Samsung Galaxy S Duos: A quick review

Hi there, this is Aryansh and in this post I'm gonna review the new Samsung Galaxy S Duos.

Many of the normal people out there might mistake this phone to be a Galaxy S3. But it ain't that. This phone is for those people who have two SIM cards, or actually, two mobile numbers, but would like to have only one phone for that purpose. Not just that, it also has all the features required in daily use. Read More to know about this Dual Sim Galaxy phone by Samsung.











This phone looks very similar to the Samsung Galaxy S3. I don't know how has Samsung got this fever to make every phone/tablet of theirs S3-like. All their phones are now coming with the same colours as the S3 and they all have this glossy plastic finish which is very cheap! Samsung is putting this glossy plastic to make the phone light, as well as, keep it thin.

The first thing I'd like to tell you about this phone is the display of it. The screen on this phone is quite disappointing to my liking as it is a TFT screen and the viewing angles are not of Samsung's standards. Samsung has jolted in this, is a 4-inch screen with the resolution of 480 x 800 pixels and with a pixel density of 233 ppi. The screen quality on this phone is not good, I believe that has been done by Samsung to save money or to cut down on cost of this phone.
It does support the multitouch feature which is helpful in gaming and all.

The phone supports Dual SIM and both the SIMs in the normal format, i.e mini SIM.

On the front, we have three buttons out of which two are touch sensitive and one is the large boring Samsung Button that we have seen in almost all of the phones of the Galaxy series, except for the Galaxy Nexus. There is nothing special about them.

The built quality of this phone is very bad. It is made out of plastic, by this I mean that the whole phone is made out of plastic and even the bezel of the phone is made out of plastic and it is all glossy and I believe that Samsung has put some polish on that thing and after some time of usage, the phone will look very dull, as the polish will get abraded. This will kind of force you to change your phone, as this thing doesn't look good in public and can't be changed in touch phones. They can be changed, it is possible, but if you do so, it may harm the inner components of your phone. So, I suggest you to buy this phone only if you change phones every 6 months or less.

Talking about the storage. The storage given is very meager, Samsung has decided to put in only 4 GB of storage out of which around 1 GB of storage is available to you and the rest is used by the phone for various thing like apps and stuff like that.
Fortunately, Samsung has given the option to add a microSD card to expand the storage and you can expand the same for up to 32 GB which is quite nice.
Talking about the RAM on this phone. The RAM that we see in this phone is quite solitary, as I have never seen RAM in these digits before. The RAM that we get with this phone is 768 MB and that is quite confusing to me. The phone performs well on multitasking and I don't know how well it'll perform when both the SIM slots are filled. As of now, I have tested it with only one SIM and I don't have any problem in multitasking. The phone uses around 250 MB of RAM for itself with nothing going on in background, even after removing the active widgets.

It is a flagship Android phone from Samsung and it comes pre-loaded with ICS , i.e Android version 4.0.x and it is upgradeable to Jelly Bean, i.e version 4.1.x. And it has the sick TouchWiz UI which we have seen previously in every Samsung Android phone with the exception of the Galaxy nexus.

Coming to the insides of the phone. This phone sports a 1 GHz Cortex-A5 Snapdragon processor and it is a single-core processor, again we see Samsung cutting down on cost here. Even thought the phone has a single-core 1 GHz processor it works smooth and I guess that is because of  ICS on this thing. The kinetic scrolling is quite smooth but laggy at times, and even the pinching and zooming has the same problem. This was with only one SIM over a Wi-Fi  connection. And the Wi-Fi reception of the phone is just okay.

Coming to the camera. The primary(rear-facing) camera on this phone is a 5 Mega-pixels shooter and the colours come out good even in low light, the night shooting mode is also good even without flash in low light it does a good job. The camera has the touch focus functionality but it is quite slow, it takes about 1 sec to focus and that is a big con. It also has LED flash.
The video recording sucks on this phone. For that notion, this phone doesn't deserve to be in the $300+ range. The recording it offers is VGA at 30 fps which is not at all impressive.
There is a secondary camera which shoots in 0.3 Mega-pixels or we can simply say, it's VGA.

Talking about the GPU. The GPU on this piece of crap doesn't stand to my expectations. It has a Adreno 200 GPU which is okay to play 480p videos and nothing else. Leave alone heavy games. It's good for running the Angry Birds series and the Temple Run sort of games. HD video playback is supported and I have to tell you, it is amazing! It's so amazing that you can watch your favorite Television program by the time it loads one frame after the other.

 This phone does support GPS with A-GPS support and we can't reckon GLONASS on this thing.

The connectivity options that we get are: GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth, WLAN(Wi-Fi).
As expected, it doesn't support DLNA and nor it is Bluetooth v4.0 and it doesn't even support the "a" tpe of connection over Wi-Fi.

The last, the battery. The battery on this phone is a Li-ion 1500mAh battery and what Samsung says about this phone's battery life is nothing but calumny. The battery life of this phone with a single SIM is of about a day and a half, and with two SIMs I believe it would go down to a day.

That's it for now...
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