Samsung Galaxy Y Duos Lite Review on Mobilekeeda Live

The Galaxy Y Duos Lite is another attempt by Samsung to tap into budget conscious Smartphone market in India. The Galaxy Duos Lite is the toned down version of the Galaxy Y duos and has a lesser price and a smaller screen as compared to it’s older sibling. The competition in the budget smartphone is highly intensified by the likes of some Indian manufacturers like Micromax and Karbonn among others who have some strong products at this price point.  Will the Galaxy Y Duos Lie be able to hold it’s own? Let’s find out!

Build Quality and Design

The Galaxy Y Duos Lite has nothing to boast about here, It keeps things simple and in line with it’s elder brother with just a smaller screen. At the front, you’ll see the speaker grill, a physical home button below the screen along with two capacitive-touch buttons, one for the menu and another used for the back button.  On the right, there’s the power button while on the left there’s a volume rocker. There’s  a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top, which sits along the micro-USB port. At the back, the phone has a 2 megapixel snapper with the speaker grill located to it’s right and the microphone is located at the bottom of the device. 

Remove the back cover of the Galaxy Y Duos Lite and you’ll see the battery, below which, there are two SIM cad slots. Also, the micro-SD card slot is located to the left of the battery compartment, which in our opinion is a bit flawed as you’ll have to remove the battery cover every time, if you wish to take out your micro-SD card.

At a thickness of 12mm, it isn’t the thinnest in it’s segment and is built entirely out of plastic with a thin chrome painted plastic bezel surrounding the front of the device. There’s no dedicated camera key on this device and we found the cover over the micro-USB port a bit clumsy, which might just come off over time.

Hardware

The Galaxy Y Duos Lite comes with a mere 832 MHz processor coupled with 256MB RAM.  This disappointed us a lot because  there are some phones in this segment which offer a faster, 1GHz processor and higher RAM. But to our surprise, even with such low power under the hood, the phone held up quite well and the usage was smooth for most of the part.

The device comes with an internal storage of 4GB out of which 1GB is reserved for Apps while 2GB is available for multimedia. There’s also a micro-SD card slot for storage expansion.

Camera

The Galaxy Y Duos Lite comes with a 2 megapixel camera which in our opinion is a bit substandard and the image quality is average at best.  Even with such a low quality camera, you have 3 shooting modes to choose from- Single shot, Smile shot and Panorama.

Open the camera and you’ll notice quite a simple user interface. In the settings, you have the option of Auto timer, adjusting the white balance, Image quality and you can choose to click pictures in 2MP, 1.3MP, 0.3Mp or 0.1MP. The camera offers quite a few scene modes as well, like Landscape, Night, Beach, Snow, Sunset, Fireworks, etc. You can also add various effects to your images while clicking like- Sepia, negative, Black and White.

As far as video is concerned, at best, you can record QVGA videos at 15fps. Not good enough by any means.

Display

The Galaxy Y Duos Lite has a 2.8-inch display that has a resolution of 320 x 240 (QVGA) pixels. Thus, the screen has a low, 120 pixel per inch density. The screen on the Galaxy Y Duos Lite is a 262k color panel and is easily viewable in daylight as well. That being said, another down side of the screen is that it just has a 2-point multi-touch!

Operating System/Software

This is one of the biggest disappointments with this phone as it runs on the older, Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread out of the box. But, considering the slow processor and low RAM, Gingerbread was maybe option for this smartphone.

The OS of the Galaxy Y Duos Lite is fairly smooth and you can add up to 7 home screens on this device. Samsung has added some new features to Gingerbread and now you get an ‘ICS-styled’ lock screen which shows you notifications as well. You can swipe in any direction to unlock the phone and get to your home screen. Pull down the notification bar and you’ll notice a few toggles like- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sound and Auto-rotation below which can see which SIM card is running in which slot and your notifications are below that.

Typing on the qwerty keypad in portrait mode is painful, as it feels cramped due to the smaller screen. But in landscape mode, we managed to use the keyboard with ease. So, we recommend using the 3 x 4 keypad in the portrait mode!

The device comes pre-installed with some of the Samsung’s own applications like Social Hub, Samsung Apps and ChatON messenger. Other than that, there’s nothing more on the OS front.

Multimedia, Gaming and Internet

Starting with the Audio, the phone fares pretty well as far as playing music is concerned. Just plug in the the earphones which come along and you’ll be quite pleased with the audio levels. Even at the highest volume, it sounds good, without much distortion.  The phone also features 5.1 Channel sound effect which can only be enabled, when you have plugged in the earphones. But, hearing music at full volume with the 5.1 channel sound effect turned on wasn’t the best of experiences we’ve had! It’s advisable to keep the volume a bit low, when the 5.1 channel effect is turned on.

