Looking at the Samsung Galaxy Fame, it is immediately obvious that media consumption was not at the fore of the designers minds. The smaller screen being too small, with a lower resolution, makes it a poor choice for watching anything other than short YouTube clips.
Plus the tiny 1.95GB of storage available after Android and others have taken up a chunk of the 4GB memory is uninspiring, though it can be expanded via the phones micro SD card slot or cloud storage via the Dropbox app.
The Music app is again another basic affair, with some of Samsungs touches popping up. The most notable special touch is the Music Square. This is a very peculiar piece of tech, one that we have seen before in other phones but that we have very high reservations about nevertheless. In simple terms, the Samsung Galaxy Fame will sort your music by its mood, so that you can select the appropriate square to match the way youre feeling, and have the phone play songs to match.
Load up the music player and you are greeted with a rather fancy stock Android player. This also brings up a little bar in the notifications area, as it has on Samsung Galaxy phones for years. From here you can play/pause and skip tracks.
There is also a widget to accompany it, which again we were glad to see. Our only slight disappointment was the inability to control it all directly from the lock screen. Within the Samsung Galaxy Fames music player are the usual shuffle, skip and repeat functions.
The music player also offers equaliser settings that have been put into a Sound Alive screen, which includes quite a long list of settings, such as Pop, Rock, Jazz through to Virtual 7.1 and Concert Hall. Theres even a custom setting, should you really feel the need to go to town with it.
When it comes to video, we were a little shocked to find that the Samsung Galaxy Fame didnt wish to play our test video. Weve found on a few of the lower end handsets that we are greeted with a warning on the desktop showing that the phone might not be able to play the video, but until now they have all managed it anyway.
Thankfully there is the option to convert it, however the estimated conversion time of the 90 minute video was around an hour. We left the video to convert, but in its new WMV format, the Samsung Galaxy Fame was still unable to play the file.
Samsung claims that the Galaxy Fame can play MPEG4, 3GPP, MKV and WebM file types, yet our test video was originally in MP4 format.
The video player itself is a basic affair, offering play, pause and manual selection of timing placements. Dont expect to see pop-up play on the Samsung Galaxy Fame, although with a screen that small were not entirely surprised or bothered.
Samsung has equipped the Galaxy Fame with an FM radio, however. We found that it had some trouble picking up some of the stations that we expected it to, which was a little disheartening. The app itself is well designed, again being perfectly functional.
The Gallery app is again another functional app. Tiles show each folder, with the Samsung Galaxy Fame able to pull in our Picasa/Google+ photo albums, though not our Facebook shots. Editing photos taken on the Samsung Galaxy Fame is, unfortunately, not possible.
Battery life
When we were told that the Samsung Galaxy Fame was only being graced with a 1300mAh battery, we scoffed a little. Dealing with flagship phones with massive screens must have left us with the idea that massive batteries were the in thing.
In truth, with a tiny screen and a lower clocked processor, 1300mAh is more than sufficient. We did find ourselves leaving the screen on maximum brightness most of the time, because the lack of an auto brightness feature meant that we forgot to turn it down.
With the small screen and the low powered processor, the whole use of the phone is geared towards stretching out a longer battery life. Media consumption and game playing were kept to a minimum as the Samsung Galaxy Fame struggled to cope with anything too strenuous, although it coped admirably with our need to update social media accounts and send messages to all of our friends.
Elsewhere, Samsungs TouchWiz interface means that quick settings are in the notifications bar, enabling you to disable and enable Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and other such battery draining settings at will.
Connectivity
When it comes to connectivity, the Samsung Galaxy Fame comes packed with everything that you could imagine a phone at the bottom end of the market would.
3G/HSUPA is supported to HSDPA 7.2Mbps and HSUPA 5.76Mbps, along with Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, NFC, Bluetooth with A2DP support and GPS/GLONASS.
Wi-Fi Direct, which has already been available across Samsung Galaxy phones for a while, is also available.
For those who are unaware of what GLONASS is, its a Russian developed, slightly less accurate location system, that weve heard is necessary to avoid import taxes to Russia. It does mean that location tracking is even faster.
Connection to a PC is done via the supplied micro USB cable, with file transfer available via mass storage or via digital camera software. Mass storage is the easiest, so you can hook up the Samsung Galaxy Fame as a standard USB storage device for dragging and dropping files. On the Galaxy Fame, Samsung has provided a file manager, meaning that any files you put onto it are easily located.
Samsung also has its proprietary Kies software, should you want a desktop manager for your Galaxy Fame.
Apps
With the Google Play Store pushing Apple further than ever, and holding off the Windows app store too, apps are very easy to get hold of on the Samsung Galaxy Fame. Usefully, games and apps in the Store are viewable by Top Free, Top Paid, Top Grossing, Top New Free and Top New Paid groups, helping to filter out the excess rubbish.
