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What do you get if you sew together the sheer size of the Galaxy S4, the chassis of the S3, the innards of the S2 and two SIM-card slots? The Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos, a Frankenstein phone on sale now in the UK for just over £300.
Samsung loves to mix and match specs and sizes, creating a panoply of phones to cater for every thinkable niche and need. The Grand Duos is the dual-SIM version of the Galaxy Grand, itself a mad mashup for people who want a huge screen on a budget.
Dual-SIM means it has two separate slots for SIM cards, which is handy if you often travel to another country or want to keep your work and personal phone calls tidily discrete. Only one of the slots is 3G-enabled, ITProPortal points out, so you won’t be able to surf the Web on your foreign SIM.
Elsewise the Grand Duos is a respectable mid-range blower, with a dual-core 1.2GHz chip, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front-facer for video chats. Its 8GB of storage is pretty meagre, especially as you won’t be able to use all of it, and while you can expand it with a microSD card, you won’t be able to install apps on that.
Its 5-inch screen looks impressive in the press shot above, but it’s potentially the weakest part of the phone. It looks like an S4 with the S3’s styling, but the screen has only 800×480 pixels, or 187 pixels per inch, which is worse than the original Galaxy S. The even bigger 5.8-inch Galaxy Mega is afflicted with a similar problem.
A cheaper and even bigger alternative is the £180 Asus Fonepad. It’s slow and makes you look a right berk when you make a call, but you’re getting far more pixels for your pounds.
Are you tempted by the Grand Duos? Or just baffled by all these Galaxies? Make your mark in our dual comments or Facebook page.
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