Samsung Galaxy Y S5360 > Reviews (11)

I recently wrote a review of my lovely new iPhone 4 which I really loved. Not as much as my 3gs, but I wouldn’t have been without it. The iPhone 4 was a replacement phone for my 3GS which I had stolen out of may hand by a thug on a bike as I walked down the street. I duly claimed on my house insurance and got the 4. Then, about three months later, my all singing all dancing phone was taken from a pub table by some crafty people right under my friend’s nose. I then decided that at £500 a pop, I could not have a new iPhone until I could be a responsible adult and look after one properly.

So off I went to Vodafone looking for the cheapest model possible. I went in and had a look, and after some discussion with the helpful man he helped me chose one that was supposedly ‘like an iPhone but not as expensive’ – bring on the Samsung Galaxy Y. At £110 (now £95) it wasn’t the bargain I went in for but I was convinced I had brought myself a great alternative. I was wrong!

The phone is small and compact – dimensions are 104 x 58 x 11.5 with a three inch screen and it weighs in at 97g. It looks nice and feels comfortable in my hand. The battery life is fairly good, apparently with 5 hours of talk time.

Calls – The phone is easy to add contacts to, with a choice of phone or sim before you input the details. I have yet to figure out how to add favourites to it! From the contact you are able to choose to text or message them. It is easy to make a call and the handset is fairly clear. On 2 occasions now I have been unable to end a call I have made. Once was done by accident when a friend was having a look through my new phone and we could not end it! If you leave the main phone screen it is impossible to get it to hang up. I had to turn the phone off in the end which is not ideal as it is quite slow to turn off and on again.

Texts – These are quite difficult to send. The buttons are very close together and I am always spelling things wrong and having to go back. Luckily with this phone you can move the cursor with your finger to the middle of a word rather than have to delete the whole thing. There is a ‘keypad settings’ button next to the full stop which I keep hitting by accident and get very annoyed with it. My husband refuses to use it as he says his fingers are too big it takes him forever to type a sentence!

Alarm – I have only used this three times – the first time it worked ok but I wish I had checked the alarm tone first – I was woken up with quite a shock! The second time I could not turn the alarm off. My husband and I tried for about three minutes which is quite long enough at 6am still half asleep and in the end I had to turn it off again! This put me off using it for a while and when I did use it again, the battery had died so the alarm did not go off. Others phones I have used always seem to save enough power for the alarm to go off regardless so it was lucky it was over the holidays and not a work day. I know I need to try it again, but it should not be that difficult!

Internet – its ok – a bit slow even with the wireless connection at home. I am just figuring out now how to download Android apps – I was a bit annoyed that I had to set up a goolemail account to do this. There does seem to be a few good apps but I get so annoyed by the slowness of it, I haven’t bothered getting too many.

Camera – its not bad. Only 2 megapixels but has a x 4 zoom. You can upload directly to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

Angry Birds – This is just for those of you that have played and love this game! It was the first thing I downloaded. I no longer play it at all. There is an advert at the top of the page and if you manage to tap it whilst playing, which is easily done, it opens it up a different page half way through the game – very infuriating!

One good thing is that you can personalise your home page so you can get to the apps you use most easily and quickly.

All in all, I do not think it is a great phone. It is slow and quite difficult to use. I haven’t written about any other features as there isn’t really anything special to write about. Other people will probably love it, and may be if I hadn’t come from an iPhone I would too. They really are incomparable and I was probably silly for thinking that a model at a fifth of the price could be anything like it but as I have issues with the simplest of things on this handset I would definitely not recommend to anyone. I am counting down the days until I can upgrade now!

If you have any other questions, let me know and I will try to answer.

Thanks for reading
Rachel