Maimpok

After the semi-failed Galaxy S3 Mini whose purpose not many understood, Samsung pulled a pretty nasty stunt, scaring us with what looked like another mess of a mid-range phone. Thankfully, many of the rumors surrounding the Galaxy Premier’s specs have proven fake, and now that the handheld is official, we can definitely start feeling relieved.

Basically, the Galaxy Premier is an ever so slightly downgraded version of the Galaxy S3 who only makes a few performance sacrifices in order to reach a wider audience. Sounds great to us, but let’s see exactly what downgrades we are dealing with.
First off, let’s talk design, although there’s not much to discuss here. The Premier looks almost identical to the S3, weighing 130 grams (3 grams less than the flagship) and measuring 8.99 mm in thickness (a tad more than the S3).
The Premier sports a Super AMOLED display that, although has a slightly shrunken 4.65-inch diagonal compared with its “cousin”, still boasts a generous 1280 x 720 pixels resolution and an impressive 316 ppi pixel density.


The 1.5 GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4470 ticker under the hood can’t compare with the quad-core Exynos or dual-core Krait CPUs of the S3, but is definitely no pushover either. There’s also only 1 gig of RAM on the Galaxy Premier, but the international S3 has the same amount of memory and there’s nothing wrong with its multitasking whatsoever.
As for the cameras, those are actually identical to the ones featured by the S3, with the rear-facing one being equipped with an 8 MP sensor and the front-facing having 1.9 megapixels. One of the major sacrifices you’ll be asked to make with the Premier involves storage space, which has been shrunken from 16, 32 and 64 GB on the S3 to just 8 and 16 gigs.
Still, there’s microSD support allowing you to expand storage with an additional 32 GB, so all in all this doesn’t seem like a big issue either. The software is another area where all’s good, with the Premier being ready to run Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box with Touchwiz on top, as well as other Samsung exclusive goodies like S Beam, AllShare Cast, AllShare Play or S Voice.

The battery is itself more than decent, at 2,100 mAh, and we should probably expect a higher autonomy than on the S3, given the Premier’s slightly smaller screen and slower CPU. Finally, in terms of connectivity, you get all you could ever need, including Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and 4G LTE.
Now for the details you’re all so eager to hear about – pricing and availability. Well, we know that the Galaxy Premier will be available in parts of Europe, South East Asia, China and Korea. We also know that Russia will get it in November, while the Ukrainian release is scheduled for December.
Finally, we know the price in Ukraine, which will be of 5,555 hryvnias, or around $680. We don’t know however other pricing details or anything about a possible US release. Hopefully, we will find out something on that soon, so stay tuned, and, in the meantime, tell us what you think of the Galaxy Premier. Could the phone find a niche for itself? Is it a disappointment or a hit in the making?