Samsung Galaxy Camera 2: Android-powered camera gets turbocharged

 

 

Back in 2012, Samsung brought all of its smartphone expertise to bear in creating the Galaxy Camera: an Android-based, standalone camera. Now, with the follow-up Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 the company hones its offering, retaining the basic feature set -- including the same 16-megapixel, backside-illuminated CMOS image sensor and optically-stabilized, 21x wide zoom lens -- while hitting the turbo button, and yet (hopefully) extending battery life, too.

The Samsung Galaxy Camera 2's restyled body is slightly wider, and a bit lighter, but little-changed beyond refreshed styling. The important tweaks are on the inside: a new, faster 1.6GHz quad-core processor and a huge increase in available memory to 2GB. (That's not to be confused with its 2.8GB available internal storage, incidentally; it also retains a MicroSD card slot.)

 

 

Alongside the increase in processing power, Samsung is also gifting the Galaxy Camera 2 with a more recent version of Google's Android operating system, 4.3 Jelly Bean. It's not quite the newest available -- some devices have now moved to 4.4 Kit Kat -- but it's certainly close, and given that the original Galaxy Camera hasn't yet seen an OS update, that's a good thing. Samsung has also increased battery capacity by more than 20%, which coupled with the efficiency improvements of the newer OS should translate to better battery life, despite the increase in processing power.

And there are a few tweaks in other areas, too, which we've detailed in our hands-on preview of the Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 -- so if you want to know more about Samsung's latest flagship Android camera, you'll want to read the preview for the full story. (Note that the article has now beeen updated, including more hands-on thoughts.)

 

 

Samsung has yet to announce pricing and availability of the Galaxy Camera 2, nor has it stated whether there will be multiple versions of the camera. (The original Galaxy Camera was sold in variants for different cellular network types, as well as in a variant that dropped the cellular connectivity altogether, providing only Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.) And of course, with no info on network types, we also have no info as yet on carriers with which the Galaxy Camera 2 will be compatible.

As soon as the company makes any statement about pricing, availability, or compatibility, you can expect to hear about it on our news page, and in our Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 preview!