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The Samsung Galaxy Young, a 3.3-inch budget blower, is the latest guilelessly named addition to Samsung’s sprawling Galaxy range and it’s out in the UK this weekend.
It’s a significant step up from last year’s Galaxy Y, which also stood for Young — maybe Samsung felt that was too subtle for Britain’s youth and has been forced to spell it out like an exasperated schoolmaster.
Whereas the Y had a miserable 320×240-pixel screen that was virtually unusable, the Young offers 480×320 pixels, bumping up the density to 176 pixels per inch. That’s barely half the ‘retina’ density you get on even the old iPhone 4, but should make navigating the Young’s Android 4.1 Jelly Bean software much more of a pleasure than a chore.
Elsewhere the Young is predictably basic — a 1GHz processor (Samsung doesn’t say how many cores it has, so I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s single-core) and 768MB of RAM. That kind of spec won’t let you play cutting-edge mobile games, but should be perfectly fine for Facebook and WhatsApp.
Games won’t be much of an option anyway. There’s only 4GB of on-board storage, and as we’ve seen with the S4 recently, much of that is bound to be taken up with Samsung’s TouchWiz software, which lets you shake to refresh your page, or turn the phone over to mute a call. You can expand the meagre storage with up to 64GB in a microSD card, but you can’t install apps to that, just store music and photos.
Each photo you snap won’t take up much space though — the camera is only a 3-megapixel job. There’s no front-facing camera either, so video calls are a no-no. If you want to make your own moving pictures, you’re restricted to a very modest 640×480 pixels.
It’s not the most elegant of mobiles either, at 12.5mm thick. That’s probably to fit the 1,300mAh battery behind the relatively small screen — you can probably expect decent battery life from this mini-mobile.
Samsung hasn’t said how much the Young will be on sale for, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t less than £100. We’ll give it the full review treatment as soon as we can get our hands on it.
Will you be plumping for the Young? Or do you prefer something more mature? Join the youngsters in the comments, or on our ageing Facebook page.
