Samsung has always enjoyed dabbling with the rugged crowd: be it the original Xcover or the Beam range, it's enjoyed offering up more robust phones. The Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 brings with it a whole new gamut of features and functionality and really shows straight away that it's not a phone to be messed with.
Let's get the key features that make it such a tough Mother Hubbard on the table now, shall we? Well firstly it's IP67 certified, which means you can submerge it for up to 1 metre for 30 minutes before it will start to go a bit wrong.
In reality it means you can pop it in with the nightly washing up to get it all nice and clean after a day's hard extreme rambling, or whatever it is you fancy doing. You can also chuck it in sand or drop it from a height of two metres before worrying about smashes - plus it has a neat screw-in battery cover on the back that means it won't all fall apart should you do so.
But under all the tough exterior beats the heart of a decent smartphone - and it's hard to explain how glad we were not to be looking at another Samsung Galaxy S3 clone, since this is all decked out in a plastic/rubber hybrid that makes it super easy to grip no matter what the conditions.
It's hefty alright, with a 12mm (0.47 inches) thick chassis and a weight that tips the scales at nearly 150g (0.33lbs) - but you're glad of all that when you're holding it, because it gives the impression of impregnability that we assume you're after.
The dual-core 1GHz processor, the 4-inch screen with WVGA resolution and the 1GB of RAM all combine to make an impressive phone - it's basically an upgraded Samsung Galaxy S2 with a really protective shell whacked on the outside.
There's also a killer feature that we love to see: the camera shutter button on the side. This can even be fired underwater, so if you're taking a short snorkelling excursion over some quite picturesque fish, then you may snap away with the Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 at 5MP resolution.
There's also a killer feature that we love to see: the camera shutter button on the side. This can even be fired underwater, so if you're taking a short snorkelling excursion over some quite picturesque fish, then you may snap away with the Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 at 5MP resolution.
The LED flash also doubles up as a torch - sure, that's nothing new, but on the new Xcover 2 you can set it so that the torch fires when you hold the Volume-Up key in sleep mode. It's a useful feature, but hard to use without accidentally waking the screen at times.
The only worry we have is over the battery size: it's only 1700mAh and while the screen is smaller than others on the market, it still needs a bit of power behind it. Given the increased dimensions, we'd have liked to see a thicker phone and a larger battery instead.
You can't do that underwater though, since the headphone jack is under a cover too - you'll need some submerged Bluetooth headphones if you're that way inclined. Maybe you don't want to go diving and work on a building site though - in which case you'll be fine.
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