VR-Zone

Jumping the gun on this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) in late Feb, Samsung has just unveiled its new Galaxy S Advance smartphone which shapes up similarly to the original Galaxy S, but sports a 1GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core processor.

The Galaxy S Advance's screen is the same 4-inch sized (480 x 800) Super AMOLED one used on the Galaxy S, only it is more curved not unlike the Galaxy Nexus. It also uses the same rear 5MP camera (along with a 1.3MP front facing) and near identical dimensions. RAM is superior with 768MB on tap, while it will be offered with 8 or 16GB of internal storage and gives HSDPA connectivity at speeds of up to 14.4 Mbit/s as touted by Samsung.

The phone won't be shipping with Android 4.0 unfortunately, instead using Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It should hopefully be cheap enough though, with Samsung positioning it as the most affordable dual-core smart phone in its range.

The Galaxy S Advance is scheduled to be rolled out in Russia sometime next month, followed by gradual rollouts in other parts of the world including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast and Southwest Asia, Latin America and China.