Last year, Samsung tried something a little kooky: it made a mash-up of a middling smartphone and a solid point-and-shoot camera (you know, the kind smartphones have nearly driven to extinction). The resulting chimaera was called the Galaxy S4 Zoom, and it was... not great. To absolutely no one's surprise, though, Samsung's fixation on fusion is still going strong and the company's trying to crack the code again with a new camera/phone combo called the Galaxy K zoom.
Mildly silly name aside (the "K" stands for "kamera," seriously), the international K zoom packs 2GB of RAM and one of Samsung's hexa-core Exynos chipsets into its chubby, dimpled frame. In this case, the chip combines quad-core 1.3GHz and a dual-core 1.7GHz processors -- the pairing isn't as snappy as a Galaxy S5, but it's still beefy enough to handle most people's daily routines. Toss in 2GB of RAM, 3G and LTE radios, 8GB of internal storage and a spacious 4.8-inch 720p screen and you've got yourself a package that's a bit more robust than most. If the name wasn't a dead giveaway though, the K zoom's 20.7-megapixel BSI CMOS camera sensor is the star of the show here. Samsung's rear shooter is kitted out with optical image stabilization, the ability to shoot 1080p video at 60 frames per second and a slew of software features that aim to make your on-the-go photos less terrible. That all sounds fine enough on paper, but here's the bigger question: what's it like to actually use?
Long story short, better than you might expect.
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Filed under: Mobile