Samsung Galaxy S5 announced. Available in Ireland from April

As expected, Samsung’s latest Unpacked event at WMC in Barcelona was used to unveil the Galaxy S5. Boasting sales in excess of 200 million units, the S line of phones has been incredibly successful for Samsung and in truth has been the only real competition to the iPhone in sales numbers.

Naturally the world is watching but rather than a complete redesign which many had hoped for, this is another incremental update. As is usual now, just about every area of the phone has gotten a small upgrade. And in most cases it is a pretty small upgrade.

Here’s a list of the main specs:

• 5.1-inch FHD Super AMOLED display (1920 x 1080 resolution)
• 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor
• 2GB of RAM
• 16/32GB of memory
• microSD support up to 128GB
• 16-megapixel camera with UHD 4K video recording at 30fps
• 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera
• LTE Cat 4 150/50Mbps
• 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 4.0
• USB 3.0, NFC, IR Remote
• 2800mAh battery
• IP67 Dust and Water Resistant
• Fingerprint scanner
• Heart rate sensor
• Android 4.4.2 KitKat out of the box
• Size: 142 x 72.5 x 8.1/ Weight: 145g

As you can see from the specs above, the phone is now water and dust resistant to match Sony’s offerings with the battery, processor, screen and camera all getting slight improvements.

There is now also a fingerprint scanner onboard, located in the home button. Take that Apple! Another new feature is a heart rate sensor built into the camera flash at the rear of the device.

The phone is to go on sale in Ireland from April and while it’s too early to hear from any of the networks, it’s a safe bet that all will be selling this device.