Samsung Galaxy Y Pro

Editor's Review of the Galaxy Y Pro

As you probably already know thanks to Samsung's new naming scheme, the "Y Pro" is a phone aimed at youngsters with a physical keypad, acting as the spiritual successor to the Samsung Galaxy Pro. However, can it manage to stand-up against such an array of competition, or will Research In Motion remain victorious?

Design & Build

With its sleek black curves and svelte 11.5mm-thick form factor, the Samsung Galaxy Y Pro is certainly giving RIM a run for its money when it comes to design. Within its lightweight casing, you'll find a 2.6-inch capacitive touchscreen, which sadly disappointed with its lowly 240 x 320 resolution, and surprisingly poor viewing angles. Saying that, the display is extremely touch-sensitive and quick to respond.

Underneath its keypad you'll find the handset's most important asset: its physical portrait QWERTY keypad. Thanks to the phone's relatively wide form factor, each key is well separated which should help avoid mistakes, and the buttons are impressively comfortable to touch.

Under the good of the Galaxy Y Pro, you'll find a middle-of-the-road 832MHz processor. Although this may sound disappointing, as a phone aimed at text-happy teens we weren't expecting a powerful dual-core processor, and the 832MHz chipset offers a surprisingly slick and speedy experience.

OS & Interface

Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) runs well on the phone's 832MHz processor, too, and this comes skinned in Samsung's typically functional TouchWiz user interface.

Due to the lack of on-screen keypad and well-though-out widget placement, Samsung's TouchWiz UI makes the 2.6-inch screen feel much-more spacious than it actually is. This makes updating your Facebook and Twitter an absolute breeze, and there's also plenty of screen-space for gaming applications.

As a handset focused on teens, Samsung also equips the phone with its Social Hub app, which aggregated your social networking feeds into one easy-to-read feed. It also comes equipped with Microsoft Exchange set-up and email support, making this a viable choice for the business crowd, too.

Multimedia & Storage

On the rear of the Samsung Galaxy Y Pro, you'll find a fairly average 3.15 megapixel camera, paired with Samsung's equally basic interface. Although not excellent, the shooter managed to snap some detailed, sharp photographs - full of plentiful detail for sharing on Facebook. The camera's also capable of shooting video at 320 x 240 - disappointing low for a modern-Samsung smartphone.

As you'd expect, there's also a built-in music player, which has also been dressed with Samsung's TouchWiz outfit. For an affordable handset you certainly get a decent media player, which offers a bunch of features such as "music clarity" and "bass boost".

On the storage front, the Y Pro comes with a mere 160MB of built-in memory. Thankfully, it also arrive equipped with support for microSD cards, enabling you to expand this to a much-more reasonable 32GB.

Everything Else

Although users of the phone will do most of their socialising through applications, we're still disappointed by the handset's web browser. Due to the handsets pint-sized 2.6-inch touchscreen, the Android browser lacks pinch-to-zoom support and Adobe Flash, and text pages often look cramped and difficult to read.

However, you won't be let down by the handset's connectivity, which includes HSDPA 7.2Mbps speeds, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, WiFi hotspot functionality and A-GPS.

Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy Y Pro is by no means ground-breaking, and failed to impress us more than the now-outdated Samsung Galaxy Pro B7510. However, as a pohone targeted at teens, the Galaxy Y Pro did manage to impress with its social networking smarts and tactile QWERTY keypad, and certainly could stand a change against its BlackBerry rivals.