BARCELONA—Can anyone topple the iPod Touch? Can anyone even dent its towering market superiority as the number-one non-phone handheld, by far? Samsung tried last year with the Galaxy Player 4.0 and 5.0, and the market hardly noticed. Now the company is trying again with the Galaxy S WiFi 4.2, an upgrade to the Galaxy Player 4.0. I got some hands-on time here at Mobile World Congress.
The Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 4.2 is a slim, elegant white handheld with chromed plastic trim, a white plastic back, and slightly rounded corners and an 800-by-480-pixel, 4.2-inch IPS LCD screen. The screen was bright enough and sharp, but not outstanding. There's a single physical home button on the bottom, and virtual Android back and menu buttons which light up when you touch the bottom bezel.
The S WiFi's specs are very similar to, although a little better than, the Galaxy Player's. It has a 1GHz TI OMAP4 processor, which the Samsung representative I spoke with said was a bit faster than the Player 4.0's 1GHz unit. It has the same 800-by-480-pixel screen resolution, albeit this time on a 4.2 rather than a 4-inch screen. It connects to the Internet with 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and it'll come with 8 or 16GB of storage as well as a memory card slot. There's a 2-megapixel camera on the back.
The device runs Google Android Gingerbread (version 2.3), and it'll receive an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) eventually, according to Samsung.
I had a chance to test the new six-axis gyroscope for tilt sensing with some driving games. Controls felt suitably sensitive. Overall, the device felt exactly like the midrange Android phone it basically is; Android apps and menus worked just as expected.
As it supports the hundreds of thousands of Android apps, I'm stymied to figure out why the Galaxy Player line hasn't been more successful. The S WiFi 4.2 is an elegant, affordable media player and gaming device, but so was the Galaxy Player 4.0. The answer has to be marketing: while Apple's iPod Touch built on the iPod brand, people just aren't used to Android being on handhelds that aren't phones.
The Galaxy S WiFi 4.2 is a nice upgrade, but it won't change that game. It isn't cutting-edge or mind-blowing—it's a nice midrange product for an existing ecosystem, but the ecosystem it should be serving doesn't really exist. There's little consumer demand for Android PDAs. A subsidized, or low-cost Galaxy S WiFi 4.2, backed by heavy marketing, might be able to change that, but I haven't seen any signs that Samsung is willing to go that far.
The Galaxy S WiFi 4.2 will become available in March and will probably cost around the same as the current Galaxy Player 4.0, which starts at $199.99 list.