It can be hard to keep up with the never-ending conveyor belt of new products – white slab after slightly altered white slab… it’s exhausting, frankly. So how about a new Samsung handset that really stands out, for better or for worse.
This is the Samsung K Zoom, and as you can quite clearly see it is a combination of high-powered digital camera and smartphone. It looks a little bit ridiculous at first, but once you get used to it it actually looks a little more polished than the mundane, plasticky Galaxy S5. That massive lens that you can so clearly see is 20.7 megapixels, with 10x optical zoom. Because zooming is a pretty important point that Samsung obviously wanted to get across.
The camera is also 3 BSI CMOS with optical image stabilisation, so it really is rather powerful. Naturally to pack in all of this tech the device is a bit fatter than normal. Twice the fatness of most other smartphones actually, at 16.6mm in depth (compared to, say, the 8.1mm of the Galaxy S5). It would be a fair trade-off, were it not for the fact that Samsung has put a bizarrely small battery inside of it. For a device so power-thirsty you would expect more than the 2,430 mAh battery contained within it – the Galaxy S5 has 2,800 mAh and it doesn’t have to power an obscenely big camera, so battery life might be a bit of an issue for the K Zoom. Still, at least it’s interchangeable.
Looking at its specifications as a smartphone, there’s been a clear compromise made to keep costs down. You get a nicely sized 4.8-inch display, but it’s only 1280 x 720 in resolution. It also has a rarely seen hexa-core processor, meaning you have a 1.3 GHz quad-core chip for strenuous applications like photography, and a 1.7 dual-core chip for day-to-day stuff. There’s 2GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage (expandable by microSD) as well as 4G capability and Android 4.4 KitKat pre-installed.
All of these specs are an upgrade over Samsung’s previous photography-centric effort the Galaxy S4 Zoom, so it’s nice to see that some real effort has been put into improving the handset. Of course it’s highly unlikely that its camera is as good as its most obvious competitor, the Nokia Lumia 1020, but of course Samsung as a brand is much more popular. It probably won’t be breaking sales records any time soon, but it makes for a nice Android alternative for photography buffs looking for a unified device.
