AT&T has announced that it will begin taking pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S5 on March 21 and will offer the smartphone for $199 when signing a new 2-year contract.
Samsung is gearing up to launch three new devices on April 11. The company will release its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5 and its new Gear 2 smartwatch and Gear Fit fitness band. All four major carriers have confirmed that they will offer the Galaxy S5 to customers in April and now AT&T has become the first to announce pricing and pre-orders.
AT&T will begin taking pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy S5 through its online store beginning on March 21. The smartphone will be priced at $199 when signing a new 2-year contract with AT&T or $649 outright. AT&T hasn't announced when it will actually ship the Galaxy S5, only saying it will ship in early April (likely on or around April 11).
The Samsung Galaxy S5 is packing a 5.1-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display that provides excellent viewing angles and true color reproduction. Samsung has upgraded the Galaxy S5's processor to use Qualcomm's latest 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 chipset, along with 2GB of RAM. The smartphone runs Android 4.4 KitKat and a new version of Samsung TouchWiz UI that has been rewritten to take make Android 4.4 KitKat more user friendly. The Galaxy S5 ships with 16GB of internal storage and users will be able to add to that via its microSD expansion slot, which now supports up to 128GB microSD cards.
Samsung has decided to use a 16-megapixel rear camera that has some advanced features like "Selective Focus", which allows users to change focus of images at a later time and its HDR Live mode makes it easy to see what your image will look like with HDR enabled before you actually capture the picture. The Galaxy S5 is IP67 certified dust-proof and water-resistant and uses a 2,800 mAh removable battery that provides up to 11 hours of video playback and 10 hours of web browsing over 4G LTE.
Since the Galaxy S5's major rival is Apple's iPhone 5s, Samsung has added a fingerprint scanner to the Galaxy S5 and has also installed it inside the smartphone's Home button. Samsung, unlike Apple has released an SDK that opens up the fingerprint technology to developers for integrating with their applications.
For a limited time, AT&T will also offer $50 off the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch when pre-ordering the Galaxy S5. We'll now have to wait and see how Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile respond with the Galaxy S5 launch plans.
