Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302

Overview

Affordable Dual-SIM Android Phone

The Galaxy Y Duos Lite is known internationally as the Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302, and is the less capable sibling of the Galaxy S Duos, aimed at the lower end of the smartphone market. It’s certainly more affordable – but is it as appealing?

Design and Build Quality of Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302

Thanks to its very modest hardware, the Samsung Pocket Duos is much smaller and lighter than the juggernaut smartphones at the top of the market. At 13mm thick, this compact handset is thicker than many phones, making it less pocket-friendly than you might expect. The phone offers a 2.8-inch QVGA TFT capacitive touchscreen with 256,000 colors and a resolution of 240x320 (143ppi). Users of power smartphones will find this irritatingly small, but it’s a passable size for most basic tasks such as making calls and sending messages. The phone’s body is available in black and white; and most users will probably opt for the black, as it’s the sleeker and more sophisticated of the two. However, the build quality is not great, with a slightly plasticky look to the material. Overall, it’s a dull and uninspired design, but the physical buttons are solid and responsive.

User Interface and Comfort to Use Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302

The Samsung Pocket Duos runs on a very modest 832MHz ARM11 processor, so it won’t be performing heavy-duty tasks or running animation-heavy apps. Its operating system is Android’s 2.3 Gingerbread version, now dated by several subsequent incarnations. The standard interface is rendered faithfully here, with the six home screens that can be customized with folders and widgets

Telephony and Phonebook

The phone uses the standard Android Contacts functionality, allowing unlimited entries and multiple entries for contacts. You can select an image for each contact, but without access to Facebook or Twitter the user must upload this himself. One of the phone’s key selling points is its incorporation of Samsung’s Smart Dual SIM function, which enables users to insert two SIM cards and use them simultaneously – for example, for personal and business contacts. There’s no social media integration, so you’ll be inputting information manually. Call quality is average. The phone rarely drops calls, but does not maintain strong signal except in locations with exceptional coverage. It copes badly with background noise and voices are often distorted. The volume options are not powerful to overcome these flaws.

Messaging and Emails

Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302 offers support for all basic message types: threaded SMS, MMS, IM, Email, Push Mail and support for RSS. Account setup can be fiddly and time-consuming if you’re not using Gmail, and the lack of social media integration is unsurprising but subtracts from the experience. Due to the phone’s small screen, the on-screen keyboard is compact and challenging to use, so most users will opt for predictive text instead. There is the option of voice to text recording, but in practice the user will have to extensively correct the text produced, making it too time-consuming to be useful.

Gallery, Photo Viewer and Video Player

With only 3GB of internal storage, the Pocket Duos is not a flashy multimedia smartphone designed to store hours of high-definition images and video. Thankfully, its internal micro-SD slot enables the user to insert an SD card up to a 32GB capacity, boosting it to a total of 35GB.

Music Player and FM Radio of Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302

Samsung phones generally offer reasonably capable music players with some decent functionality, and the Pocket Duos offers a passable Music app. There is very limited support for audio types, and the app feels very dated compared to the more recent Android offerings. Sound quality is generally poor, and the absence of equalizer settings doesn’t help. The phone’s loudspeaker output is particularly bad – so tinny that it’s virtually unusable. The phone’s music player incorporates a stereo FM radio equipped with RDS – it’s reasonably capable, and does a good job finding local stations, but struggles to maintain signal quality.

Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302 Still Camera and Image Quality

The phone’s primary camera is a 2-megapixel camera, capable of taking stills at a resolution of 1600x1200. Image quality is generally quite poor, as you’d expect from this kind of hardware: contrast is weak, colors look washed out, and images are marred by a lot of noise. The lack of flash means that the phone performs very badly in low-light settings.

Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302 Video Camera and Video Quality

The phone’s video camera is acceptable for a phone of this kind: it is capable of capturing QVGA video at a frame rate of 15fps, significantly less than the 30fps high-definition captures that you’ll see at the top of the market. The result is uninspiring: colors look flat and dim, and the phone’s sensor performs badly in low light. There are relatively few additional features beyond the basic geo-tagging.

Connectivity Options in Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302

Despite its low-level specifications, the phone offers a range of connectivity options, including GPRS, HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, 3G HSDPA, and micro-USB 2.0. It’s worth noting that the phone’s 3G connectivity is only available on one SIM card, not both.

Organiser and Other Utility Tools

Samsung Pocket Duos comes equipped with a standard suite of organizational tools, including the Clock, Alarm, Notes, Calendar, Stopwatch and Calculator functions.

Web Browser and Applications

The phone is equipped with the standard Android browser for 2.3 Gingerbread, which is basic but decent enough for most web browsing. The phone noticeably struggles with media-heavy webpages. The Pocket Duos comes with a range of Google apps out of the box, including YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Calendar, Search and more.

Google Maps and GPS

As an Android phone, the Pocket Duos comes with Google’s Maps app as standard. It is A-GPS connectivity should mean that it locates the user in a matter of seconds, but when tested the phone significantly under-performs, taking up to thirty seconds to find even the rough area in which the user is located. The phone’s low processing power means that it struggles with the higher resolution and degree of detail on maps when zoomed in, and maps can take several minutes to render. However, once you have the app running, it delivers clear directions with some helpful local information.

Distinctive Features of Samsung Galaxy Pocket Duos S5302

The phone’s Smart Dual SIM capability, enabling use of two SIM cards simultaneously, will appeal to many users.

Value for money and Verdict

Samsung Pocket Duos is aimed at the budget end of the smartphone market, and offers a great deal of functionality for a very low price, making it great value for money. If you’re an undemanding smartphone user – perhaps buying a smartphone for the first time – the Pocket Duos is a strong handset with some great features. However, if the phone’s media capabilities are important to you, consider spending a bit more to get one of HTC’s budget phones instead.