Rumours have swirled about the existence of a Galaxy S4 Zoom cameraphone for the past few months, and now Samsung has officially announced its existence. The phone packs a 16MP sensor and is capable of 10x optical zoom, achieved by rotating a ring that surrounds the lens.
That same ring also launched the camera app, and other camera specs include optical image stabilisation and a Xenon flash.
In terms of guts, specs are similar to the S4 Mini: a dual-core 1.5GHz Exynos processor, 1.5GB of RAM and eight gigs of internal storage. There’s also, as you’d hope for a cameraphone like this, a microSD slot for adding more space. There’s a 4.3-inch screen which packs 960×540 pixels, it’s juiced by a 2330mAh removable battery, and everything runs on Android 4.2.2 . Elsewhere, there’s a 1.9MP front-facing camera LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC.
A leaked review on a Russian site claims that the camera shoots in 16:9 at 12 megapixels, but it sounds like there’s a bewildering number of options you can tweak too — including 26 different camera modes. There are some sample pictures available from that review too — there’s one below — and they look pretty good. The phone is said to arrive some time in the third quarter of this year. While there’s no official word on price, the Russian leak suggests it should retail at somewhere around the $US600 mark. [Samsung, Hi-Tech Mail]