Samsung Galaxy S2 vs Samsung Rugby Smart: AT&T Smartphone Shootout

Samsung will release the AT&T Rugby Smart March 4 for $100 on contract, and the Galaxy S2 is now also $100.

Samsung has designated the Rugby Smart as AT&T's new tough-guy phone, and by that we mean it's made to be waterproof, dustproof and pretty much the most rugged device they make. They're targeting construction workers, people who work outside, that kind of person. In fact, the Rugby Smart is made to military standards regarding toughness, so don't be afraid to spill coffee on it or even drop it here and there. Because of this added ruggedness, it's quite thick at around 12 mm despite the fact it doesn't have a large battery or LTE support.

It also features a 3.7-inch Super AMOLED display, four gigabytes of internal storage, dual cameras and up to eight hours of talk time, according to Samsung. It also has a microSD card slot for expanding the storage up to 32 gigabytes, but that's all that's known about it so far. Samsung will likely debut it more completely at the Mobile World Congress starting Sunday in Barcelona, Spain. We like Samsung's Super AMOLED technology, though sometimes the colors are a bit too saturated, but for $100, the Rugby Smart doesn't jump out at us. If you need something tough, then you've got your phone, but compared to the Galaxy S2, at the same price, it's not even close.

The Galaxy S2 surpassed the 20 million sales mark in less than a year, so there's no denying its popularity. That's partly due the fact it features a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display with 16 gigabytes of storage, excellent eight-megapixel rear-facing camera, near field communications chip for instant sharing of data and voice talk speech to text technology. Furthermore, it shoots 1080p HD video, has a super-thin profile, and includes a microSD card reader and DLNA support for streaming content to an HDTV or Blu-ray player. It's a superphone without even having a quad-core processor or 16 megapixel camera or other features sure to be coming with new phones later in 2012. It easily wins the recommendation here.

Let us know in the comments if you're an AT&T customer and if you'll be following the Mobile World Congress next weekend for a preview of your next phone.

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