Pre-installed apps are kept to a minimum, with Samsungs Game and Apps hubs on offer alongside the standard Google offerings in the way of Google+, Hangouts, Gmail, Google Play, Play Music and YouTube, and alongside the Mapping apps such as Maps, Local and Navigation.
The Samsung Galaxy Fame comes with very little in the way of S-inspired apps that have made themselves famous on larger, more powerful Samsung Galaxy handsets. So theres no S Translate, S Travel, S Suggest or S Voice, but there is the S Planner, which is a fancy name for a calendar app.
Facebook also comes pre-installed, making it easier to set the Samsung Galaxy Fame up from the very start. Twitter, however, must be located and downloaded from the Google Play Store.
Dropbox is also included, in order to help relieve the stress on the tiny 1.95GB of storage available from the 4GB that is initially stated.
Samsungs Game and Apps hubs are just more app stores, really. Weve seen OEMs input their own stores onto phones before, but we have yet to see a massive point in any of them, because the Google Play Store is so well populated.
Maps
As you have heard it all before, we wont go into much detail with regards to the Google Maps app. If youve used the desktop version, youll have a fairly good understanding of how the app works and what it can do.
Being possibly the most well-known Google product, after its search function, Google Maps was always going to get a lot of love and attention. As with every iteration on every device, the application is absolutely superb, if hampered by the really poor processor.
GPS lock on was rather snappy, aided by the GLONASS system.
Google Maps also includes Navigation software. Weve always been impressed by Googles effort here, not least because its free. There are other sat nav apps available from the Google Play Store, of course, but when youre in a spot of bother, Google will easily sort you out.
One feature we are fond of is that it taps into traffic data, and can tell you how long your route is set to take in those conditions. This means if you pull to the side of the road - were safe drivers - you can easily reroute. Wed have liked active rerouting, but for a free app were not arguing.
Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Fame is another Galaxy handset designed to sit towards the bottom of the range, competing in the challenging budget smartphone market. This leaves it to play against the likes of the LG Optimus L3 2, the Nokia Lumia 520 and Samsungs other offering, the Samsung Galaxy Young.
As the song goes, we looked, and now were going to tell you what we saw. Given time though, we really dont see the Samsung Galaxy Fame making us forget the rest.
Pros
If we see it, we like it. Were talking about microSD card support. We put it in our "we liked" section a lot, but that is purely because it is omitted from so many modern smartphones. Having support for microSD cards really boosts the internal storage, of which the Samsung Galaxy Fame has very little.
We also like the TouchWiz interface. It has got a lot better since its early days, increasing to become a highly usable and intuitive UI. It gives Android Jelly Bean a really nice feel, being simple enough for novices, yet with enough features to satisfy more seasoned users too.
The design is also very nice. It sits nicely in the hand, is easy to use one-handed, and fits very well into the existing Samsung Galaxy range, being very much the baby brother to the flagship phones. The plastic feel suits the Samsung Galaxy Fame too, given the much smaller price tag.
NFC is also making its way onto the lower-end phones, so it is nice to see that the Samsung Galaxy Fame is another handset that includes it even at the low end cost.
Cons
Our biggest bugbear is the processor. Weve used phones with a single-core 1GHz processor before, and it wasnt too long ago that they were gracing the likes of the HTC Desire or the Samsung Galaxy S.
They have since popped up in the cheaper devices and been fine, yet the Samsung Galaxy Fame really seems to suffer. Loading the camera app from the lock screen is the biggest culprit, with it taking more than a few seconds to kick into gear.
The tiny screen is also a problem. It is low resolution, has no auto brightness feature, and results in a tiny keyboard. This made it very fiddly to use, and the autocorrect function is not really up to the standard we have come to expect from a modern smartphone.
The camera is also really poor. The 5MP sensor takes decent enough photos in the right lighting conditions, but on a bright sunny day, light areas lose a lot of detail. Video recording is also really poor, with the 640 x 480 VGA resolution not enough for filming anything of note.
Final verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Fame is not a phone that will live forever, and it hasnt quite learned to fly. It is clear from the very outset that Samsung has used the ingredients to create a lower-end smartphone, such as the smaller internal chipset, the smaller screen and the low internal storage.
In doing so the Samsung Galaxy Fame, in a continuation of the Samsung Galaxy ranges design, feels a little underpowered. The feel of the Samsung Galaxy Fame, with the TouchWiz interface and external design, is reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini, and makes you want to see it as a more expensive handset.
The smaller chipset generally nipped along fairly well when swiping between home screens, but when waking up to the camera or loading slightly larger apps, the Samsung Galaxy Fame struggled really quite noticeably, to the point where we were feeling rather frustrated.
We can see the Samsung Galaxy Fame selling a fair few units, especially given its super low price tag, and we dont see that as a bad thing, given that the majority of users will likely be young, and wanting a way of connecting to Facebook, but for anything more substantial, the handset really struggles.
