Samsung GALAXY Mini S5570

Introduction

As a complete newcomer to smartphones, apart from the occasional play on others’ devices, I wanted something cheap and fairly basic. Therefore my review is intended to tell you what you can expect to experience when turning on the phone and exploring the functions for the first time, as I have created this review whilst doing so myself.

I bought this phone for £91.75 in July 2012, and I was gutted to see that it was previously £88 earlier that month. Still, I seemed intent on this device and liked that it had an Android OS. I noticed that the phone that I purchased came with Android 2.3.4. I haven’t yet got to the stage where I need to work out how to update this yet. For this price you get a plug adaptor and USB adaptor for charging and a 2GB micro SD card.

Charging

The first thing you have to do is charge your phone up to the maximum. You can do this via a plug adaptor (provided) or a USB cable (also provided). There is no in-car charger provided, but this is something that can be bought elsewhere, as can the protective case and screen protectors. Charging seems to take a while and even if you turn off 3G, the battery still runs down fairly quickly, so it looks like I might have to buy an in-car charger after all if it is likely to run out of power whilst I’m out.

An example of the battery usage: I had charged up to 87%, and simply turning off the phone, putting in a SIM card and turning it back on, the battery was back down to 70%. How the phone used up 17% battery life doing this I have no idea.

One thing I like about the charging slot is that it has one of those swivel covers that you pick off with your nail to insert the charger adaptor. This stops dirt getting in, unlike in the open iPhone charging slot. I also like that it is quite small compared to the long iPhone charger end. I suppose a disadvantage could be that it might break off one day if you’re not careful.

Newbie to 3G

What I really needed to know when I first turned this phone on was how to stop 3G. As I’m PAYG, I didn’t want to be charged needlessly for data I had no idea how to control yet. Nonetheless, a message flashed up saying how much I’d be charged, which I searched frantically for the option to switch off 3G. I should probably have read the manual first but being quite tech savvy I thought I could manage. Clicking the applications button at the bottom right hand of the screen takes you to the apps page, where the settings app should be at the bottom right and select Wireless Networks, Mobile Networks and deselect “use packet data” which will stop 3G from working. You also have other options in this menu such as only using 2G, a useful battery saving device. I prefer to keep everything turned off until I need it, especially since I am on PAYG.

Contacts

The next thing I had to do was move all my contacts over, which was a fairly easy process. You just select Contacts and then hit the menu button on the bottom left corner of the phone, and select Import/Export, which should allow you to get your contacts from your SIM to the micro SD card. From my initial exploration, there doesn’t seem to be an option to store them on the phone.

I then wanted to transfer across all of my old text messages and clicked on the menu bar within Messages. There was no option to do this, and the manual didn’t show me otherwise, so I had to delete all of them.

Background/home screen

Hitting the menu button on the home screen allows you to change the wallpaper. There is a selection of 9 in the wallpaper gallery, but you can also set a photograph or go online to look for images.

Another way to change the wallpaper is to hold down your finger on the home screen. There are 3 other options to add widgets, shortcuts or folders on the home screen.

The home screen automatically locks/goes dark (battery saving!), set according to a timer that you choose between 15 seconds and 30 minutes of inactivity. I find that 30 secs is too short for when you are first learning to use the phone (as you have to unlock it every time you want to consult the manual so I increased this for my learning phase. You can also use the power button to lock the screen. Holding the power button allows you to turn it off, or put it on silent, turn on/off the flight mode or data functions.

You can access the settings in two ways through the home screen – either hitting the menu button and selecting settings (quicker), or choosing applications and then selecting settings through there.

Once the phone is locked, you can press the home button or the power button on the side of the phone to unlock again, but all of the other buttons on the phone (volume, back and menu) become inactive.

Appearance/Physicality

The first thing I notice about the galaxy mini is how light it is. It slips out the hand quite easily and the screen gets quite dirty easily. It is annoying how the booklet in the phone only tells you the physical things you need to do to put the battery in, the mini SD card and your SIM card. If you want the user manual you have to go online to download it (which I did). The back of the phone comes off easily, and the SIM card is easy to insert, as is the battery.

One thing that annoys me is that when holding the phone my fingers touch the volume button on the left hand side of the phone, and the power buttonon the right hand side. Therefore, it can be very easy to increase or decrease the volume, or hit the power button. I found that when trying to hit the power button to lock the screen, I accidentally changed the volume too. Thankfully once the screen is locked he volume button becomes inactive.

Messaging

This is easy to use. I personally didn’t find the keyboard too small to use, and I really like the Swype function which allows you to drag your fingers from letter to letter to make the word. This is quick and I find it much more accurate than typing it yourself. There is a tutorial on the phone for this which teaches you how to type various words with apostrophes and so on. The only thing I didn’t notice was if the phone tells me when I go over the character limit for one text message and start using the next one. On PAYG with certain limits, I would find this useful.

As a PAYG customer, I also find it useful that my balance shows up on the screen everything I send a text message.

Camera

I took to testing the camera (my old phone didn’t have a camera) and I found the picture quality to be adequate for a phone. Once you take a picture you have 4 ways of sharing it (gmail, messaging, picasa or Bluetooth) which seems to be straightforward enough. You can store 2080 photos on the phone, but haven’t yet worked out if this affects the memory capacity in relation to storing other items.

Summary

As I don’t have 3G up and running yet I haven’t been able to test the MMS at this stage nor any of the other internet related functions such as emails and other apps.

Do you want to know more?

I hope you find this review useful, and as I continue to use the phone I will endeavour to come back here to Ciao and update the review as time goes on. If there are any particular aspects of the phone you want to know more about, then please let me know and I will test those and report back as soon as possible.