Monday, July 11, 2011

Samsung Galaxy Gio Coming to Bell in August

It appears that Bell plans to release one of the Galaxy family mid-range Android smartphones, the Galaxy Gio sometime in August.

Unveiled earlier this year at the 2011 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung Galaxy Gio hit shelves in May.

According to the guys over at MobileSyrup, the handset is en route to Bell and will make its debut in Canada next month.

There is no information regarding the phone's price options, but the latest rumors say that the Galaxy Gio might be picked by Virgin Mobile as well.

Samsung Galaxy Gio will face a fierce competition on Canadian shores, as many Android devices in the same price range are already available on the market, including INQ Cloud Touch, LG Optimus One and HTC Wildfire S.

Although the phone is powered by Google's Android 2.2 (Froyo) platform, multiple unofficial ROMs that allow users to upgrade to Gingerbread are already available in the wild.

Furthermore, the Galaxy Gio is equipped with a single core Qualcomm QCT MSM7227-1 Turbo processor clocked at 800 MHz.

With only 158 MB of internal memory, potential customers should buy an extra microSD memory card, though the phone is delivered with a 2GB memory card in the sales package.

The phone also sports an average 3-megapixel camera with autofocus, geo-tagging, smile detection and video recording capabilities (QVGA@15fps).

The Galaxy Gio comes with a mid-size 3.2-inch multi-touch capacitive display with 16 million colors support and 320 x 480 pixels resolution, as well as accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate and proximity sensor for auto turn-off.

The handset does not feature a secondary front-facing camera for video calls, instead it offers HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n connectivity, including Wi-Fi hotspot capability.

The phone's standard 1350 mAh Li-Ion battery should provide up to 610 hours (460 hours for 3G) of standby time or up to 11 hours (7 hours for 3G) of talk time.