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Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 hands-on review: powerful, rugged and impressive
Samsung has always enjoyed dabbling with the rugged crowd: be it theoriginal Xcover or the Beam range, it’s enjoyed offering up more robust phones. The Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 brings with it a whole new gamut of features and functionality and really shows straight away that it’s not a phone to be messed with.
And here’s some more good news for you tough fiends – the Xcover 2 release date is set for 7 March, which is barely any time at all to save up the €319 (£275 / AUS$405 / $415) it’s slated to cost.
Let’s get the key features that make it such a tough Mother Hubbard on the table now, shall we? Well firstly it’s IP67 certified, which means you can submerge it for up to 1 metre for 30 minutes before it will start to go a bit wrong.
But under all the tough exterior beats the heart of a decent smartphone – and it’s hard to explain how glad we were not to be looking at anotherSamsung Galaxy S3 clone, since this is all decked out in a plastic/rubber hybrid that makes it super easy to grip no matter what the conditions.
The dual-core 1GHz processor, the 4-inch screen with WVGA resolution and the 1GB of RAM all combine to make an impressive phone – it’s basically an upgraded Samsung Galaxy S2 with a really protective shell whacked on the outside.
The only worry we have is over the battery size: it’s only 1700mAh and while the screen is smaller than others on the market, it still needs a bit of power behind it. Given the increased dimensions, we’d have liked to see a thicker phone and a larger battery instead.
Early verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 is one of the better phones we saw at MWC 2013, simply because it was a different proposition to the rest of the identikit Samsung Galaxy family. We didn’t get to dunk it underwater, which is still a favourite test of all mobile phone reviewers, but we’re pretty confident it can stand the heat. Also literally.
It looks to not be a super-expensive handset either, which is a real plus for those thinking of picking it up, as the spec level belies a mid-range phone. We’re expecting this to land any month now on shop shelves, and if you’re in the market for a tough, attractive next-gen smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 could certainly be worth checking out.