saying 25 per cent of S4 users are making use of the fitness app, which can also integrate with supported accessories. Samsung said though that the basics still drive smartphone purchase decisions: a high quality camera, a big display, and screen resolution. The S5 camera is an enhanced 16MP camera with selective focus and high dynamic range.
Also new are three smart watch/fitness accessories designed to work both independently and in conjunction with the Galaxy S5. The Samsung Gear Fit is designed primarily as a fitness accessory, and includes a pedometer and lap timer, as well as multimedia controls when connected to the S5. The Galaxy Gear 2 and Gear 2 NEO are updates to the Galaxy Gear smartwatch, but Samsung has introduced the new Gear model as a budget version of the smartwatch — the camera has been removed to get to a lower pricepoint. All three will be available with the S5 launch on April 11.