Samsung Galaxy Pocket S5300 Review and Pricing

The Samsung Galaxy line is arguably the most popular line of Android phones and tablets in the tech market.

One of the factors behind the massive popularity of the Samsung Handsets is the fact it has an extremely flexible pricing plan compared to other Smartphone manufacturers such as Apple.

The Galaxy Pocket is yet another addition to the Samsung Galaxy Entry Level Smartphones. Here is an in depth review of the Samsung Galaxy Pocket S5300 features.

The Galaxy Pocket comes with a 2.8 inches TFT display, that has a maximum resolution of 240 x 320 pixels i.e. 143 ppi per density.

The screen size is slightly smaller compared to the Samsung Galaxy Mini, which spots a 3.14 TFT display.

Related: Samsung Galaxy Mini 2 Review

However, it is worthwhile noting that despite the smaller display, the phone has one of the highest resolution Samsung Android entry-level handset lineup. The high resolution allows the phone to maintain decent viewing angles even under direct sunlight.The display supports multi touch gestures but lack a gorilla corning glass protection on its surface.

Unlike the Samsung Galaxy Mini, which has a TouchWiz user interface, the Samsung Galaxy Pocket comes with a TouchWiz UX.

The TouchWiz UX is an update to the custom Samsung UI that adds more functionality such as allowing more widgets on the home screen.

The Samsung galaxy pocket comes in a 103.7 x 57.5 x 12 mm chassis and weighs about 97g.

The phone has a typical S-que design that is typical of many Samsung phones and it perfectly fits in your hand making one-hand operations a breeze.However, with an all-plastic design the phone is a magnet for fingerprints and smudges.

The phone comes with an ARM 11 CPU clocked at 832 MHz.  Hackers have however claimed that once the phone is rooted, the CPU can be over clocked to 900Mhz.

The phone comes with an accelerometer and a digital compass to aid in navigation. The Galaxy Pocket however lacks a proximity sensor.

On the storage, the Samsung galaxy pocket beats the rest of the pack by shipping with 3 GB internal storage and a memory slot that can handle a 32GB memory card. This is so far the star feature of the phone. This makes the phone perfect multimedia lover companion.

On the Operating System, the phones come with Gingerbread V 2.3 which is sadly not upgradable to V 4.0 aka Google Ice Cream Sandwich.

On connectivity, the phone comes with 3G capabilities. This is coupled with a WI-Fi 802.11 b/g/n chip  to help you minimize on your data charges. The phone also supports portable WI-Fi functionality. Bluetooth v3.0 that supports A2DP is available to cover all your file sharing needs.

Multimedia

The enormous internal memory is clearly for music tracks considering the phone comes with a 2MP camera.

Although equipped with just the basic photography settings, the phone still manages to capture sleek images. However, the images tend to come out overexposed especially when captured in brightly-lit scenes.

The camera captures video at a maximum of 15 frames per second and can therefore take some decent amateur videos.

On the music player, the phone comes with the stock Samsung music player common in most Android handsets. The music player is loaded with several audio codecs and has an inbuilt equalizer. The stock video player however can only handle MP4 media files.

The phone comes with a Standard battery, Li-Ion 1200 mAh. The battery gives the phone a decent battery life packing in enough juice to take you through the day.

The Samsung Galaxy Pocket is definitely designed for the Youth Segment of the market. It is a low budget phone with basic Smartphone features perfect for a first time Smartphone user. The 3GB internal memory additionally makes it appealing to music lovers.

In Kenya, the phone is priced at Ksh 9,500.Phones in the same price range include Samsung Galaxy Mini 2, Sony Xperia X8 and LG Optimus P350.