Samsung Galaxy Y S5360 Review

  

Mobile phones sadly have a torrid time in my hands. My last phone was a Samsung Galaxy Y S5360 which I owned for approximately 3 months until last weekend.

Despite its solid appearance it was really no match for the taxi car door that I slammed into it (the phone fell out of my pocket just as I was closing the door)

If Samsung ever need design ideas for a banana shaped phone they should get in touch with me. When I did manage to get the pieces of the phone together, I was hopeful that the shattered screen would at least offer a convincing image of Jesus that I could run to the Daily Mail with, but alas it wasn't to be. Still, I managed to get some feel for the phone before it joined its three 2012 predecessors in the cell phone grave yard. 

Its immediate predecessor was a Samsung Tocco Lite which I really liked for the scant 7 weeks I owned it (before it went out in a flash of blue lighted glory after I got it wet in my shorts pocket during a Lake District downpour). I foolishly went a little upscale to spend around £75 on the Galaxy Y as I figured I'd like it even better. Actually I didn't, although in the end I concluded it wasn't a bad phone.

It's for young people

I didn’t realise when I bought it that the “Y” stood for “Young”. I think the idea is that the Y S5360 is a cheap phone for stylish young people, which offers basic android functionality with apps and the like. To be honest, the phone looks the part (well mine used to anyway) and the screen is a three inch smaller version to the bigger and more expensive Galaxy phones.

While it has the app styling and touch screen functionality, I actually found the images rather fuzzy looking and certainly not as clear as my previous Tocco Lite. Likewise turning on the beast seem to take rather longer for it to whirr into action.

You can set up a password and I made the mistake of including the digit zero. The “touch” on the touch screen is a little clumsy and I found I kept on bringing up the emergency number functionality instead. While I do inevitably have old man's hands, they are comparatively small with long thin “pianist fingers” (as my grandmother would say), so goodness only knows how a bricklayer type might cope.

We live in a cave (a 360 year old cottage with 2 foot thick stone walls). Vodaphone is our only practical mobile phone option and this phone was equally as effective as all the other phones I have owned for connectivity (strictly for the front of our house only).

Internet playing

I found it quite easy to get onto the internet using my little Samsung Galaxy Y, and in fact upset my beloved more than once as her “big beast” contract Samsung Galaxy phone struggled to access the internet whereas my PAYG slipped into Google search with ease. Like bigger boys the screen turns sidewise if you want to use a bigger keyboard (my fingers might be slim, but my eyes are shot).
Unfortunately internet searching and PAYG aren’t happy bed mates and I was finding the phone costing me about twice as much on PAYG to my previous phones even though I didn't use it that much for anything.

Photo style

I'm told the camera on the Galaxy Y S5360 is pretty good (it is a 2 meg image which seems quite adequate to me rather than pretty good) but the tight functionality within the guts of the phone meant I would have to add a micro SD card to store my images. It was a little purchase I was meaning to get around to. It was one less thing to smash.

Battery

Unfortunately these phones haven't quite matched the battery development needed for power hungry apps and internet searching, and if I used the phone for anything, I was finding that I needed to top up the battery. Despite my phones having such a short shelf life I actually am a very light phone user and if I hadn't used my phone for a week, then the battery life usually remained OK if not completely topped up.

However, unlike the old “emergency” phone we use at work that sits in the fire marshals bag for weeks on end with an occasional top up, this phone always needed a top up at the end of a week even with no use whatsoever.

Summing up

I’m sure the Galaxy Y S5360 would annoy anyone with a passion for the best and most developed type of Mobile phone but I did warm to it by the end, despite my initial disappointment that it was “different” to my Tocco Lite rather than “better”. I'm sure gamers and frequent users would find the functionality and speed a bit sluggish, but for the 2 minutes a day on average I used it, I was quite happy with it, and it looked “modern” enough not to elicit too loud a groan from my 16 year old niece when she borrowed it to ring her boyfriend.

That said, I probably won't buy an exact replacement as I found the cheaper Tocco Lite just as user friendly for my purposes, and I'm getting a little tired of splashing out the likes of £70 4 times a year for something I don't use too often.

Specification (stolen from the Samsung website)

Platform 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900MHz GSM&EDGE Band
900 / 2100MHz 3G Band
GPRS Network&Data: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 (Slave)
EDGE Network&Data: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 (Master)
3G Network&Data: HSDPA7.2
Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)
Android Browser
0.655mW/g SAR value
Physical Specification 104 x 58 x 11.5mm Dimension
97.5g Weight
Battery 1200mAh Battery Capacity
Up to 1020min (2g), up to 370min (3g) Talk Time Battery
Design Full Touch BAR Form Factor
Display 262K ColourTFT Technology
320 x 240 External Resolution
3.0" External Display Size

Advantages:
Easy to use and looks the part 

Disadvantages:
Battery life not great 

Source : http://www.ciao.co.uk/Samsung_Galaxy_Y_S5360__Review_6078338