Samsung Galaxy Y Pro Duos Review

Samsung Galaxy Y Pro Duos can not really be called budget smartphone in Kenya although in some parts of the world it is. The price range is around Ksh.20k.  It is very similar to the Galaxy Y Duos except  for the front camera and the Qwerty keyboard. We have talked about many dual-SIM phones but majority of them in the Kenya market are feature phones. So I find this, and Galaxy Y Duos which I will talk about later interesting . Especially when you consider the market segment that are capable of spending over Ksh.15k  to buy a phone.

Dual SIM.

Regardless of the class (the annoying societal grouping of Middle, Lower and Upper)  many Kenyans have the same queer calling/phone use habits,  a fact noticed by former CEO of Safaricom Michael Joseph in the early life of phones in Kenya. I still think, it has contributed in enabling  Safaricom to stay ahead of the other operators. When comes to choosing the mobile phone operators in Kenya, People simply don’t want to leave their first love. So the early adopters of Safaricom will remain with Safaricom but are ready to take advantage of any cheap offer in the market.

I have used the phone for the last one month and the best part for me so far, is the Dual SIM management tool. It allows users to use one Sim card for data services and the other one for calling or texting. Meaning you can have Data service  active on SIM1 , and still can call out and receive calls on SIM2. There is a dedicated button available on keypad to switch between SIMs. Great..you can sample the best worlds of both Orange Kenya and Safaricom. You know when comes to Data, Orange Kenya is starting to get it…. try it out

I like the Dual SIM functionality and the management but there is  limitation in that you can use only one SIM at a time for calls. Basically when talking on SIM1, you can’t receive calls on SIM2. The caller will get the “mteja message” or phone you calling has been ‘switched off ’. Samsung should find away to fix this..

Qwerty KeyBoard

The QWERTY keypad is neatly laid out and with a 2.6’’ display,. The standard Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons are distributed on either side of an Optical trackpad which makes navigation easier. Yes, Let’s Qwerty here..

Display
The GALAXY Y Pro DUOS features a 2.6-inch touch screen display with a resolution of 320×240 pixels. And here comes a drawback but which you can live with, the screen orientation is both on portrait and landscape modes although the screen size is so small. Unfortunately, some software like my favorite Chess for Android can only open on landscape mode on this phone.

OS and Software

The Galaxy Y Pro Duos comes with Android Gingerbread (v2.3.6).. ..no Ice cream Sandwich version of Android on this phone but the word out there is, only 2 percent of Android phones have the Ice Cream Sandwich. The reason for the low uptake of ICS is a story for another day. As always, the  TouchWiz interface gives the users cool experience.

To make working with office documents easy, GALAXY Y Pro DUOS comes with Polaris and Find My Mobile professional tools. Polaris offers easy viewing and editing of a wide range of Office documents, enabling you to work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even PDF file. Samsung’s Find My Mobile Service lets the users to remotely lock the phone at anytime, as well as trace the phone or remotely wipe its contents in case of loss or theft.

 Processor

The device comes with  832 MHz single core processor, and that speed is good enough and allows multi-tasking. It has the memory size of  384MB of RAM . Well that is very low by any standards but the memory can be expanded upto 32GB via microSD card slot.

Camera

At 3.2MP, decent enough but …mmh. There is no flash, so pictures taken in the  dark is crap but is ok during the day .

Samsung GALAXY Y Pro DUOS Product Specifications