14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung India has just announced that Galaxy Pop CDMA will be available on the market starting March 25 for Rs. 9750 ($215). This would be the third CDMA Android smartphone to hit the Indian market, after Galaxy I899 and MTS Pulse.
Surprisingly, the official announcement came only one day after the smartphone has been confirmed via Samsung India twitter account: “We are planning to launch it [Galaxy Pop] in the coming week.”
There are no hardware differences between the Galaxy Pop CDMA and its GSM cousin, which was launched in India in early February.
Galaxy Pop is a mid-range smartphone, which is expected to be heavily subsidized by any of the two major CDMA carriers, Tata Indicom and RCOM.
The device is powered by an average 800 MHz processor and features Android 2.2 Froyo on board. The rich-featured TouchWiz 3.0 UI has also been included to run over the operating system.
The candybar sports a 3.15-megapixel camera with autofocus, digital zoom and video recording capabilities, which is just enough to take average photos and videos.
The Galaxy Pop measures 110.4 x 60.6 x 12.1 mm and weighs 105g (battery included), which makes it suitable for any pocket size. In this regard, the Galaxy Pop has a 'tiny' 3.14-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with 262K colors support and 240 x 320 pixels resolution.
A full range of pre-loaded software apps and services are available with the phone: Gmail, Gtalk, Youtube, Google Maps, Orkut, Quick Office and Android Market.
The CDMA-enabled phone offers users data up to 3.1 Mbps of download speed using HSD network. However, users who want to avoid data usage charges can take advantage of the Wi-Fi connectivity.
Other key features of the Galaxy Pop include 384 MB of internal memory, FM Radio with unlimited channels to store, microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB), Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP support and microUSB 2.0.