Our good friends at Clove have just confirmed that the eagerly awaited Samsung Windows Phone 8 smartphone, the Ativ S, will actually be going on sale from this Friday, the 14th of December.
If you have pre-ordered the handset from Clove you should have received an update email asking you to confirm your purchase.
***ORIGINAL STORY***
After weeks and weeks of waiting it is looking like the Galaxy Ativ S will be hitting our shelves within the next few weeks as online retailer Clove.co.uk has confirmed with us that they are set to receive a batch of handsets from December 17th.
The Samsung Ativ S has been hot on our radar since it was first announced in October but since then Samsung has been very secretive about when the handset would hit our shelves. Initially a November release date was penciled in but by the time November had come and gone we still had no word on a release date.
This then led a lot of people to believe (us included) that the handset was not set to hit our shelves in 2012 and that it might even be put off until the CES or MWC tech events that will be taking place at the start of 2013.
Samsung had previously stated that the Ativ S would indeed be out in 2012 but with the days ticking by it was getting harder to believe! Well, our good friends at Clove have confirmed that they are expecting stock of the Windows Phone 8 sporting smartphone in the coming weeks.
Chris Ward, Digital Media Coordinator at Clove said: “Although the release date has now been pushed back several times, the information that we have does still indicate a release this side of 2013.”
He then followed up with “We are now expecting SIM-free stock to arrive the week commencing 17th December”.
There is a reason why we are excited, as the Samsung Ativ S features a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display, a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera and a choice of either 16 or 32GB of internal storage. The 8 megapixel camera is capable of shooting 1080p videos at 30fps, whereas a 1.9 megapixel secondary camera will be used for video calling purposes.
However, the longer Samsung waits the more it allows its Windows Phone 8 competition (namely the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 and the 8X by HTC) to get a head start in the market. Samsung has a history of upstaging the leaders though – just see how well the Galaxy S range of Android devices is doing at the moment!
You can pre-order the Samsung Ativ S smartphone from http://www.clove.co.uk/samsung-ativ-s for £442 from the 17th Dec.
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