Review: Samsung Galaxy Y

Overview, design and feel

O2 sent us a test version to review and the firmware is not final. We'll update this review - with a score and more detailed points - when we get the final version in very shortly, as per our reviews guarantee.

Budget Android smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Y are an attractive proposition on paper. Who wouldn't want to spend less than £100 for a smashing PAYG Android mobile phone?

The competition is rife at this end of the market. HTC is in there with its Wildfire S and Samsung has a couple of fingers in the pie already with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Europa and Samsung Galaxy Mini. The one to beat is still Orange's San Francisco though. So, how does the Galaxy Y stack up?

O2, whose version has a slightly tweaked chassis design, gave us an ex-test unit for a detailed look. Selling at £89.99 on O2 PAYG, we aren't sure the Samsung Galaxy Y is a bargain.

The first thing you notice is that it has a tiny screen. Just three inches across diagonal corners. And it has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. That's just too low for a serious smartphone.

Text looks a bit fuzzy, there's not enough real estate for serious web browsing or video viewing. It feels under specified.

Moreover, the screen might be capacitive but it isn't great under the fingers. We felt it was sluggish at times and it often got confused between a sweep and a press so that apps opened when we were simply sliding a finger around.

That's not helped by the fact that the 830MHz processor seemed to be working to rule. It was mighty slow to respond to our commands at times leaving us waiting while it did our bidding.

Remember, we had an ex-test unit to review, and firmware changes might be in order for the final retail version, but we weren't entirely happy.

Build quality isn't bad for a handset of this price, though, with a solid plastic chassis topped off with a metal-look backplate. We reckon it'll take a few knocks and bangs.

The chassis is small and light so this is an easy phone to tote. For the record, we are looking at 104mm x 58mm x 11.5mm and 97.5g. And of course that small screen means most hands can reach right across it for one-handed use.

There are just two touch buttons on the front below the screen, for Android Menu and Back functions. Home is catered for by a physical button that sits between these, and in O2's case this is rectangular while on other versions of the handset it is square. If you want Search you'll need to use a Widget.

There's no side button for the built-in camera, but aside from that ports and connectors are not a problem. The volume rocker on the left side is mirrored by a power button on the right, and the USB connector is on the top edge under a protective hinged cover. The headset connector is here too.

Features wise, there is 178MB of free internal storage, and you can add microSD cards to that via a slot under the backplate.

The camera is a woeful 2 megapixel version, but Samsung adds its Social Hub for social media fans, and there's Wi-Fi, GPS, HSDPA and Android 2.3.5.

Overall there's nothing here that makes us say 'wow' and at first glance the screen and camera could well be trouble spots.

Interface

The skin Samsung has used on its Galaxy Y will hold no surprises for anyone who has seen a Samsung Android handset before.

You start off with just two home screens, but can easily bump this number up by using the Edit option after pressing the menu button on any home screen.

You can create up to seven home screens this way.

The main home screen by default shows the time and date, Google search box, four shortcuts and a panel which sits on every home screen offering shortcut access to the dialler, contacts, email and apps.

Widgets are in reasonably good supply, though, because of the low 320 x 240 pixel screen resolution, screens soon fill up. Look what adding just a dual time clock and some quick settings for connection options does for a home screen, for example:

The notifications bar has plenty on offer. Pull it down and there are toggle settings for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, speaker and screen rotation as well as messaging notifications and some application dependent shortcuts. Again, though, the low screen resolution means you may need to scroll vertically to see everything.

Apps are organised in horizontally scrolling screens, and that bar of shortcuts remains. Again it offer quick access to dialler, contacts and messaging, but where the apps shortcut was before there's now one that takes you out to the main home screen.

Samsung has even added something a little neat to the lock screen. If there's a message waiting for your attention, you are told on the lock screen, and a quick drag of the notification towards the left opens up the relevant messaging app for you to knock out a quick response.

Contacts and calling

We'd love, at this point, to write about how the Samsung Galaxy Y handles contacts that it pulls in from social media accounts, but we can't.

Our review sample, which was an O2 ex-test unit, wouldn't log in to our Twitter or Facebook accounts.

However, you should have the ability to do both, as well as pick up Exchange Active Sync, Google and Samsung accounts.

If you do get your social media accounts syncing, then the Social Hub app should pick them up, alongside SMS messages. In our case, though, it was just SMS we collected.

Contacts can be added in other ways too, such as being imported from a SIM card or entered manually.

When entering contacts manually you can add a fair amount of information for each person including plenty of phone numbers and email addresses, but there's no special field for a Twitter handle.

Contacts can be pulled into groups with default ringtones. There are already family, friends and work groups configured and it is easy to add more.