The phone also comes with an FM radio with RDS which can turned on by plugging in the earphones. You can then turn ON the loudspeaker if you feel like. Just plug in and the phone will scan all the available FM channels.

The video playing capabilities of the device is again nothing to boast about as the low resolution screen limits the video experience of this smartphone. The Galaxy Y Duos Lite can play MP4 and 3GP videos through the native video player that comes installed in the smartphone.

Gaming on this device is quite bad to say the least. Due to the low-end processor and screen, a majority of the popular games like Temple Run, Angry Birds Star Wars, etc. aren’t compatible with this phone. Some of the games which did manage to run on this device like Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds Space, weren’t smooth, or we would say were very, very laggy.

The phone can connect to the internet, using 2G, 3G or Wi-Fi, with a maximum download speed of 3.6 Mbps on 3G. The web browsing capability on the Galaxy Y Duos Lite is fairly smooth, pages load up quickly, pinch to zoom works smoothly as well but then again, it isn’t the best what we have in this segment and also, the low-res screen makes it difficult to read online content.  Being an Android device, the smartphone also lets you share your phone’s 3G connection using Tethering.

Battery

The phone comes with a 1,200 mAh battery but the battery life on the Galaxy Y Duos Lite is not as much as we would have liked and has failed to impress us.

Connections ON

Talktime 2G (data ON): 6 hours

Talktime 3G (data ON): 5 hours

Internet: 5.5 hours

Music: 6.5 hours

Connections OFF

Talktime 2G (data OFF): 6.5 hours

Talktime 3G (data OFF): 6 hours

Internet: NA

Music: 8 hours

Wi-Fi Only

Talktime 2G (data off): 6 hours

talktime 3G (data off): 5.5

Internet: 5 hours

Music: 7 hours

Conclusion

The Galaxy Y Duos Lite has failed to impress us on almost all the levels. Samsung is still stuck with such petit phones whereas it’s Indian counterparts have much, much better options for users at this price point. Other than it’s Dual-SIM capabilities, we don’t think this phone can boast about anything.  The slow processor, low-resolution screen and less RAM, all these factors contribute to the the Non-impressive appeal of this smartphone whereas the only saving grace can be it’s audio capabilities which were pretty decent.  Even with the low-end specs, the battery life wasn’t as great as expected.

As it’s competitors, the Galaxy Y Duos Lite stands up against Micromax Ninja 4, LAVA Iris N400 and even the newly launched Micromax A68 Smarty, all of which offer a hugely better, 4-inch display, a faster 1GHz processor and even dual-SIM capabilities. To take the competition a notch higher, the Smarty and Iris run on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box and offer a 5MP shooters. If you can do without Android OS, you may also check out Nokia Asha 311 which offers a 1GHz processor and a larger 3-inch LCD display. 

Buy this device only if you’re a Samsung fan, or better, we advice you wait a little, save more money and buy a better handset if it really has to be a Samsung device!

Samsung Galaxy Y Duos Lite Specifications

	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 – SIM 1 & SIM 2
	3G Network	HSDPA 900 / 2100 – SIM 1 only
	SIM	Dual SIM (Mini-SIM, dual stand-by)
	Announced	2012, August
	Status	Available. Released 2012, September

	Dimensions	103.9 x 57.9 x 13 mm (4.09 x 2.28 x 0.51 in)
	Weight	103 g (3.63 oz)

	Type	TFT capacitive touchscreen, 256K colors
	Size	240 x 320 pixels, 2.8 inches (~143 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes
		– TouchWiz UX UI

	Alert types	Vibration, MP3 ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes
		– DNSe sound enhancement

	Card slot	microSD, up to 32 GB
	Internal	3 GB

	GPRS	Yes
	EDGE	Yes
	Speed	HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot
	Bluetooth	Yes, v3.0 with A2DP
	USB	Yes, microUSB v2.0

	Primary	2 MP, 1600×1200 pixels
	Features	Geo-tagging
	Video	Yes, QVGA@15fps
	Secondary	No

	OS	Android OS, v2.3 (Gingerbread)
	CPU	832 MHz ARM 11
	Sensors	Accelerometer, compass
	Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, RSS
	Browser	HTML
	Radio	Stereo FM radio with RDS
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support
	Java	Yes, via Java MIDP emulator
	Colors	Black, White
		– SNS integration – MP4/H.264/H.263 player – MP3/WAV/eAAC+ player – Organizer – Image/video editor – Document viewer – Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk – Voice memo/dial – Predictive text input