Samsung announced its rumoured Galaxy S4 Zoom device, which looks like the lovechild of a Galaxy S4 Mini and a digital camera.

From the front, it looks very much like a standard Android smartphone from the South Korean giant, while from the rear it resembles a digital camera. In a statement, Samsung said that it is the “realisation of Samsung’s mission to create a single device that can fulfil the role of both an industry leading smartphone and a high-end compact camera”.

Galaxy S4 Zoom includes a 16 megapixel camera sensor with 10x optical zoom, and includes in-built optical image stabliliser that “helps keep the camera perfectly still even when you’re not”.

For the smartphone portion, the device is not dissimilar to the Galaxy S4 Mini. It has a 4.3-inch screen and 1.5GHz dual core processor, although it also notes that the processor spec “will differ by markets”.

3G and LTE versions will be available.

The camera portion also adds size and weight, with it being significantly deeper and more heavy than its siblings.

For an image-capture device, it also comes with a surprisingly meagre memory provision – just 8GB of onboard storage, of which 5GB is user accessible. However, it also includes a microSD slot, providing expansion of up to 64GB.

Samsung last year released Galaxy Camera, an Android-powered device with integrated network connectivity – but without the “smartphone” element being played up.

Availability of the Galaxy S4 Zoom device is slated for “this summer”.

Samsung S4 Comparison