The dialler has a very familiar look to it, and it incorporates smart dialling. Just start tapping out a name on the dial pad and matches are shown in a small window above it. If there is more than one match, tap the down arrow showing the number to see the lot, or keep typing till there's just one left, then tap it to call.

Note too that once you've selected a number you can tap the envelope icon to pop straight into messaging.

We found making calls easy and the dial pad gives you the facility to add more than one person to a call, putting the first one automatically on hold as you add the second, then letting you merge the two together.

Speaker volume is not particularly loud though, and we found there was a bit of feedback during calls too making them echo a little at times. This may be due to the fact that our Samsung Galaxy Y was a test unit - we'll report back when we see final firmware.

Messaging

Messaging is all about tapping out information using the Samsung Galaxy Y's keyboard.

Well, we defy anyone over the age of about five to be able to use the keyboard in tall mode. The keys are really, really small.

We lost count of the number of times we hit the wrong key, and the predictive text, while good, should not be something you have to fall back on because the keyboard is too small.

Switch out to widescreen mode and things get a bit better, but the keyboard was still too small for us to tap quickly with two fingers successfully, and the window in which to see what you've typed so far becomes very small.

You could choose a 3.4 keypad in tall screen mode, though, or handwriting recognition if you really can't cope with the keypad.

There are very few long press options on the QWERTY keyboard, so if you want punctuation or other characters you have to hit the '123' key, and no, it doesn't automatically revert back to the QWERTY option when you've made a tap, which we found very irritating.

On the other hand, messages are shown in neat little threaded views which let you scroll up and down to review a conversation. It's hardly rocket science, but it's neat nonetheless.

When it comes to email you can add your Gmail account as previously noted, as well as other email accounts you may have. The procedure here is straightforward, though you may need to get some settings from your ISP to help you along.

Once your email is set up you can configure regular pickup so you're never out of touch.

If you want messaging widgets on a home screen, well, there's not a great deal going on natively. An email widget occupies a complete screen, but that's all you get.

Internet

With Wi-Fi and HSDPA to 7.2Mbps downloads you might expect reasonably good things from the Samsung Galaxy Y in terms of web delivery.

We downloaded the TechRadar home page over the network and it took more than a minute-and-a-half because our handset kept slipping back to GPRS for reasons we couldn't fathom.

Over Wi-Fi downloads were a lot faster, but it still took 30 seconds to resolve the full TechRadar home page. And when the task was done, the image was so small we could barely read it at all thanks to the 3-inch 320 x 240 resolution screen.

Double tap and things get a whole lot more readable.

There is bad news in the text reflowing department, though. When you want to zoom in far enough to be able to read a serious amount of text, you'll have to pan around, as text reflow appears to be non-existent.

An option on many web pages will be to nip into wide screen format. But how well that works really depends on how the original web pages are formatted.

If you want a bit of good news, then the here's some. Tapping out search terms on the small keyboard for Google is a pain, but the voice search worked really well for us. Tap the search bar, then the microphone and speak a search term.

However, there's a bit more bad news to come. The Samsung Galaxy Y doesn't support Flash. So that means no embedded video. We're not fans of any handset that simply refuses to play video that's embedded into a website.

Another tip of the scales with a further positive comment comes in that while we did have some general problems with screen responsiveness, its pinch to zoom and panning support was really pretty good. If you don't mind squeezing your browsing into a three inch screen, this will be a definite plus point for web fans.

Overall, though, the small screen and lack of Flash combine to mean this is not a web browsing fan's smartphone.

Camera

The camera on the Samsung Galaxy Y is probably the handset's weakest features. Stuck at an unforgivably low 2 megapixels for stills and 640 x 480 for video, and lacking a flash, it barely warrants talking about, to be honest.

There are very few shooting modes, though a range of scene modes including landscape, night, party/indoor, sunset, dawn, fall colour, candlelight and backlight suggest the camera is far more capable than it really is.

The best of our test shots were taken indoors in reasonably good lighting conditions. Step away from that and the cracks show.

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WHITE SKY: We admit this was an early morning shot with low light levels, but the sky was not white. The pixelation is extremely noticeable.

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PIXELATED: A similarly pixelated shot, taken on the same morning the look of the water gives away that this camera has a fairly slow shutter speed.

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NEGATIVE: The same shot, this time trying the negative effect, looks a little funky.

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BLACK AND WHITE: In black and white mode the shot looks rather fuzzy, though we're sure we were not moving when we took it.

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SEPIA: This is probably the best of the effects styles because the old fashioned look of the shot means it is easier for the eye to forgive blemishes and aberrations.

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INDOORS: Indoor shots with good lighting were probably the best-quality photos we took with this camera, but still you can see the pixelation without looking too hard.

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PANORAMIC: The camera automatically stitches together eight photos into a panorama 192 pixels high and 1440 pixels wide.

