Samsung Galaxy Fame

Introduction

You could almost take the Samsung Galaxy Fame’s name to be something of an 'inside joke' at Samsung. The company must surely know that it’ll never be anywhere near as famous as the Samsung Galaxy S3, and it even has a near-identical brother, the Samsung Galaxy Young, to steal even more of its limelight.

Hey-ho, it’s a hard old life when you’re trying to make it in the showbiz world of smartphones. But is the Samsung Galaxy Fame a mere extra, or is it a budget lead?

Samsung Galaxy Fame - Design and Features

The first signs are not good. The Samsung Galaxy Fame has an unadventurous, fairly plain design that treads ground now well-trodden by other Samsung phones.

Its front and back are glossy white, and its sides finished with silver. Like the Samsung Galaxy Young, it’s not a desperately slim phone at 11.6mm thick, but has a comfortably curvaceous bod. Its 3.5-inch screen results in a body that’s just-right for smaller hands – how about an S3 for yourself and a Fame for your child? Failing that, perhaps you’re just cash-strapped – it's not a bad-looking phone after all.



There’s just 4GB of internal storage in the Samsung Galaxy Fame, but whip off the plastic battery cover and you’ll find a microSD memory card slot, alongside the mini-SIM port.

Samsung Galaxy Fame – Screen

The Samsung Galaxy Fame has, by current standards, a pretty small 3.5 inches screen. Once upon a time we’d have said this offers a good compromise between size and easy typing, however, if you’re used to a larger display, you may find navigating the keyboard fiddly. We certainly did.

Display quality is mediocre too. The Samsung Galaxy Fame has a screen resolution of 320 x 480 pixels, which feels low even for a screen of this size. It’s the same screen size and resolution combo as the now-ancient iPhone 3GS.



Turn the screen the wrong way and contrast shift kicks in, veiling the image in shadow and causing colours to invert. Look dead on and the Samsung Galaxy Fame screen doesn’t look terrible, but we’d have liked to see a slightly higher grade display here. It is 2013 after all, Samsung.

Samsung Galaxy Fame - Software and Performance

Common to just about every Samsung phone, the Samsung Galaxy Fame uses a version of TouchWiz – the custom Samsung user interface. Underneath it sits Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, a reasonably up-to-date version of the Google mobile OS (4.2 exists, but you won’t find it on many phones yet).



The Samsung Galaxy Fame edition of TouchWiz is a little cut-down from what you’ll find in something like the Samsung Galaxy S3, lacking some of the more advanced features. We’ll see exactly what it misses in our full review.

Powered by a 1GHz single-core processor, the Samsung Galaxy Fame will struggle with more demanding apps and games. However, general navigation through the interface is fairly nippy thanks to speed improvements made in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Samsung Galaxy Fame – Camera

One small victory the Samsung Galaxy Fame can claim over its brother the Young is a 5-megapixel camera. Its sibling uses a truly low-end 3.2MP sensor.



However, both are pretty uninspiring snappers. We didn’t get to test out its skills fully but don’t go thinking you’ll be producing many snaps worth printing out with this phone. It does, however, have an LED flash for low-light shooting. There’s also a basic VGA user-facing camera for video calls.

Samsung Galaxy Fame – First Impressions

The Samsung Galaxy Fame has only one chance at fame, and that’s only if it sells at a rock-bottom price. Even then, there’s a lot of competition from phones with less glamorous names than 'Samsung' and 'Galaxy' attached. Of course, given that it's sharing a name with such well-known phones as the Galaxy S3 should be enough to see the Samsung Galaxy Fame through commercially, however bargain hunters and phone geeks are likely to find better phones at the same price, or ones from lesser-known names for less cash.