Samsung Galaxy K Zoom review

Our only slight complaint about the Galaxy K Zoom is the somewhat limited amount of storage available. The phone comes with 8GB of internal storage, of which around 5GB is available to the user, so that doesn’t leave a lot of room for taking lots of photos and videos, especially if you want to put any music files on it as well.

Thankfully, there’s a microSD card slot which can take cards up to 64GB. Inserting a card will automatically switch the camera’s default storage location to your microSD card as well, but you can always use Samsung’s file manager app if you want to move files between the two.

Inside, the Galaxy K Zoom pairs a Samsung hexa-core Exynos 5260 processor, which combines a 1.3GHz quad-core chip and a 1.7GHz dual-core chip, with 2GB of RAM. With so much power at its disposal, this makes the Galaxy K Zoom almost as quick as the Galaxy S5, and the Galaxy K Zoom completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in a lightning fast 486ms when we used its default browser. The Galaxy S5’s score completed the benchmark in 391ms, so you can be sure that the Galaxy K Zoom is one of the fastest phones around.

Unsurprisingly, all this processing power translated into a super-smooth web browsing performance. The Galaxy K Zoom took image-heavy pages such as The Guardian’s home desktop page in its stride and we saw no signs of stuttering whatsoever when we panned around websites.

Graphics performance was also excellent. The Galaxy K Zoom scored maximum points out the standard 3DMark Ice Storm test, scored 6,713 (28.3fps) in the Ice Storm Extreme test and scored 9,100 (38.1fps) in the Ice Storm Unlimited test respectively. This is excellent for a £400 handset, and its score of 30.2fps in Epic Citadel with graphics quality set to Ultra High means that the Galaxy K Zoom is more than capable of handling any app in the Google Play Store.

Such power doesn’t come at the cost of battery life either, as the Galaxy K Zoom lasted 12 hours and 38 minutes in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to half brightness. This is great for such a highly specified handset, and we were also impressed with how long it lasted as a camera during everyday use. We took the Galaxy K Zoom out with us to capture the Hyper Japan convention in London and were taking pictures every few minutes with and without the zoom. After three hours of solid use, the battery was still at 87 per cent, so even trigger-happy photo enthusiasts should get a full day’s use out of the K Zoom on a single charge.

The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom is an excellent phone with an even better camera. It won’t replace a high-end £400 compact camera, as the camera’s default zoomed-out picture quality is roughly on par with most other 20-megapixel smartphone cameras. But for those who want a fantastic optical zoom and the ability to share your photos instantly on social networks, there’s simply no competition.