During shooting in panoramic mode it tells you if you need to raise or lower the lens. You need to move very slowly for the panorama to work properly due to slow shutter speed. Notice the blurring towards the start of our shot. And even then, just as with normal shots, the camera copes badly, with light variation.

Video

The Samsung Galaxy Y captures video to a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, apparently, but our review sample refused to do so.

Remembering that this was a test sample from O2, we're chasing up the reasons why, and will update this review when we are able to shoot video.

Media

The music player on the Samsung Galaxy Y doesn't do anything especially inspiring.It is fairly basic and it didn't even manage to pick up album art from our microSD card.

Still it does the basic of playback well enough.The handset speaker is a bit shrill, but put earphones in and you can use an equaliser and a 5.1 channel setting. The equaliser has some effect on sound quality, changing the tone somewhat. But all the 5.1 setting seemed to do for us was add a popping sound over the top of the music, which is hardly what you want.

We reiterate that our review sample was a test sample and this may well be dealt with in the final version of the firmware.

Media playback controls are accessible from the notifications area, so you don't have to drop into the player to pause or skip tracks.

Video playback is nothing much to write home about. Samsung says the Galaxy Y supports 3GPP, H.263, H.264 and MPEG4, and it did indeed play videos for us in MP4 format, but it wouldn't play our AVI samples.

The 3-inch 320 x 240 pixel screen isn't ideal for video watching. It is too small, and colours are too dark for real enjoyment.

If you can't watch video at least you can listen to radio. It filled 24 presets on an auto scan which is nice, but you actually have to enter the names of stations yourself which is a pain.

There's a radio widget for the notifications area and the forward and back icons in this case enable you to skip to the next and previous stored stations.

Battery life and connectivity

With a 1200mAh battery on board you might think the Samsung Galaxy Y has little staying power.

Left on overnight on several occasions with Wi-Fi running, it barely lost any power at all. Admittedly it wasn't actually polling any data like email or social media updates, but just the process of being on didn't seem to hurt it.

During the day, however, when it was doing things like surfing the web, playing music and making voice calls, the story was different. We would get down to about half life by lunchtime, and feel the need to administer a power boost.

Now, our review sample, as we've said before, was a test sample, and things may be different off the shelf, but on our experience you'd need to find mains power during the latter part of the afternoon to ensure a full evening's worth of entertainment and use.

Samsung says you'll get up to 1020 minutes of talk on 2G and 370 minutes on 3G, up to 850 hours of standby on 2G and 540 hours on 3G.

Connectivity wise, there isn't much to grumble about. This is a low cost handset so expecting fancy stuff like DLNA and HDMI is asking too much.

But Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) and A-GPS are here of course, as is Bluetooth 3.0. Samsung Kies is supported for PC connections and the HSDPA supports downloads to 7.2Mbps. And you can use the Samsung Galaxy Y as a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot.

Maps and apps

The Samsung Galaxy Y doesn't have the vast range of extras in terms of apps that you'd find on a top end handset, but there are a couple of goodies here to make use of.

The copy of QuickOffice might seem like an odd addition to a handset with such a small and fiddly keyboard, but in fact you don't get to use the keyboard as QuickOffice is only for viewing documents in a range of formats, not for editing them.

If you do want to use the keyboard, you can go to town with Memo, an app we've seen before from Samsung that lets you create little notes to yourself.

There's also Samsung's own App Store to complement the Android Market, but that's your lot.

If you want to use the Samsung Galaxy Y for getting from A to B then Google Maps makes its usual appearance, and you can add satellite and traffic layers among others. You could just about use the small screen as an aid when walking around town, we reckon.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Y is yet another low cost smartphone. It doesn't have any features that stand out particularly, and indeed it has some which make it rather less attractive than other low cost options.

We liked

There's no doubting that the Samsung Galaxy Y is compact, but that's its major plus point, fitting nicely in the hand.

However, we did enjoy the range of Samsung apps on show, and the lower cost is bound to appeal to some... although the quality of the screen might equally put some off. Google is well represented here, and if you can see past the display quality you've got a decent sat nav and music player for less than £100.

We disliked

The small screen we can forgive. After all, costs have to be kept down. But the low resolution is not something we forgive so lightly. Over a year ago Orange produced its 480 x 800 3.5-inch screened San Francisco, and against it the Samsung Galaxy Y's screen looks pedestrian.

The camera is poor too. We weren't able to test video recording, but its low resolution is a worry, and at 2 megapixels for stills we aren't impressed.

Final verdict

Even though our review handset was an ex-test unit, and there may well be some upgrades to the final firmware, we have trouble recommending the Samsung Galaxy Y. We'd suggest holding your horses till the new Orange San Francisco II comes along before making a final decision.