Samsung Galaxy Young review

Ratings in depth

When it comes to the modern smartphone, there are two manufacturers that manage to stand head and shoulders above the rest. Both Apple and Samsung have managed to take the mobile market by storm with their own takes on what should be in your pocket.

Unsurprisingly Samsung is the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world with its Android smartphones covering the high end with the Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy Note 3, but also the low end with the Galaxy Fame and the Galaxy Young handsets.

With a pay as you go (PAYG) price as little as £69.99 (around $115, AU$130) and contract prices of only £7.25 per month in the UK, the Galaxy Young is pitched at the lowest end competing with the likes of the Nokia Asha 503, as well as the Lumia 520 and Huawei Ascend Y300.

This low price tag means that it's not only being pitched at a younger audience (there was a clue in the name), it also appears to make an ideal second phone for emergencies or even as a festival phone.

So what do you get for your money?

Given that Samsung has tied up a large section of the budget market, it stands to reason that there may not be a lot of difference between the Galaxy Young and the Galaxy Fame. That is very much the case.

One of the main areas to look at is the screen. Obviously the likes of the a HD screen have been overlooked, instead a 3.3-inch 320 x 480 screen giving around 176ppi is what you get on the Young.

This means that the Galaxy Young is slightly smaller than the Galaxy Fame but with a slightly higher ppi.

Elsewhere there are a lot more similarities. At measurements of 109.4 x 58.6 x 12.5mm and weighing 112g, the Galaxy Young sits around the same size as the Fame.

I found that the Young sits extremely comfortably in one hand, and I was able to hit the entire screen and the traditional Samsung buttons without issue.

There is little surprise in what Samsung has chosen to build its cheapest handset out of - the plastic construction that has been criticised on Samsung's flagships, but it's very fitting for such a cheap handset.

Storage wise the Galaxy Fame comes along with a rather measly 4GB of which less than 1.5GB is actually available for you to use.

Although you're unlikely to install any massive apps on the Galaxy Young, I still feel that this is pretty poor. Thankfully the addition of microSD support of up to 64GB does ease the pain.

Dropbox also comes preinstalled meaning you can store all your photos and files to the cloud further lessening the stress on the internal memory.

A 1GHz single-core CPU has been provided under the hood, tasked with running Android with the help of 768MB of RAM.

That's slightly more than the 512MB of RAM in the Galaxy Fame, but the larger RAM comes with the trade-off for a smaller 3.2MP camera rather than the 5MP of the Fame. A front facing camera is also missing here.

In all the Galaxy Young is an interesting proposition, with the low price tag giving an incentive to take another look at this lower powered handset, yet the specs won't blow you away.