Samsung has revealed the successor the Galaxy S4 Zoom today, named the Galaxy K Zoom. The new cameraphone has a few notable changes to the previous generation and looks quite a lot like the Galaxy S5, even though it has a different brand name.
Internally the Galaxy K Zoom is a little underwhelming, with a 1.7GHz quad-core Exynos chip, 2GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and a 2430mAh battery. The phone has LTE, WiFi a/b/g/n, NFC and Bluetooth 4.0 and comes running Android 4.4 KitKat.
The design of the device is very familiar to the Galaxy S5, it has the same dimpled back and shell design. On the front is the physical home button, alongside two capacitive keys for back and multi-tasking. The home button does not have an inbuilt fingerprint sensor, for better or worse.
What the Galaxy K Zoom does have is a 20.7MP rear camera and instead of trying to cover this up behind a small lens, Samsung has made it the centre feature, taking up more than a third of the back cover, similar to the Nokia Lumia 1020.
The camera on the back of the device can shoot 1080p at 60fps and has a 10x optical zoom with OIS. Optical image stabilisation is standard on most cameras and will allow users to take excellent photos even when their hands are shaky.
Even though the camera on the back of the Galaxy K Zoom may hint at a big advantage in photos, it has the same megapixel sensor as the Sony Xperia Z2 and the only reason it is so large is for the 10x optical zoom, a feature Samsung are hoping sells units.
For us, it doesn’t really grasp the idea of a high-end cameraphone and once again Samsung has thrown themselves in a market nobody is really interested in, something they have been doing a lot recently, as they try to put consumers into different groups.
