Samsung Galaxy S 4.2 Wi-Fi Still Can’t Beat iPod Touch [MWC 2012]

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The 4.2-inch Wi-Fi handset is adequate

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Samsung continues to chip away at the iPod Touch market with a newer, bigger version of its Wi-Fi-only Galaxy S Wi-Fi 4.2. It’s a Gingerbread device, running on a 1GHz processor, and — surprisingly — it has a 4.2-inch screen. Obviously Samsung saw lucrative a gap in the market between the 4-inch and 4.5-inch sizes.

The first thing you notice is just how big it is. Not the screen size, but the fat body. It’s thick, light and plasticky. But that’s fine — the Touch can be hard to keep hold of while playing games. Slip on the headphones and the sound is good and clear, but start playing graphic-intensive games and it all goes wrong.

I played the racing game you see above, and the graphics look great on the big, bright screen. But the game almost flickers as it plays. I don’t know the frame rate, but it certainly doesn’t make for fluid motion.

Plus, sadly,Android still doesn’t have the depth of titles found over the road in the iOS App Store. It remains a weird fact that, despite the huge amount of Android phones, there is still no real iPod Touch competitor.

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