In today’s smartphone world, the handsets currently available in the market, especially the high-end ones, mostly come with a full touchscreen display which eats up most of the front panel of these handsets. In fact, rarely do you get to see a very capable device with a physical QWERTY keyboard because this will keyboard only take much precious real estate in the front panel of the handset. If you happen to be the type of smartphone-user who would rather do your messaging chores with a physical keyboard, you still have a couple of choice – you have the Motorola Droid 4 and the Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE to name a few.
But if you want your handset to have the best possible configuration under the hood and still have that much needed physical keyboard, then the most logical choice would be the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II. The handset is the successor of the original Stratosphere released from yesteryear and was officially announced a couple of weeks back so if you happen to have Verizon for your wireless provider and are interested in getting your hands on a smartphone with physical keyboard with all the bells and whistles that people look for in a handset, the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II is your best bet.
Announced quietly a couple of weeks back, the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II is now available off of the shelves of Verizon and will set you back $129.99. Of course, you will be required to sing a new two-year service agreement with the AT&T if you want to take advantage of the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II at its carrier-subsidized price point.
In terms of its design and aesthetics, the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II is a bulky and hefty device but this is pretty understandable because of the slide-out QWERTY keyboard it has in its chassis. The dimensions of the handset come up to 126.2 x 65.5 x 13.5 mm and it tips the scales at 154 grams. Of course, the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II exhibits the same build quality that we have come to love in Motorola smartphones from the olden days.
Under the hood, the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II comes with a pretty impressive array of fire-breathing components despite its being tagged as a mid-range device. It runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for its operating system and this is powered by the handset’s QualComm MSM8960 SnapDragon chipset (which is incidentally the same SoC found in the internals of the US version of the Samsung Galaxy S III). The Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II relies on its dual-core 1.2 GHz Krait processor and 1GB of RAM to generate the computing power it needs for its performance to always be snappy and lag-free.
Storage space on the handset is pegged at a meager 8GB of onboard memory but given the fact that the Samsung Galaxy Stratosphere II comes with a microSD card slot that enables memory expansion, the measly internal memory of the handset shouldn’t be too much of a concern here. Its dual-shooter configuration on the other hand features a rear 5MP shooter and a front 1.3MP snapper.
