Samsung has just announced yet another Galaxy device, the Galaxy Pocket. It’s the exact opposite of the massive 5.3 inch Galaxy Note. With the Pocket you’re looking at a 2.8 inch screen that pushes the now ancient resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, it has a 2 megapixel fixed focus camera, runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a single core 800 MHz processor, and of course comes with all the associated radios (WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS) you’d expect from most modern smartphones. We don’t have an exact price for this thing, but we do know it’s going to come to the UK “later this year”. If we had to take a guess, we’d say it’s going to cost no more than 150 EUR. In fact, we’d go so far as to say it’ll cost just 100 EUR. Last month at Mobile World Congress we saw Nokia announce the Windows Phone powered Lumia 610. It’ll be sold for 189 EUR and it features a 3.7 inch 800 x 480 pixel resolution screen, so half that price for the Galaxy Pocket sounds like a reasonable estimate.
The question on our minds is what’s Google’s strategy for the low end going to be? The lowest end device that runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich reliably is the Samsung Nexus S, and that’s on the market for roughly 400 EUR. Will Jelly Bean or Key Lime Pie focus on making Android more appealing to the low end? Those are the folks who will be buying the next billion smartphones, not pasty white boys who think they’re rock stars because the handset they own is less than half a year old.
What do you think, do we not pay enough attention to devices like the Galaxy Pocket? Forget feature phones for a second, those are dead, these new smartphones that cost what a decent feature phone used to cost are going to be making a big splash in 2012 and 2013.
[Via: SammyHub]
Update: We have pricing! 1200 SEK in Sweden ($175). 130 EUR in Finland ($170). 1199 NOK in Norway ($215). It’s expected to land in those three countries in April.