If you’re wanting a smartphone but don’t want to empty your bank account to pay for one, the Samsung Galaxy Fame could be the perfect option. With an attractive design, decent specifications and a low price tag, the Galaxy Fame is one of the most popular smartphones currently available. Even on Pay As You Go contracts this smartphone can be yours for less than £80! The Samsung Galaxy Fame is a great all-rounder and a perfect phone for anyone on a budget.
Display
The 3.5 inch display isn’t as big as the current generation of high end smartphones, but it’s perfectly adequate for every use. You’ll have no problem watching videos, playing games or browsing the web with this size screen, and for comparison it’s the same size as the display on the iPhone 4s. The resolution is 480 x 320 which isn’t amazing, but is good enough for most tasks and for the price point we aren’t disappointed with what is on offer for the money. The display uses TFT technology.
Design
The Galaxy Fame has quite a distinctive design, with highly curved corners making the phone appear like a rectangle that’s half-morphed into an oval. This is quite satisfactory and gives the phone a distinctive appearance, akin to a pebble. The phone is available in two colours: white, which is the most popular choice, or a dark-blue/black.
Camera
The standout feature of the Samsung Galaxy Fame is the 5 megapixel camera. This is a ridiculously good camera for the price point and is better than many cameras on phones over double the price of the Galaxy Fame. The camera also comes with autofocus and an integrated LED flash, making it great for indoor and nighttime photos too. You’re also able to capture video with the camera at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. There’s a secondary front facing camera which is great for video calling on, this camera is only 0.3 megapixels but can capture VGA quality video.
Performance and Hardware
The Galaxy Fame has decent specs for the price point, although those used to more powerful smartphones might find it a little slow. Nevertheless it can perform most common smartphone tasks without problem, and it’s only niche uses such as playing 3D games or loading up multiple graphics intensive websites that cause it to slow down. The phone uses a 1 GHz Cortex A9 single-core processor and this is assisted with 512 MB RAM.
Storage is 4GB, which is quite low – although thankfully you can increase this by a further 32 GB thanks to the MicroSD card slot. 32 GB MicroSD cards can be picked up for less than £15, and if you’re planning on storing a lot of music or photos on your phone you’ll need one. The battery is 1300 mAh which gives the phone around 6 hours of 3G calling time – not great, but perfectly reasonable. You can always charge it using using the standard smartphone USB cable. The Samsung Galaxy Fame connections to both 2G and 3G, and also supports NFC, WiFi and GPS.
Android
The Galaxy Fame runs on the most popular smartphone operating system, Google Android. Android has an impressive range of apps meaning you’ll be able to find an app for any purpose on this phone, and with the exception of a few processor intensive apps you’ll be able to use the exact same apps as on high end Android smartphones such as the Galaxy S4. Samsung have included their own impressive user interface called TouchWiz in the phone that makes everything that bit easier for a new smartphone user.
Overall
This is a great entry level smartphone and perfect for those wanting to experience what smartphones have to offer without breaking the bank. It’s perfect for occasional phone users and those that only use their smartphones for calls, texts, browsing and navigation. It’s very much an entry level option, but a well designed one.
