Samsung Star II S5260

Available now
18th January 2011

The original Samsung Star was a huge sales success, although it was sold under many different names in different countries including the Samsung Tocco Lite in the UK. A good value touchscreen phone, it seemed to be exactly what many consumers wanted.

Almost two years on from the original Star, Samsung have announced its successor - the Samsung Star II. Both phones are pretty similar on paper, but Samsung have made some useful improvements to keep the Star II fresh.

The display is a 3" 240 x 400 pixel unit, the old resistive panel on the Star was the same size, but this is reportedly a capacitive panel which is much nicer to use. On the back is a basic 3.2 megapixel camera and the Samsung Star II has WiFi but no 3G support.

Underneath Samsung have made some other changes by adding Social Networking Support (SNS) and there's an updated version of TouchWiz (version 3.0) running on the Star II as well. Perhaps surprisingly, Samsung haven't chosen to make the Star II run their Bada OS, instead keeping it in the "feature phone" category.

We don't know what price the Star II will be, but its predecessor retails for less than €100 at the moment, so we expect the Star II to be a little more. For this sort of price we can forgive the lack of 3G, as we would sooner have WiFi for a device like this anyway.

Samsung says that the Star II should be available in Germany from February, followed by other countries in Europe, the CIS, Middle East, South America and India.