Samsung Galaxy Mini review

Samsung seems intent on being the dominant mobile phone manufacturer at all price points. It’s already impressed us this year with the high-end Samsung Galaxy S2 and the budget Galaxy Fit. Now it’s the turn of another budget Android handset, the Galaxy Mini.

In many ways the Mini is very similar to the Fit. Both are a similar size and look fairly similar too. As with the Mini, the Fit is made from plastic, although the build quality is high and the phone feels pretty tough and well made.

Telling the differences between the phones requires a bit of investigation. One difference is that the Mini has a slightly smaller screen to the Fit (3.1in vs 3.3in), although both phones have the same 240×320 resolution so the difference isn’t particularly noticeable.

This resolution is fine, although text can look a fit fuzzy and you need to zoom into a web page in order to be able to read properly. Still, at this price high-resolution AMOLED screens are simply too expensive to include, so it’s to be expected.

As with the Fit, the Mini has a 600MHz single-core processor. It may seem a little bit slow by today’s standards, but it nipped along and we found zooming into web pages and navigating through the OS to be slick and smooth for the most part. Once you’ve got a lot of applications open, the slow processor means it can take a while to switch between them; fortunately, Samsung has built-in a Task Manager app to end unwanted processes and we recommend using it. You’ll also find that the latest games will chug a little.

Android 2.2 comes installed on the phone, which means you turn the phone into a 3G hotspot using its Wi-Fi adaptor. It’s a little bit of a shame that Android 2.3 wasn’t installed, as it’s that little bit more polished. That said, Samsung’s customisation of the OS makes up for some of 2.2’s short-fallings. In particular, the new copy-and-paste selection tools are far more advanced than the basic Android 2.2 version and actually easier to use than the Google version in Android 2.3. We also like the way that Samsung has integrated the shortcut buttons for toggling Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and Silent mode into the standard Android pull-down menu.

As this is a budget phone, corners have had to be cut. One of the main areas is with storage, as the Mini comes with just 164MB of phone memory, of which just 138MB is free for installing apps. Samsung has used the storage space it’s taken wisely, with QuickOffice, FM Radio (for the built-in receiver), and a voice recorder all pre-installed, but you’re still likely to want to install more and the small amount of storage won’t go far.

There’s a MicroSD card slot for adding more storage and a 2GB card ships with the phone, but not all apps support being moved to the memory card and even those that do require some internal phone storage. Still, at this low price a lot of phone storage can’t be expected.

The Mini loses out to the Fit in terms of digital camera, too, having just a 3-megapixel model compared to the 5-megapixel model in the Fit. Shots were grainy in poorly-lit conditions and there’s no flash to help. Even in well-lit areas, 3-megapixels aren’t enough to capture any details. Videos were just as poor, with soft details and, at 14fps, they were jerky. It’s fixed-focus camera, too, making hard to use as a barcode scanner.

There are a couple of other minor annoyances, too, such as you have to install the Kies Desktop software and phone driver in order to enable the phone’s mass storage option when you connect it via USB. It’s easier in practice to remove the MicroSD card and use it in the provided SD card adaptor to plug directly into your computer.

Battery life wasn’t too bad, with the phone lasting for just over 24-hours in our playback test. Given a hard day’s use of 3G and Wi-Fi, you’ll most likely want to charge this handset every day, but that’s no different to the majority of other smartphones.

It’s hard to pick between this and the Galaxy Fit, as they have largely identical specifications. If you’re on a very tight budget, it’s hard to argue against the Mini, as you can buy it SIM-free for less than £100. However, if you’re going for a contract, we recommend the Samsung Galaxy Fit instead; you can get roughly the same deal for both phones, but we’d take the Fit’s slightly larger screen and better camera.