What, who, how?! I didn’t believe the SMS I received the other day from Vodacom, alerting me to the fact that I could now upgrade. “That’s impossible,” I exclaimed, “there is no way that I’ve had my delightful Samsung Star for two years already!”
But a quick check in my records revealed the truth – it had been two years already and I was indeed due for an upgrade, nice, and after seeing an advert on TV for the new Samsung Galaxy Ace on a Vodacom contract, I sprung into action and did some Internet research – all of which led to a very quick realization that this was indeed the phone I wanted, my first ever Android “smartphone”, and most importantly, probably the shortest ever phone search in the history of me owning a mobile phone! :)
Anyway, I placed a quick phone call to the Vodacom shop in the mall (Somerset Mall in case you were wondering) just to make sure they had some Galaxies in stock (they had 5) and half an hour later, I found myself seated in the Vodacom Shop waiting for assistant Wendy to fill in all the necessary forms before I handed over my upgrade administration fee and left the store, now a proud owner of a shiny black Samsung (I’m such a fanboy) Android midrange smartphone.
And boy am I pleased with my upgrade (as is Chantelle who is quite jealous and now full of respite that she didn’t do the necessary homework before going for her current Windows Mobile device).
All the standard features you would expect on a phone (apart from a dismal, unusable video recorder), the Galaxy comes packing Android 2.2 Froyo, running on a 800mhz processor and sporting 278mb of available RAM. It has a 3.5″ 16 million color TFT LCD capacitive touchscreen (gorilla glass of course), features a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB connectivity, GPS with A-GPS connectivity, accelerometer and proximity sensor, and a standard 3.5 mm audio jack. It measures in at 112.4 x 59.9 x 11.5 mm and weights an unbelievable light 113 grams.
And with all the goodness that Android and touchscreen computing brings, this really is a gem of a phone at a very affordable price.
(And yes, the very first app I downloaded and installed was indeed Angry Birds. Really, do you think it would have been anything else? :P)